“THANK you. Is it permissible for me to sit? Fine. No, I cannot complain, really … .
“I’d like to say that everyone here has been as courteous as could be expected—that isn’t quite true, actually, but you know what I mean. No one has struck me.
“No, I don’t smoke. I’d appreciate some coffee, though. That was one of the things we missed—coffee. At least at first. There was a lot of tea in the supplies, but no coffee. I used to enjoy it while I was in there—tea, I mean—but now I can’t tolerate the taste.
“I don’t know if it was intentional or not. I thought you would know.
“It’s odd that you should put it as you did. Because I’ve thought of it so often myself, since the end, in just that way. I remember how things used to be … the way I used to be myself, outside. And the next thing I think of is the psych-aids breaking through the wall with the butts of their guns, and the way my guards fought them. We had polearms, you know. Polearms and swords—the swords were reserved for officers. Somebody told me a few days ago that three of the psych-aids were hurt; but I feel sure it must have been more than that. We were surprised, of course—anyone would have been under the circumstances. Still, we fought well. My guards were well trained, and every one of them, man or woman, was a warrior of proven bravery.
“Listen, you don’t have to stop him like that. That was a legitimate question, ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ And I’ll give him a legitimate answer—no, I am not ashamed. I am proud of the Empire, proud of what we did, proud of the way we fought at the end. It was a fight we couldn’t win, but we fought well. That’s what matters—fighting well. Who wins is a matter of chance and advantage.
“You don’t have to tell me to relax; I am perfectly relaxed. I raised my voice only to bring home my point to you—it’s a little trick I have, just like pounding the arm of the chair as I pronounce each word.
“We were talking about morality, and I feel that is a more fruitful and interesting subject; but I can tell you very briefly how we constructed our weapons, if you want—provided you understand that we are going to return to the moral question afterward.
“No, I feel no need whatsoever to justify myself—not to you or to anyone else. But I want to make you understand the imperatives of the situation. After all, that was the whole point of the experiment: to clarify the imperatives of that type of situation. What was the use of all that time … .
“Oh Jesus, the building and the fighting … .
“I’m sorry. I’m all right. Thank you for the coffee. The polearms were easy, really. There were several cleavers in the kitchen, and a lot of knives. We sawed the handles off brooms and mops, and joined two of them together. We made scarf joints at the ends—do you know what a scarf is? Like a step in the wood, to give the glue more area. There was a glue in the wood shop that was stronger than the wood itself, if you let it set up overnight. We made tests, you see. Glued up pieces and broke them afterward. We made saw cuts in the ends of the poles, and put the knife blades into them, clamped them, and glued them in place. Afterward we put nails through the holes in the tangs—that was just extra insurance. Out here there will be more scope for ingenuity; we might even be able to get hold of some fissionables. Just joking, of course.
“In there, the cleavers were the best of the kitchen material. We put them about twenty centimeters down the shaft, then put a boning-knife blade in the end. With a weapon like that, the warrior could hack or stab; it was almost as good as a sword.
“The swords were the most difficult to make—that was why I restricted them, made them only for officers. Then too, in that way they served as badges of tank. We tore up the floors in the Graphic Arts Center to get the steel reinforcing bars, and heated them in the furnace burner, then pounded them out. A lot of them broke, and had to be reforged—sometimes over and over. I had the best one, naturally. I suppose you people have it now?
“Yes, I suppose I would like to see it—I carried it in some good fights. You wouldn’t understand about that. The hilt was bone, almost like ivory, and I had Althea burn the Lung-Rin into the bone. Althea was our best artist.
“The Lung-Rin? That is the symbol of the Empire—two dragons fighting.
“No, we didn’t worship the Lung-Rin. It was a symbol, that’s all. In the long run, if you know what I mean, we were the Lung-Rin. We had ceremonies, yes. We set up a figure to represent all the Yellows. Don made it of wood and leather, and that was the center of the ceremonies. Althea helped him with the face, and I had her make it look something like me—you understand, a little psychology. It’s odd, but you can make a thing like that, and have everyone bow in front of it, and offer it the things we took in war, and after a time it becomes … I don’t know, something more. More than just the figure you set up in the beginning. Have you talked to Don?
