A Call to Darkness - Michael Jan Friedman [41]
The goldeneyed one just nodded.
“Pardon me,” said Picard, raising his voice a little to be heard better over the wind, “but I’ve forgotten your name.”
The driver smiled a little. “Ralak’kai,” he said.
Picard smiled a little too. “Ralak’kai.”
Their conversation was interrupted as the overturned wagon and its assorted burdens were pushed off the ledgesent crashing down the terraces of stone so the train could move again.
Before another tragedy had a chance to befall them.
At first, Dan’nor didn’t want to watch the Conflicts again. They reminded him too much of what he might have done-what he might have been. They were salt, ground hard into his still-open wounds.
His former quarters had had no videoscreen. Officers were unofficially discouraged from viewership, under the theory that it would make their brains soft. Particularly field officers-those who created the Conflicts in the first place.
However, he had a videoscreen now. And if he left it off indefinitely, the Viewership Service would eventually catch on to him. In a Lower Caster who’d spent his life in the factories, a disinterest in the Conflicts would have prompted the scrutiny of the authorities. After all, non-viewership was a sign of disenchantment. And disenchantment often led to antisocial behavior.
In someone who knew that videoscreen use was monitored, a failure to at least tune in would be seen as something more extreme: a conscious and perhaps even flagrant decision to rebel. The scrutiny stage would be bypassed and sanctions imposed-subtle at first, and then less so if non-viewership persisted.
And then, of course, there was always the possibility-no matter how remote-that model behavior would be rewarded with a second chance. An opportunity to pick up the pieces of his career and go on.
So he tuned in. He thought he would just let the damned thing play, doing his best to ignore it. Then he found out that he couldn’t.
Once, the Conflicts had intrigued him-he’d forgotten that somehow. Of course, he had been just a boy back then-taking apart each strategy in his mind, bit by bit, until he could see why the successful ones had worked and the unsuccessful ones hadn’t. And all the while, his Lower Caste playmates were reveling in the blood and glory, miniature versions of the viewers they were to become.
Before long, all that came back to him, and the old intrigue snared him once more. He found, ironically, that the only way to escape the bitterness of his fate was to immerse himself in the very source of that bitterness. To play again at being the field officer he had hoped to become in reality.
This time, however, he saw more deeply into the strategies. He saw beyond the level of winning and losing to the underlying dynamics: the rise and fall of action, the thwarting or satisfaction of expectation-all of which served to enthrall the viewer.
It was far from a revelation. He had known for a long time, of course, that the purpose of the Conflicts was to distract the Lower Castes from the tedium of their lives-from the fact of their servitude. But now he saw how it was done-and that there was more skill involved than he had first believed.
In one sequence, for example, the video alternated between two hostile reconnaissance parties-unknowingly about to meet head-on. Long shots established the relative positions of the groups, while closer shots showed their respective difficulties in negotiating the mountainous terrain. When the screen filled with one or another unsuspecting face, Dan’nor had an impulse to shout out a warning. To curse him for a fool. But at the same time, it gave him a sense of power to know something the participant did not.
The anticipation mounted steadily, culminating in a desperate and deadly encounter. Here again, certain warriors were singled out for special scrutiny-a most effective technique indeed. The expressions of the participants, seen up close, were fascinating-despite the headgear that obscured