The Magister (Earthkeep) (25 page)

Lin-ci Win snapped her head downward, sitting for a moment with her hand shielding her face.  She shook her head twice, then released a long sigh.  When she looked at her colleagues again, her voice wore the endlessly patient tone of master to student. 

"We are talking here of an ancient and fundamental truth, at least in my culture: that humanity must be governed by all-encompassing social mandates so that its essential goodness can be realized and so thatwhat violence erupts can be controlled.  That wisdom has for millennia weathered the insidious teachings of a lesser philosophy which you, Adverb, seem now to be championing.  'Never resist,' that way suggests, 'for resistance only intensifies that which is being resisted.'"  Lin-ci's eyes bored into Zude's. "That submissive and servile philosophy is at this moment running rampant on this planet, infecting minds otherwise courageous and stable." 

She sat back in her Greatchair and her eyes swept those of both her colleagues.  "I know once more why I am Kanshou."  She lifted her head higher.  "I am Kanshou today for the same reason that I chose to be Kanshou over forty years ago: because in the rising of the power of women I found my first hope for the appropriate handling of violence.  I could see that humanity's goodness was no longer to be endangered by corrupt police and military forces which had only in theory protected and nurtured it.  I could see basic human virtue for the first time contained by a formal but organic structure of reason, by a social order that was not imposed from without — as men's social order had always been — but which grew from within, from the Inner Virtue itself."

Lin-ci Win leaned forward.  "I could trust the Kanshoubu.  The hands of women are accustomed to the nurturing and protection of goodness and of life.  And you, Zella Terremoto Adverb, you would have us abolish the only agency that has given meaning to the human need for social order.  You would have us forsake that very Order itself for the chaos that will reign without it."

Her last words echoed in the holochamber and faded into silence. 

Yotoma studied her Kanshoumates.  She took in a long breath. 

"I am not this world's oldest living Kanshou," she said quietly.  "I am not even its oldest active Kanshou.  But I've been around a good while.  I had already spent over twenty years on Little Blue before the Kanshoubu even got born.  I got to sit at a table with the women who were creating the Femmedarme Cadet Academy.  And one of the first gerts from the Vigilancia's new division, called the Flying Daggers, carried me over the Atlantic and back to southern Sudan for my momah's funeral."

She looked hard at the Amah Magister.  "Lin-ci, I had your same feelings when I discovered I wanted to be Kanshou.  It was a new kind of law and order, the kind that I could trust, the kind that gave a sweet pride to being a woman."

She clasped then unclasped her hands twice, three times. 

"I'm trying to figure what's happening here, where you two are parting company, and where I stand.  In some ways, Lin-ci, you are more optimistic than many of my own, who say folks are bad from the start and need a lifetime dose of law and order to keep them from getting any worse." 

Yotoma wrinkled her spacious forehead, then spoke again.

"By this way of thinking, violence and peacekeeping would be two inseparable and eternal halves of the human coin.  The Kanshoubu just put the law and order into the hands of women where it belonged in the first place.  But then you bite your thumb at Zude here, accusing her of turning into one of those nonaction-action people who go lingering in rivers and soil and star spirits and let the civilized rest of the world go to perdition in a pitcher.  With all due respect, Lin-ci, I think you're mistaken about what our colleague here is proposing." 

Magister Adverb was staring at her old friend, alternately amazed and puzzled.  Magister Win made an impatient gesture and hardened her mouth. 

Zude rushed into the widening gap.  "Flossie, does it matter. . ."

"Hush, woman," Magister Lutu admonished. "I am trying to understand you, and the task is not easy."  She turned back to the red-caped Amah Magister.  "Whether we're talking your people or mine, Lin-ci,we would have to believe that violence is inherent in the human condition, yes?  That it will always be with us and the question is how to handle it?"
Lin-ci spoke through a mask of tolerance.  "That is my understanding, Magister Lutu."

"I hear Zude saying that violence is
not
inherent, that it is born from our deepest fears and expectations and nourished by our need to control it.  Thus, if we were willing to change ourselves enough, it could be undone." 

She paused.  No one spoke for a moment.  She scratched her close-cropped hair.  She waited for some response.  Zude supplied it. 

