There Won't Be War

The mushroom cloud winked out. Gazing westward through the giant figure of the peacekeeper into a clear evening sky, I realized that if my father’s fears were real, our house would be destroyed in the next few minutes. I was afraid for him, and felt ashamed of my doubts.

“We do not fear!” the great figure intoned, reaching into me with strength and certainty. I waited, held by a new hope, but my stomach tightened as lights blossomed high in the west, and my father’s doubts crowded into me. Somehow, a warhead had escaped the beams of the orbital stations. I held my breath and waited in the shelter with my father for the flash that he had expected all his life.

The second wave bloomed and died. Trails of light scratched across the sky beyond the mountains as debris reentered and burned. Cries of joy went up from the gathering as parents embraced their children.

“Our peace is born again!” the keeper cried. “And it is stronger than ever.”

The giant figure turned and strode away across the desert, and I knew that my father was wrong.

He had always been wrong.

* * *

Coming home was a return to doubt. “Was there a live warhead?” I asked him. “Would they risk so many lives?”

“They’re getting us ready, that’s what they are,” he said from his chair, glaring up at me bitterly. “A keeper isn’t a human being, son. They sleep* into the future, tinker with their genes, with no two generations alike. They preach to us about keeping the peace, but they’re only buying time for themselves, so they can replace us. We’ve always had them—people who specialize in telling others how to live. Shamans and priests, then kings and politicians, and psychologists of every stripe—leaders, they always call themselves. But none of them ever helped us to be free and self-directed, because that would make us free of them. But they always helped themselves, stealing everything in the way of goods, pleasures, and privileges. Above all, they stole power.”

“But we have peace,” I said.

He sighed as his vehemence subsided into a look of pain. “I suppose nuclear terror was more dangerous, if something went wrong, but there are ways around this peace of ours.” He seemed moody and strange, out of touch.

I asked, “Did you go to the shelter?”

He nodded, clenching his teeth.

“But you weren’t in danger,” I insisted, sitting down at his feet. “I saw for myself.”

He leaned forward and grasped my head in his hands. “Son—you don’t know this world, or what you are. Most everything in our kind of organism is hidden deeply, and you’ve lived too easily to dig it out. There were clues in old poems, plays, and novels, but the keepers stole them from us. What I know has seeped into me slowly. I’ve read what I could find ... and there have been miraculous accidents in my thoughts, since your mother died. The keepers are making a garden for themselves—and for us a desert they call peace.” He gripped my head and looked into my eyes. “They’re working to be rid of us!” It seemed suddenly that he would crush my skull. “Do you understand?”

I tried to nod, realizing that there was no hope for him now. He let go and fell back, exhausted. “There’s no one left to know,” he whispered, “what’s been lost ....”He was silent for a while. “What are you going to do?”

“Join them.” I hadn’t intended to say it, hadn’t even realized that I had come to a decision. I would not be like him, I told myself, expecting angry, frantic words, and maybe even violence, because he would believe it was necessary.

He laughed suddenly and said, “Of course,” then shook his head and gazed steadily at me. “I knew you would in the end.”

When I joined the keepers, he stopped speaking to me, unable to see the great purpose to which I gave myself. One day he disappeared. I came home to visit, and no one in the area knew where to find him. At first I imagined that he had simply found some patch of wilderness to live out his life with the memory of my mother.

I found his last letter to me. He had written it by hand, and left it, unsigned, in his study, under the holo portrait of my mother and me.

Son,