"History needs its butchers as well as its shepherds, Sergeant."
I know I won't need to explain this to a number of readers here (like rincewind [waves]) but perhaps this will help those who have in the past complained bitterly about the excess of fantasy fans here (or at least about our indelicacy in persistently referring to our orientation) why it is exactly that we fen look to our sf literature for insights, and why we're somewhat less shocked by all the goings-on these days. Nothing new under the sun and all that, and history being the trade secret of the sf writer, you know.
The source of these exerpts is a somewhat-atypical novel by Terry Pratchett, who a) auctioned off a role as an extra* in the book, won by Ken Follett, so he could b) donate the proceeds to one of his favorite charities, a foundation for the victims of torture, in October of 2001. (Another favorite charity is the one for protection of orangutans, for reasons I won't go into here/now.)
* This is a common practice in the SF/fantasy sphere. Ken Follett got very aptly cast, btw. I won't tell you if he got killed or not, though.
It's set in his alternate universe, the Discworld, which is a weird combination of classic sword-and-sorcery, modern British skewed humor, and parodies of every bit of pop culture for the past 300 or so years, with lots of bawdy and morbid bits.
"The cells are empty this morning. What happened to the other six? Sergeant Knock?"
The sergeant licked his lips nervously
"Dropped 'em off in Cable Street for questioning, o'course," he said. "As per instructions."
"Did you get a receipt?"
"A what?"
"Your men hauled in six people who were staying out late and you handed them over to the Unmentionables," said Vimes with the calm that comes before a storm. "Did they sign for them? Do you even know their names?"
"Orders is just to hand 'em over," said Knock, trying a little defiance. "Hand 'em over and come away."
"From now on, someone at Cable Street signs for prisoners or we bring them right back here," said Vimes. "It's bloody elementary, Sergeant. You hand 'em over, you get a docket. Don't you do that down at the Tanty?"
Well, yeah, obviously, but...well, Cable Street...I mean, you don't know what it's like here, I can see that, but with the Unmentionables 'round at Cable Street it's best not to--"
"Listen, I'm not telling you to kick the door down and shout 'put down those thumbscrews!'" said Vimes. "I'm telling you we keept track of prisoners. When you arrest a man, you sign him over to Snouty, don't you? When he leaves, Snouty or the orderly man signs him out, doesn't he? It's basic custody discipline, man! So if you hand a prisoner over to Cable Street, someone there gives you a signature. Understand? No one just disappears."
Most of the series' stories are set in Ankh-Morpork, a metropolis which is a combination of renaissance Italy, Old London, Old New York, and modern panurban post-industrial-revolution dystopia where nothing is an anachronism. Thus we now have a situation where the new "clacks" towers send stock prices across the country - and news, and spy reports at fast-as-light speed through a complicated semaphore process, and where magic works, and is studied at Unseen University where the faculty teach aspiring young geniuses how not to turn themselves into smoking holes or let interdimensional demons into the world, and young men looking for work in the big city can rent rooms at the YMPA...and Death stalks through and does his job, except when he's taking another holiday...
Oh, and the world rests on the backs of four colossal elephants, who in turn stand on the back of a giant immortal turtle, who is or is not - there was a Quisition about this theological controversy once - swimming through the ocean of space...
As Ankh-Morpork struggles to modernize (that is, some want to improve things, others to maintain the status quo) one of the recurring characters is the police chief Sam Vimes, who it turns out per the author (in The Art of Discworld) was't supposed to be the star, it just happened that way - a cynical alcoholic Bogart-like character who is a cynical drunk because he knows things are wrong in the world, and can't do anything about them - except he does.
It wasn't that he liked being shot at by hooded figures in the temporary employ of his many and varied enemies, but he'd always looked at it as some kind of vote of confidence. It showed that he was annoying the rich and arrogant people who ought to be annoyed.
In his scruffy, insolent, unwilling way, he has helped to clean up the city's corrupt politics and entrenched speciesism, (Guards, Guards!, Men At Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo) stopping a war or two along the way (Jingo, Fifth Elephant) as he wrangles with not only petty criminals but both its hereditary aristocracy and sundry up-and-coming plutocrats and xenophobes as well as its Machiavellian head of state, Lord Vetinari, whom he grudgingly admits is at least an improvement over the former Patricians, Lord Winder and Snapcase.
And that's what we get to in this book. Because in past volumes the former tyrants were always referred to in that macabre joking way of Monty Python or "Far Side" torture cartoons, the Robin Hood/Addams Family/Princess Bride style of Olde Worlde Politics and dungeons and racks and all.
"I'm not a criminal madman," said Vimes. He wondered why he said it, and then wondered who he was trying to reassure.
"Never mind, you'll soon fit in," said Lawn.