“He had a theory—I don’t know whether he believed it himself. I didn’t, but still … . There was something in it. Do you understand what I mean? It wasn’t true; but still … .
“All right, here’s what he thought. Or anyway, what he said he thought. That there are things we don’t know about that live in the world with us—things in another plane of reality. And when you make something like that, it comes—one of them comes. It shapes itself to fit your image of it, becoming the real Spirit of the Yellows. Anyway, when we had the torchlight processions, sometimes you might think you could see it move. It was just the flickering light, of course, and the fact that because it was so tall the face was illuminated from the bottom. Any face will look strange when you light it from below, I suppose. We caught rats and pigeons when we built it and put them inside, so it would make strange sounds; some of them must have lived a long time.
“No, I don’t know what happened to it, and I don’t care. You can’t kill the thing, the Spirit of the Yellows. Not unless you kill all of us, and you won’t do that. We’ll be free someday. How could we forget? The experiment was the greatest thing in our lives. At night, before we had won, we used to sit around the fire—outside, the buildings were too dangerous then—and talk. You’ve never done that. You weren’t there.
“No, not about what we were going to do when we won—at least, not mostly. Not even about our plans for the next day. Mostly we talked about our lives before the experiment. Each of us would tell the rotten things that had happened to him, and then someone else would talk. We never said it, but we were all thinking that it wasn’t like that here. We were all together—all Yellows together. That was one of the first things we did, I think about the fourth day after the gates closed. We swore that we were going to stand together or fall together; there wasn’t going to be any splitting. We had seen what happened to the Greens; they were always going in all directions; they wouldn’t support each other. By the time they got organized it was too late. The others had the weapons and the organization and the fighting spirit. They’d been knocked down too much, and they’d been cut up too much—do you understand what I mean? If you take people like that, and beat them over and over and over again, most of them stay beaten. One or two will go the other way—become so hard and strong that they’re as good as anything you’ve got. But not most of them. So when the one or two try and lead them, there’s no support. Then too, there’s the sexual effect. Maybe I shouldn’t talk about this. Do you want to turn off the recorder? Well, all right. Everybody saw, almost from the beginning, that the women would have to fight just like the men. Jan was the best woman warrior we had, and she came out for it from the beginning. The Blues were already doing it, and if we didn’t, we’d lose. Besides, if the women didn’t fight, there couldn’t be real equality, because if a woman said we ought to stand up to the other colors, all the men would say it wasn’t her that was going to bleed.
“Some of the women didn’t want to, of course. And some of the men didn’t want to have them do it, either. I’d say that there were perhaps eight women against, and five men. That was where the drill came in. Most of all, there. It’s hard—very hard to get people to drill. You’ve got to work it in a little bit at a time. But once they do it, they learn to obey orders, and when you say, ‘Come on!’ they follow. I started them with practice in using weapons (it was just the knives and clubs then) and formalized it later. I said even if they weren’t going to fight, the least they could do was practice with the rest of us; and then if they had to sometime, they’d know how. Of course after we were better organized I could have simply ordered it; but I didn’t have that kind of authority then—I wasn’t Emperor.
“No, I was a political science major. A lot were psych students, and a lot more were from the school of sociology. I never noticed that they behaved differently than the rest of us.
“What I was coming to, was that when a man—a male, let’s call him—has been fighting a woman, and he wins and knocks her down, and she drops whatever it is she has, a club or whatever, and perhaps she’s bleeding where he cut her or broke her lip, and often her shirt and shorts are torn, there is an impulse that takes command. Perhaps women don’t feel that way, but men do. And then, when a woman has had that happen once or twice, it takes everything out of them. They won’t fight anymore; they just want to run, or sometimes to hide. Some of the men said that they really liked it, underneath, but I don’t think so. Still, they were the ones, mostly, who wanted to join us.