"Flossie, what I'm saying isn't new.  It's just that. . ."

"It's just that only mystics, poets and philosophers ever took it seriously, Adverb, because it says loud and clear that we do indeed create our own reality.  We've got to take that idea seriously now." 

"You neglect the final and most obvious possibility."

Zude and Yotoma swiveled toward their Kanshoumate.

Lin-ci's voice wavered.  "This is also the most devastating one, and to my eternal dread, the one that is most likely our destiny."  The face that shone from the red Amah cowl looked ready to flood the earth with tears.

Yotoma deliberately softened in the face of Lin-ci's demeanor.  Clearly the woman was at the center of some internal storm of which neither she nor Zude could guess the dimensions.

"When I was very small," said the now carefully measured voice of the Magister of Little Blue's largest tri-satrapy, "both my mother and my father were killed in the battle that made Hong Kong a free city under women's rule.  They had both been career officers in China's New Army, and they were both a part of the rebel forces who defied that army from within its ranks.  I spent my childhood reading tales of warriors, battles, and the emergence and destruction of great kingdoms.  I spent my youth poring over military science texts.

"The swearing of my Kanshou Oath was the most meaningful moment I had ever experienced.  I believed I was saying the words earnestly: 'I hold in my heart the vision of a world where peacekeeping forces are unnecessary. . .and my purpose in becoming Kanshou will ever be to render obsolete my own profession and the Kanshoubu itself.'"  The Magister's face was pinched.  "Veng's betrayal and the desertion of the Asian Amahs set me to a re-examination of that oath.  I now know that I had never said those words earnestly.  I had said them blithely."

Neither Zude nor Yotoma stirred.  Lin-ci spoke harshly. 

"I thought that to render the Kanshoubu obsolete meant that we would have won, that we would have made a world where men controlled their own violence, where civilians were so enlightened that only a civilian social order would be necessary to handle any infraction.  I thought in my innocence that it would be a shame to lose the Kanshoubu, and of course I would miss it.  But, my young heart told me, what a victory that loss would testify to: that we had at last harnessed and controlled human violence!"

The red-clad Amah smiled wryly. 

"But here is what I found, my Kanshoumates, in the depths of my despair.  Here is the root of my rage at your proposal, Zella Adverb.  Here is what both of you have failed to understand from the start, the reason that Kanshou will never sanction your scheme."

Her words came very slowly.  "Adverb is wrong.  Violence will never disappear.  But not because it is built from the start into every synapse of our consciousness, not because it lets us sin so that we can be redeemed, not because it provides karmic ribbons by which we must learn compassion, and not because it is the human form of some universal necessity for imbalance." 

Lin-ci Win's arched one eyebrow high, and her smile bespoke self-contempt.  "Violence is an inherent part of the human condition, and we will never choose to live without it," she over-enunciated each word,
"because we like it that way." 

"Doubledamn!"  The words exploded in a whisper from Yotoma's lips.  Immediately her head swung back and forth in denial.  Her voice rose. "Lin-ci, not so!  You don't anymore believe that drivel than you think you can catch wind in a cabbage net!"

"Why not, Magister Lutu?"  The Amah Magister was relentless.  "You can submit to me that through the ages human beings have fought for food, for territory, for God, for glory and for love, and I can show you that such motives constitute only part of the story, that they only mask a crude but remarkably dependable rush of adrenaline that quickens in every person at the prospect of blood and conquest.  Sing me ballads about the rise and fall of mighty empires and the triumph of just societies over barbarism, and I can disrupt your harmonies by unveiling for you the spark of violence that lies at the birth not only of every army but of every police force or peacekeeping agency since the dawn of human consciousness.  Even the Kanshoubu."

Lin-ci's laugh was empty.  "Even in times of justice and plenty we will look for an enemy, we will cultivate evil, we will find a reason to defend, a reason to take violent action."  She surveyed the grim countenances of her Co-Magisters.  "We have institutionalized violence simply because we desire it."  She paused.  "And if all other proof fails, we as Kanshou have only to look honestly into our own hearts in this very moment and see there that same stark desire.  To disband the Kanshoubu is to rob myself of the thing I love most: the violence for which I have lived my life."