But in Night Watch, due to a supernatural disaster, both Vimes - who has foolishly been romanticizing about the good old days and longing for a time when being police chief didn't involve endless paperwork and meetings - and a psychotic criminal are flung back in time thirty-odd years, to those bad old days, and it isn't funny at all. (Most of the Discworld books are quite outrageous, even when they're being appalling, but NW was shockingly serious, even the funny bits. No Keystone Cops dressed in drag doing juggling acts with fruit in this one.)
"I've been talking to people today who are going to
die," he said. "How do you think that makes me feel? Do you know what that feels like?"
The monks gave him a puzzled look.
"Er...yes," said Qu.
"We do," said Sweeper. "Everyone we talk to is going to die. Everyone you talk to is going to die. Everyone dies."
It's right before the uprising that replaced Mad Lord Winder with the even-madder Lord Snapcase, in which cavalry was turned on citizens who then tore down police stations and mobs rioted in the streets--
But there's a complication this time around, with two individuals from the future, one of whom has a natural home in the past, where he isn't a psychotic outsider, but fits right into a government that has a building with sound-proofed cellars for those who are caught after curfew, or meeting without permission, or saying disloyal things, or...
At one point he had to step aside as a very thin horse dragged a huge and familiar four-wheeled wagon over the cobbles. Frightened faces looked out at him from between the wide metal strips that covered most of it, and then it disappeared into the gloom. Curfew was claiming its nightly harvest.
These were not good times. Everyone knew Lord Winder was insane. And then some kid who was equally mad had tried to knock him off and would have done, too, if the man hadn't moved at the wrong moment. His lordship had taken the arrow in the arm, and they said - they being the nameless people of the kind that everyone meets in the pub - that the wound had poisoned him and made him worse. He suspected everyone and everything, he saw dark assassins on every corner. The rumor was that he woke up sweating every night because they even got into his dreams.
And he saw plots and spies everywhere throughout his waking hours, and had men root them out, and the thing about rooting out plots and spies everywhere is that, even if there are no real plots to begin with, there are plots and spies galore very soon.
At least the Night Watch didn't have to do much of the actual rooting. They just arrested the pieces. It was the special office in Cable Street that was the long hand of his lordship's paranoia. The Particulars, they were officially, but as far as Vimes could remember they'd reveled in their nickname of the Unmentionables. They were the ones that listened in every shadow and watched at every window. That was how it seemed, anyway. They were certainly the ones who knocked on doors in the middle of the night.
Vimes stopped in the dark. The cheap clothes were soaked through, the boots were flooded, and rain was trickling off his chin, and he was a long, long way from home. Yet, in a treacherous kind of way, this was home. He'd spent most of his days working nights. Walking through the wet streets of a sleeping city was his life.
The nature of the night changed, but the nature of The Beast remained the same.
And worse than that - a moral quandary for our battered protagonist, who is faced with the possibility that - as he steps into the role of the honorable sergeant who inspired him as a rookie, but who, in this past, has been murdered by the psychopathic Carcer - he might be able to defuse the revolution and prevent the riots and stop his old friends and their relatives from being killed...but only at the cost of changing the future, so that he no longer has a life there to go back to...
"We're learning a lot, though," Lu-Tze insisted. "For a perfectly logical chain of reasons Vimes ended back in time even looking rather like Keel! Eyepatch and scar! Is that Narrative Causality, or Historical Imperative, or Just Plain Weird? Are we back to the old theory of the self-correcting history? Is there no such thing as an accident, as the Abbott says? Is every accident just a higher-order design? I'd love to find out!"
So as Sam Vimes tries desperately to get back to his present life where he is happily married and starting a family at last, and not change history disastrously, but mostly to avoid getting killed either in his current incarnation or as his younger self, we get one of those worlds-collide things when you get anachronisms that aren't anachronisms at all: a very plausible window into how an urban reign of terror creeps in, how sane, normal people who believe themselves decent end up turning a blind eye to the black wagon taking their neighbors away, how other sane normal decent people end up shooting other neighbors when the pressure builds to a flashpoint and martial law is declared, and how, yes, some of them do resist the passive peer pressure to stand idly by, and become heroes, whether they understand it or not--
"Last Friday we had to go and break up some meeting over near the University. They were just talking! And we had to take orders from some
civilian, and the Cable Street lads were a bit rough and...it's not like the people had weapons or anything. You can't tell me
that's right, Sarge. And then we loaded some of 'em into the hurry-up, just for talking. Mrs. Owlesly's boy Elson never came home the other night, too, and they say he was dragged off to the palace just for saying his lordship's a loony. Now people down our street are looking at me in a funny way."
Ye gods, I remember, thought Vimes. I thought it was all going to be chasing men who gave up after the length of a street and said "it's a fair cop, guv'nor." I thought I'd have a medal by the end of the week.
"You want to be careful what you say, lad," he said.
"Yeah, but our mum says it's fair enough if they take away the troublemakers and the weirdies but it's not right them taking away ordinary people."