“No, of course we didn’t let them. We couldn’t let them. That was the point of the whole thing. We had the bands—I’ve still got mine, see, around my wrist—and we couldn’t get them off. You can’t get them off. Once they clamped your bracelet on you, you were a Yellow or a Blue or a Green; and that was it. Some of the Greens, particularly, tried to cut them off before we got control of all the tools. It couldn’t be done; a file won’t even scratch them.
“Did that bother you? The clothes? Yes, we had colored clothes to begin with—yellow shorts and shirts. But they didn’t really matter; it was the wristbands. In the end I had all my guards go naked to the waist, with just a strip of yellow cloth around their heads to identify them. You see, I had noticed that the braver someone was, the more torn up their shirts got, until the best of them really didn’t have any at all.
“Yes, the women too. I’ll tell you a secret. When you go out to fight, anything you can do that will make you look different—strange—helps. It takes the heart out of the others. I think the Blues had the advantage at first—those dark blue shirts and shorts. They looked like Federal Police. But the naked chests and the yellow head-rags took care of that. We kept together and came at them in a solid mass—swords in front, and the polearms poking between them, and everybody yelling. That’s very important. And the flag. I gave my own shirt to make the flag. The front was all cut up by then, but there wasn’t a rip in the back—not one. That was the part we took off and used for the flag. Althea sewed the Lung-Rin in it with red thread. Some of them said it would never stand out because there wasn’t enough air movement in the building, where most of the fighting was. I told them that if they went forward fast enough it would stand out, and I was right. It was useful in another way too: once or twice we were scattered—I remember one time when the Blues ambushed us—and it showed us where our center was. Nils carried it. I don’t know what’s happened to it now. It would be nice to have when we get back together.
“I’ve already told you about that. It couldn’t be done: if you were a Yellow, you were a Yellow; a Blue was a Blue, and a Green was a Green; and nothing anybody could say made any difference. Jan had a Green slave-lover for a while—he even fought with us a couple of times against the Blues. The Greens were finished by then, and he wasn’t much good.
“No, as I said, the Greens had a few real fighters. I have no idea what their names were. That was one of the first rules I made—Greens and Blues have no names. If you knew one of them by name before the experiment, you forgot it as quickly as possible. If we had to talk about one particularly, we said: ‘the blond Blue woman,’ or Jan’s Green boy.’ Like that.
“Another thing that helped us fight was the idea of the Empire. If you talk about a thing like that, it becomes real. Just like the figure we set up. We had the Imperial Guards, and they were brave because if they weren’t, they’d lose their places, they wouldn’t be guards any more; and the others fought harder hoping to get in—if someone distinguished himself, or herself, I made them a guard. And if a guard did, I made that guard an officer. And once I had the guards, I used them to keep the rest in order.
“What it was about? The whole experiment? You know—the world. Only so many resources, you see, and so many groups of people. I understand some of the other runnings of the experiment came out a little differently; but they wanted to see how we worked it out—what our solution was. That’s why I don’t feel bad about what we did. It was our problem, set to us (if you want to put it that way), and we solved it. When they broke the wall we were organized—everyone knew his place, who he took orders from, and how much he got. How much food, drinking water, bathwater. That was the Empire.
“Mostly we just called it that: ‘The Empire.’ Officially, we began by calling it Mongolia. Because we were the Yellows. Later we shortened it.
“No, I don’t feel bad about her, whoever she was. We were all volunteers, originally, you have to remember. And she kept getting out of line, over and over again, when she was just a stinking Green or Blue or whatever she was. I can’t even remember. So I decided she should be punished. We made a ceremony out of it, with fire in the braziers, and the big gong.
“I had Jan do it. Jan was a colonel. Neal and Ted held her, and Jan put the sword through her belly—so she’d live long enough to know what was happening. When Jan pulled it out, she licked the blood from the blade. The rest of the Greens and Blues would have obeyed after that, believe me.
“Yes, when she finally died. That was when they broke down the wall. They were monitoring a few selected individuals, I suppose, though we didn’t know it. She must have been one of them.
“Naturally. I understand how you feel about it now—how the school feels and how the public and the President feel. But do you understand how we felt? You haven’t been through what we went through together. We have learned a great many things we will remember, but none of you could possibly know how it was then, when I was Ming the Merciless.”
