Sixth Installment of Otherwise: The Children’s Crusade

by Christopher Bernard

Chapter Sixteen: In Belly of the Beast

The tunnel opened like the mouth of an enormous crocodile, its surface gleaming down the reptilian throat from the long lines of weak lighting strapped to the ceiling and disappearing into an infinite distance like the parallel lines Petey’s geometry teacher had told him could meet only in infinity. 

As he and his friends might escape only in eternity this nightmare of world too much like their own to bear looking at closely. But Petey shook away the gloomy thought. Some people—cynical classmates, defeated adults—had claimed a painful thought held more truth than a pleasing one. But that was ridiculous: pain was a sign more than a punishment. A painful thought was a pain of the mind; like a bodily one, a signal something that usually worked efficiently, smoothly, noiselessly, had broken down. And anything broken could be fixed. Suffering was no virtue; it was your body, your mind, waving frantically to be saved. And what was salvation? It was the warm, delicious sensation of health, the deep, calm feeling of strength—of body and mind, of soul and will. 

Petey had come up with these fragmentary bits of wisdom on his own, during bouts of meditation before falling to sleep, or on solitary walks in the woods or on the beach in the long summer dusk. They seemed airtight, but they would be tested, and not only on this journey.

The tunnel, a half cylinder for two-way traffic fifty feet wide and a thirty high, ran underneath the river on the western side of the city. The five had managed to get here past miles of Izan patrols that seemed the city’s only traffic that night. 

Helicopters had moved or hovered like dancing spiders with blinking lights for eyes among the darkened office towers. A wailing symphony of sirens echoed across the town, every so often a Poliz car screaming past them as they had cowered behind trashcans, parked cars, closed news stands, inside doorways. The streets were empty and silent, with only a handful of lights in the windows, scattered as if by accident or negligence along the walls of boxes of brick and concrete, the city locked down, making it seem like the ghost of a city, terrorized into darkness and silence. Except for the mockingly regular street lights, it felt like the wartime blackouts Petey had heard about in movies he had seen at home about the war—movies where the Allies had triumphed in the end. But had that been a delusion? Had the other side actually won? Were the people “at home” living in an illusion? Was that “Otherwise,” as Ruhtra had grimly proposed, one of an infinite number of possible worlds, both “real” and “not real,” but this was the actual “Howtiz”?

The five children were the only pedestrians, like the last survivors of a city abandoned after some overwhelming catastrophe. 

“As for sticking out like a sore thumb,” Chace said in Petey’s ear, whispering even though there was little likelihood he would be overheard, “I’d make a sore thumb feel like a wallflower.” 

“Me too,” whispered Petey.

“What’s a wallflower?” Bumper asked innocently.

“Quiet!” said Yram. “The walls have ears.”

“But do wallflowers?” Bumper asked pertly, whispering his softest.

Yram glared at him.

“Wallflowers their ears plucked get,” Yram whispered, “and by Izan to barracks walls nailed. Like trophies.”

“Quiet,” warned Ruhtra. He gestured down the street. Petey saw a constellation of lights a block and a half away—Poliz, two patrol cars, a hastily set-up booth lit by a small harshly bright beacon: a checkpoint. Ruhtra waved everybody down behind a small parked truck with a sign that read “Joachims Blumen” on its side. So they have florists even in Izanland, thought Petey. No doubt bouquets of Venus flytraps and corpse roses were the most popular gifts for Valentine’s and Mother’s Day. Assuming Izan indulged in such girlish holidays.

The half dozen Poliz manning the checkpoint stopped each of the few passing vehicles with raised rifles, strident whistles, barked orders; one time, everyone in the vehicle was ordered out, with hands raised and terrified looks, half-blinded by the flashlights stuck into their faces, before the car was searched—or not so much searched as ransacked, the belongings inside scattered over the street—and then let go, almost bitterly, as though the Poliz resented finding nothing to hold them for. Or shoot them. Maybe they had quotas, thought Petey, and resented wasting time on fish they had to fling back into the sea. Even two pedestrians were forced to lean with legs spread and hands outstretched against the wall and were pat searched, humiliatingly, before being barked on their way.

“Customer service,” Chace muttered, “Izan style.”

While the Poliz were distracted by a large car with half a dozen would-be late-night partiers inside, trying to bribe the guards with what looked like half-full bottles of bathtub gin, Ruhtra snuck his crew down a nearby alley, poorly lit like everywhere else in this part of town. They took a lengthy detour through a slum-like neighborhood lined with metal-shuttered storefronts, shutdown bars and impoverished buildings of flats till they thought they were well beyond the checkpoint, then crossed a badly maintained park, under a darkened overpass and past a block-long windowless warehouse, till, turning a corner, they found themselves facing the gaping mouth of the traffic tunnel.

