“Wouldn’t you agree,” the smiling young man with the hard eyes said, “that it is a good thing for us all to work together?”
“No,” thought Lily. But she, like all the other Arcadian children sitting cross-legged around her, was silent.
“And wouldn’t you agree,” he persisted, holding his hands cupped on his knees from where he sat cross-legged in their midst (“we’re all friends here, after all,” he had said), “that the Good of All is better than the Good of One?”
“No,” thought Lily again. “No, I don’t think that at all. And if I don’t think it, I certainly can’t agree.” She tried not to look as sullen as she felt. They had all of them—her friends and her—learned very quickly the bullying that lay behind the pressingly friendly manner of the Empire’s occupying force. Not ‘troops.’ She wasn’t supposed to call them ‘troops.’ They were insistent about that, as about everything else. And none of them wore uniforms, only the most sharply pressed of casual clothes. And they weren’t “occupying” Arcadia. They were insistent about that, too. “We are exploring opportunities for mutual assistance. Nothing sinister about that, is there?” A Megalopolitan general had explained this to them all, after they had been herded—all the villagers of Arcadia—onto a communal field outside of Walton. The field was all stubble now, covered in bits of corn and wheat and rye. The Arcadians had harvested it and watched as the Megalopolitans heaved it onto enormous trucks that drove, day and night, through the harsh cut they had made at the lowest point of the Calandals. It was going “to feed needy people,” the Megalopolitan social workers informed them loftily. And the assumption was that the Arcadians, being such a warmhearted bunch, would find this some solace. For the fact was that the grains’ disappearance meant there were going to be some hungry mouths at home.
Alan, before he disappeared into the mountains with Colin’s dad and a half dozen others, had said to her, “Their own people are on the verge of revolt—at least the ones without the money, and that’s most of them. If they can make us the enemy, and loot our land, they can buy a little time. But what in the Goddess’s name they think they’ll do after that, I don’t know.” But he was going to find out, he said. “Take care of Mae,” he said, and then he laughed—they both laughed—at the idea of anyone taking care of Mae. She had already begun a secret line of communication between the magistrates of all of the villages, and she was helped in this by the fact that most of them were, to the Empire, “mere” housewives or small business owners. The Megalopolitans did not understand that in Arcadia the talents needed for these roles were considered supreme, and that such people were for this reason thought to be the only ones worthy of high office.
So through Mae’s secret channels traveled much information concerning the less and less full net bags of market day, information traded over the pots and pans that were less and less filled with the food needed for the patient mouths of Arcadia. The Megalopolitans looked on the activities of the women of Arcadia with a derisive eye. More worrying to them was the disappearance of many of the village menfolk into the mountains. But winter was coming. They could deal with them then. They could freeze them out.
Then there were the children of Arcadia. To the Megalopolitan invaders, these were the key to the future. “We have to educate them to Megalopolitan ways, and quickly as we can,” urged Field Commander Susan B. Riggs, a rangy ex-commando who stood about seven feet tall. “We have to—as our earlier strategists used to say—win their hearts and minds.” There had been something a little scornful in how her colleagues heard her out, especially Conor Barr, the young and handsome military attaché, sent by his phenomenally well connected parents to get some safe (and easily publicizable) real-life battlefield experience. In Megalopolis, it was unusual to find a woman in a position of such authority in the military. But her superiors, recognizing that she would be of unusual value in an environment like Arcadia, had more or less forced her on her commanding officer. Conor looked at the General now to see how he took the suggestions of a woman. Conor’s own mother, Livia Barr, was well known for her own ‘suggestions,’ but she, he thought, was the exception that proved the rule. It was men who knew best. Always, though they kept quiet about it, out of superior wisdom. Conor felt a glow of pride as he reconsidered this truism from his expensive upper class Megalopolitan education. Then he thought again about that girl, the one he saw the night they came into Arcadia. He hadn’t dared ask what had happened to her. He hardly dared admit to himself that what happened to her was the only thing that really interested him in this godforsaken land.
The General rubbed his surgery-enhanced jaw and grudgingly admitted the truth of what Field Commander Riggs had to say. If Megalopolis was to hold Arcadia, and mine its resources for the people back home, it needed workers. And those workers had to be willing, too—Megalopolis had found out, to its cost, and almost when it was too late for its own economy to recover from the damage, that it was no good working slaves to death. It was an economic waste the Empire couldn’t afford. Happy workers, under the impression that they were working for their own good: that was by far the best. And the Great City couldn’t risk importing Megalopolitans into Arcadia to do the work that needed being done there. What if they picked up the subversive values that federation had always held? That was too big a risk. Better, as Susan said, to bring up a generation of villagers who understood that the Megalopolitan way was the best. Better to teach them scorn of their own parents. “God knows, that should be easy enough!” the General exclaimed, thinking of the contempt his own three sons showed for him on every kind of occasion. This had long been a problem for Megalopolitan upper-class parents. There wasn’t a one among them who wasn’t thoroughly hated by his own children.
Why should it be any different here in Arcadia?
“Don’t you agree,” the young lieutenant insisted, there in the midst of the Arcadian children who stared at him expressionlessly, “that it is better for a government to decide what is best for the Good of All?”