Is this really me? Vimes thought. Did I really have the political awareness of a head louse?
...Vimes signed the grubby form presented to him by Fred Colon and handed it back with a solid, fixed expression that made the man feel rather worried.
"Where to now, Sarge?" said Sam as they pulled away.
"Cable Street," said Vimes. There was a murmur of dismay from the crated people behind them.
"That's not right," muttered Sam.
"We're playing this by the rules," said Vimes. "You're going to have to learn why we have rules, Lance Constable. And don't you eyeball me. I've been eyeballed by experts, and you look as if you're desperate for the privy."
"Yeah, all right, but everyone knows they torture people," mumbled Sam.
"Do they?" said Vimes. "Then why doesn't anyone do anything about it?"
"'Cos they torture people."
Ah, at least I was getting a grasp of basic social dynamics, thought Vimes.
I'm not sure how many entries this series will take: it's a rather long book, about 300 pages, and although I only want to quote from a few of them, I also want to comment on the quotes as I go along. I've been meaning to do this for some time: most of my blog readers are familiar with the series, so we simply ObRef it without bothering to cite it, but this is a different group, and I can't take the same things for granted.
Why did you come into the job, lad?"
"My mate Iffy joined last year. He said you got free food and a uniform and you could pick up the extra dollar here and there."
It's fiction, yes. I know.
But in light of the diaries by Susan Hu and Soj these past few days, and earlier ones by Avila and TomTech, I think we desperately need every intellectual tool we can to come to grips with how sane, normal, modern folks can slide down that primrose path to a hell-on-earth built of good intentions...and genre fiction, as CS Lewis noted decades ago, is an excellent way of addressing human or historical issues divorced from the agendas and controversies attached to them in our own political spheres.
--Religion, btw, is not involved at all in Discworld tyranny at this time, except in the most peripheral of ways. (eg, some people wondering if the gods get involved in human affairs, and others finding ethical inspiration in their prophetic books, and the Monks of Time, whose creed is shall we say obscure...)
"...I don't report to anyone but you, if that's any help."
Tilden looked up at him and shook his head sadly. "Spy or not, Keel, I don't mind telling you that some of the orders we've been getting lately have...not been thought out properly, in my opinion, what?"
He gave Vimes a glare as if defying him to produce the red-hot thumbscrews there and then.
Vimes could see how much the admission that abduction and torture and conspiracy to criminalize honest citizens might not be acceptable government policy was costing the old man. Tilden hadn't been brought up to think like that. He'd ridden off under the flag of Ankh-Morpork to fight the Cheese-Eaters of Quirm, or Johnny Klatchian, or whatever enemies had been selected by those higher up the chain of command, with never a second thought about the rightness of the cause, because that sort of thinking could slow a soldier down.
Tilden had grown up knowing that the people at the top were right. That was why they were at the top. He didn't have the mental vocabulary to think like a traitor, because only traitors thought like that.
You might also want to ask yourselves why good old Pterry wrote such a book, and donated to such a cause, back in October of 2001. Psychic powers - or just a keen awareness of history?
...There were a million people in the city, and a billion places to hide. Ankh-Morpork was
built of boltholes. Besides, Carcer was a nightmare.
Vimes was used to the other kinds of nut jobs, the ones that acted quite normally right up to the point where they hauled off and smashed someone with a poker for blowing their nose noisily. But Carcer was different. He was of two minds, but instead of being in conflict, they were in competition. He had demons on both shoulders, urging one another on.
And yet...he smiled all the time, in a cheerful chirpy sort of way, and he acted like the kind of rascal who made a dodgy living selling gold watches that go green after a week. And he appeared to be convinced, utterly convinced, that he never did anything really wrong. He'd stand there amid the carnage, blood on his hands and stolen jewelry in his pocket, and, with an expression of injured innocence, declare: "Me? What did I do?"
And it was believable right up until you looked into those cheeky, smiling eyes, and saw, deep down, the demons looking back...
...but don't spend too much time looking at those eyes, because that'd mean you've taken your eyes off his hands, and by now one of them would hold a knife.
...And there it was. That bloody laugh, on top of that damn grin. It was never far away. "Haha" didn't come close to doing it the injustice it deserved. It was more a sort of modulation to the voice, an irritatingly patronizing chortle that suggested that all this was somehow funny and you hadn't got the joke.
Trouble was, you couldn't shoot someone for having an annoying laugh...
--Sound familiar?
...He wondered if it was at all possible to give this idiot some lessons in basic politics. That was always the dream, wasn't it? "I wish I knew then what I know now"? But when you got older, you found out that you
now wasn't
you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp.
A much better dream, one that'd ensure sounder sleep, was not to know now what you didn't know then.
...to be continued...
He woke up once, in darkness and panic, and heard the sound of the big black wagon rattling down the street. And then it just, quite seamlessly, became part of his nightmare.