What looked like an abandoned oil tank truck stood near the tunnel’s entrance. 

Ruhtra took Yram a few paces off from the boys and, glancing occasionally at the tunnel, spoke in low voices, evidently discussing how to cross through the tunnel to the other side of the river without being seen. 

The boys crouched near the curb, and Petey could hear a faint sound of water against the nearby bank: the river passing this side of the city.  

Another dimly billboard like the one they had passed the other night before hiding in the train car stood near the tunnel entrance. It displayed a young couple with a son and daughter seated with giddy smiles around a dinner table. They held their forks and knives in their fists and gaped, hungrily and happily, at what the young mother was serving. 

The young woman’s lips were open as though she were speaking.

Huge bold letters at the top read: “[It’s better to eat than to be eaten! Join the Party now!”]

What she was serving was the head of a man.

Behind the table, painted as if fluttering in a vigorous wind, was an American flag like the one they had seen outside the post office: with swastikas instead of stars.

“Do you know what it says?” Petey asked Chace.

Chace twisted his lips in a frown.

“Something like ‘It’s better to eat than be eaten. Join the party now.’ They’ve got a wicked sense of humor,” he added dryly. “Wonder who’s their ad agency?”

Bumper leaned toward the other two.

“I’m not sure we should look now,” he said to Chace and Petey, “but I think we’re being . . . followed?”

All three boys looked back. A light from a flashlight wavered against the side of an antique sedan then winked off.

Ruhtra and Yram, having seen it too, scurried toward the boys. They motioned silently toward the oil truck, then slipped beneath it, followed by the boys, as a small troop of Poliz, masked and armed like warriors in a desperate battle against an unbeatable foe, appeared on the street ramp behind them. 

The troop’s leader hissed commands as they spread out near the tunnel.

The five crawled back to a cement wall the truck was parked against. Petey found ladder-like steps leading up side of the long silvery tank to the top and instinctively began climbing. At the top, there was a circular hatch leading inside the tank; he opened it. The tank was empty. And he dropped in. Soon the rest followed, Ruhtra pulling the hatch closed behind him as he let himself down inside.

Their descent had made a racket, and they crouched in a darkness traced with the tart sweet smell of petroleum, listening intently as the Poliz prowled around the tank in a silence broken only by sharply whispered commands. Petey could hear them tear apart the driver’s cabin, rattle the underbelly chassis and kick the frame and tires in frustration. A handful seemed to reconnoiter the tunnel, their voices sounding distant and hollow. Eventually silence fell, but whether they had gone or left a stakeout near the truck was impossible to know. So the five remained inside the tank. Not that there was an obvious way for them to climb to the only exit two yards above their heads in the impenetrable darkness.

“Comfortable try to get.” Petey heard Ruhtra’s quiet voice a few feet to his left. “And some shut eye. A long night it promises to be.”

Petey almost laughed at the old-fashioned phrase for sleeping. It sounded like one more echo from one of the ancient black-and-white movies his parents loved to watch online. This whole world seemed trapped in the 1940s. As though it had never moved on after its conquest by Izan. Trapped in amber. Or in a coma. Or dead and only pretending to be alive.

Though their safety was by no means secure, sleep was not to be resisted after the stressed-out day. A few hours later, Petey woke to the sound of footsteps outside the tank a few feet from his ear. Someone clambered into the cabin, turned a key, pulled a crank and gunned a throaty engine into life, and a moment later, the truck, reluctant as an old body pulled from a comfortable dream, rumbled into motion, veered into the street and moved off. The night before, it had been parked pointing toward the tunnel, and it hadn’t turned, so they must be entering the tunnel, headed west. 

Petey curled up against the womblike metal curve of the tank and drifted off to the echoey rumbling of the truck as fragments of the day morphed into strange dreams stalking his sleep. One in particular was of a menacing shadow against a wall, surrounded by a nimbus of light, the shadow growing as Petey tried to run away from it, but his legs could barely move, as if dragging through wet concrete, and he felt himself panic; then he twisted ahead and saw, straight before him, a blindingly bright light, and he realized, with harrowing certainty, that he would never be able to escape the shadow, not in this life or the next, that it would grow and grow and grow and pursue him to the end of his days, until it absorbed him. Until it became him. Because it was the shadow of Peter Myshkin Stephenson.

Chapter Seventeen: Ruhtra’s Story****

Hours passed, then, one by one, they woke up. 

“I wonder if he’s been driving all night long?” asked Petey, after the five traded ironic “Good mornings” in the unimpeachable night of the tank.

“For an hour the driver stopped,” said Ruhtra. “My watch I checked.”

Petey could see an old-fashioned dial watch with glowing hands and pips for the hours on the older boy’s left wrist. 

“Two there might be,” said Yram, “to take turns driving without stopping to sleep.”