“No, no, NO!” Lily shrieked inside her own head. No “government” decided what was best for the citizens of Arcadia. The Arcadians decided what was best for Arcadia. Anything else was tyranny. Lily had not just learned this at her mother’s knee, and then in school. Lily knew this—she knew it all the way down and all the way through her very self. She knew it, and she knew she had been born knowing it. And she knew it could not be any other way.
“Maud,” Lily thought hopelessly, remembering the night last spring—it seemed so long ago now, even though only a few months had passed!—when she had seen Death lead her away for the last time. “Maud, help me now.” There had been no time to grieve for Maud. That had been the hardest. All of Arcadia in an uproar, the discovery that settlers on the ridge were killed by the invaders—a ‘mistake,’ the Megalopolitans said, a miscommunication, and then their feigned anger at the fact that the Arcadians refused to forgive. The accusations that the villagers were using this, “a regrettable error but an honest mistake,” as an excuse for aggression. Then the inevitable invasion. It was very simple. Megalopolis was stronger. Arcadia, bewildered, had never even tried to fight. Arcadia had always believed that negotiation and common sense were the way. But it is not the way, as all the worlds know, when one power is so much stronger than the other. There was no negotiation. There was no common sense. There was exploitation and manipulation and planned confusion. Now there was this.
“How can it not be like this?” Lily thought furiously as she tried to keep her expression bland. “What can we DO?” For an Arcadian child was taught from birth to waste as little time as possible in wishing things might be other than the way they are. “If you don’t like what’s happening, change it.” This was what Arcadian teachers taught, time and time again.
And every child in that drab, under-heated room, under the watchful shifting eyes of the falsely pleasant man in their midst, and of Field Commander Susan B. Riggs standing by the door assessing them for her report, every child was thinking the same thing, thinking furiously: “What can be done? What can we DO?”
But as they had no answer yet, they were silent.
“Don’t you agree that might is right?” the man went on smoothly and relentlessly, his little eyes glittering with more and more anger as the hour went on. “That all men are ants, but some are meant to rule over the other ants? That Father knows best? That there’s no place like home?”
Understand, also, that Arcadian children in those days had been taught, always, the joys of ‘Yes.’ That ‘No’ might someday be necessary had not been considered by the educationists of those lovely, lighthearted villages.
“Yes,” the man’s face pleaded with the children, as his eyes darted nervously to where Field Commander Riggs impatiently waited. “Please say ‘yes.’”
That was when Lily knew what she had to do. She knew it suddenly, and very clearly, as if Maud was bending down beside her and whispering into her ear.
“No,” she said out loud. And Rex nudged her under her arm.
“What?” the man said, startled.
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t agree.”
There was a pause.
“No,” Colin’s voice said from the back. “No, I don’t agree either. I mean, I agree with Lily. No.”
“No,” a girl said from the other side of the room. And then some girls from Ventis took up the cry. “No, no, no!” they trilled like a flock of birds. And a family of children from Amana: “NO!” And Paloma spoke. And Wrykyn. And Mumford and Amaurote, too. All the children, of all the villages, in all of Arcadia, shouted out, “NO!”
“DON’T YOU AGREE,” the man shouted back, in a panic now, seeing his job disappear into the angry crease on the Field Commander’s forehead. “DON’T YOU AGREE THAT TOMORROW IS BETTER THAN TODAY?”
“NO!” Lily said, jumping to her feet and stamping her right one hard. “NO more tomorrows! Today! Today! Today!”
And all the children jumped up, too, and shouted along with her: “NO MORE TOMORROWS! TODAY! TODAY! TODAY!”
A siren rang, and the double doors at the back swung open. A trio of grim-faced men dressed in pressed chinos and polo shirts rushed inside in a wedge. Susan pointed at Lily, and they came and took her away.
“NO!” Colin bawled, and he ran out behind. Rex dodged between the children’s feet and followed, managing to get through the double doors just before they slammed shut.
The room was silent. The children were rigid now, and pale with fear. Susan strode to the front of the room, indicating with one gesture that the man in the center was to get out of her way.
“Now, children,” she said in her briskest voice. “I know that none of you want to be sent to the Children’s Mine, not like that poor little girl we were just forced to take away. I know you are all good children. And the Children’s Mine is a very bad place to be. Not a good place for good children AT ALL.” At this she gave them a piercing and meaningful look.
The children shook, looked at each other, and slowly, under the penetrating quality of her eye, sat back down.
“Now,” she said firmly, “we are going to learn today’s lesson: ‘Why Tomorrow is Always Better Than Today.’”
“No more Tomorrows.” Every child there knew that was what Susan really said. She was telling them there would be no more tomorrows for them, ever again. Every child thought that thought. But every child, now, was still.
As still as Conor Barr was later, standing transfixed at the sight of Lily and Colin and Rex being driven away to the Children’s Mine. So still was he, and so still did the scene around him seem, that the General had to speak quite sharply to make him attend. It was time for Conor to go back to Megalopolis and bring the report of the occupying force to the council of the Highest in the Land, and the General wanted to make sure that his own role would be properly represented. It would make a big difference to his pension when he retired if it was.