The three Magisters sat transfixed in the silence.

Zude spoke at last, quietly.  "You have not lived your life for violence, Magister Win."

"I have done precisely that, Magister Adverb."

"I don't believe you."

Lin-ci Win looked directly at the younger woman. 

"That is my truth as I see it.  I will not shun it, ugly as its image may be.  Let me confront my own failure, Zella Adverb."

"Your only failure, Magister Win, is one of imagination," Zude countered.  "And we've all suffered from it!  It is hard to visualize what we would do in a world without violence because we have lived with it for so long.  But we know — Kanshou know —-that there are adrenaline rushes aplenty from sources other than quelling violence.  We know the thrill of competition and of teamwork.  We know the exhilaration of a hard job well done.  We know the ecstasy of seeing our creations come into being.  Kanshou are not dependent upon violence for the joys of their existence.  I ask you to consider that, Lin-ci Win, and to trust it.  I suspect you know it as well or better than either Yotoma or I."

In the long silence, Lin-ci dropped her eyes and studied her hands.  Then she straightened in her Greatchair. 

"So!" she said with a hollow vigor. "I will watch with interest, Magister Adverb, as you approach the Heart Of All Kanshou, as you attempt this worldwide conversion of our Vigilantes and Femmedarmes and Amahs.  I will listen with care as a highly regarded Magister turns mendicant preacher and slaps the back of every sensible, trustworthy and responsible Foot-Shrieve on Little Blue, assuring her that all she must do to ring in a new reality is lift her eyes from the pain and violence that constitute the very fabric of her life and look to a sweeter vision in the clouds where the violence that she secretly loves will be no more.  I will observe her response carefully, Magister Adverb." 

Zude shot a glance at Yotoma, who sat unmoving behind a scowl.  Then she focused on her own big hands clasped before her. 

"Magister Win, even if you are right, that we have chosen violence in the past — and for the reason you give — still, we are not bound to make that same choice again.  To the extent that we can imagine or expect a world without violence, to that extent we can choose to create that world."

No one moved or spoke.  It was clear that the final meeting of Little Blue's Magisters was drawing to a close.  The holochamber held thousands of words in its embrace, awaiting an as-yet undetermined departure ritual.

Flossie Yotoma Lutu cleared her throat.  "Lin-ci, I do not believe what you are saying about Kanshou or about your own Self, that you love violence.  Every interchange we have had over the decades that we have worked together gives the lie to your words here tonight."  Yotoma’s figure was ramrod straight.  "But your words have pushed me unequivocally to my decision, because from them I realized something.  I realized that not to support Adverb in her effort to abolish the Kanshoubu would be at the very least to affirm what you call our desire for violence, and at the very most it would be to affirm the inevitability of violence in human beings.  I can't affirm those things, Lin-ci.  And I don't think you can either."

Yotoma wiped her face again with the green kerchief and restored it to her belt. 

"So," she said, "I will walk side by side with Magister Adverb when she lays out her plan to the Amahs and the Femmedarmes and the Vigilantes of Little Blue.  I will also be right there with her when she presents it to the Heart Of All Kanshou.  And, Spirit Willing, when this old world shifts on its metaphysical axis, me and Magister Adverb, we will be holding hands together, just waiting to step out into splendor!" 

Then Yotoma added softly, "Nothing would give me more joy than to be holding your hand as well, Lin-ci Win."

Lin-ci Win raised her head high.  Yotoma thought she might be trying to smile.  "A vision appropriate to your madness, my colleagues."  She adjusted her Amah cloak.  "My companion in these times to come will be my own Heart Of Darkness, whose presence has been articulated and intensified in this, our last meeting." 

Lin-ci's voice became high and brittle, and her face flushed.  "Whatever our differences, Magisters, I will always deeply value the association we have shared."  She began searching the Peace Room below her for her attending Amahs.

"Magister Win."  Zude's voice halted Lin-ci Win in her movements.  Zude held the woman's eyes.  "I want nothing more on this earth than to have you join us at the meeting of the Heart Of All Kanshou.  Even if only to be our adversary on that occasion."
"If I came, which is highly unlikely, that would certainly be my role, Magister Adverb."