Luckily the five had eaten before escaping the roof hut, but they were young and easily ravenous, and there was no immediate prospect for their next meal. At one point not long after their morning greetings, Bumper’s tummy gave a little groan.

“Oops,” said Bumper apologetically. “I must be really hungry.”

“Join the club,” said Chace in the darkness.

They sat in silence, every so often another bit of tummy rumbling reminding them they ought to be hunting a meal. And five minds tried to cope, in their different ways, with their frustrated hunger: some by imagining eating magnificent breakfasts (Petey and Bumper, both of whom had robust imaginations), others by taking the opposite tack of concentrating on anything but food while the prospect of the next meal was not yet imaginable (Ruhtra and Yram, with souls hardened, as it turned out, by years of deprivation), and one other by insistently thinking about nothing at all but the present moment (Chace, who had read a book on Zen the year before and thought he might apply what he liked to call “the lesson of empty mind” at this juncture: “An empty stomach and an empty pantry? Fill them with an empty mind,” he said later to Petey. “It’s my breakfast koan”).

After Petey had finished his imaginary breakfast (blueberry waffles with butter and maple syrup, two fried eggs over easy, a slice of Canadian bacon, two pieces of rye toast with honey butter, and a tall glass of freshly squeezed orange juice—his favorite breakfast, though one he had never actually eaten all at once), he sat back in the darkness, wondering if this might be the moment to ask a question he had been wondering about for a while. After all, they would probably be riding a long while yet, with a lot of time to fill.

“Can I ask you a personal question, Ruhtra?”

The darkness was silent except for the relentless rumbling of the truck.

“Depends on what it be,” said the remorselessly reasonable Ruhtra.

“Well, here it is,” said Petey. “How did you get involved in all this?”
“In all of this?”

“The Link, I suppose I mean. In the rebellion. How did you get where you are?”:
“Your story, I think Petey means,” said Chace.

“Yes,” said Petey. “That’s it: What is your story?”

Ruhtra was silent for a time.

“If truly interested you be …,” he said tentatively.

“Well, I am,” said Petey. 

“I’m always keen for a good story,” said Chace.

“Me . . . too?” said Bumper, not exactly sure what “keen” meant.

“That promise I cannot,” said Ruhtra.

“But think I you can,” said Yram, with a smile you could hear even if you couldn’t see it.

“Well,” said Ruhtra. “Do not say I did not you warn. This like it goes.”

Ruhtra’s family had settled two generations ago in a state of Acirema far west of here, almost to the Western Sea, in the Steinlichen Bergen. Ruhtra’s father had come from a family of professors and scholars who had been thrown out of their jobs when the Izan, after their final victory over Acireman loyalists, closed the universities and colleges and turned them into concentration camps. His grandfather on his father’s side had been a professor of chemistry, his grandmother a professor of history. They had both been forced to take work in manufacturing plants—work for which they had neither experience nor training. Their second son, Ruhtra’s father, was sent to technical school though he longed to study physics, and fed his imagination on his father and mother’s stories of life in the academic world of teaching and research. 

Ruhtra’s mother had come from a literary and publishing background, but those worlds had been abolished as completely as the academic one, and her parents were forced to pool their resources and run a small diner in the old university town. She worked as secretary to a manager in an armaments factory—a role especially bitter as her parents had been pacifists before the war and their home had been a center of political dissent, a place of constant meetings and agitation against the military machine that was already undermining the country and preparing it for, not only for military defeat, but for social, political and cultural annihilation.

Ruhtra’s father became a car mechanic, though he secretly pursued physics in his off hours: a hobby that would have been punished with death if he had been caught, as only Izan party members with special government clearances were allowed such “security nazional” research. Ruhtra’s mother pretended to have given up any interest in literature, claiming it was unwise fantasy and, having no practical application, was a dangerous lure from the rigorous demands of reality. She was partly right, as the only literature allowed in the Nacht Reich of Acirema was patriotic poetry in strictly rhyming verse and uplifting stories of Izan heroism told in rigidly defined genres. Any attempt at “creativity” was punishable by public elimination of a person’s identity: a fate that, for some, was worse than death itself. You were still alive, but you had ceased to exist, and any attempt to assert your existence was met with ridicule, mockery, and humiliation. Your soul was slowly killed before your eyes, and yet you were not allowed to die. Life itself became the punishment.

It was essential that every subject of the Nacht Reich of Acirema believe that their way of life, in its totality—from cuisine to the arts to politics—was the only possible way for human beings to live: that there was no possible “alternativ” and to believe so was a sign of profound psychological sickness that needed treatment, usually in a “relearning lager”; if persisted in despite multiple treatments, it was a capital offense punishable, ultimately, by death, though by the slowest of possible means—the victim was pushed slowly but inexorably to commit suicide. To argue otherwise—that there were other ways to live, even to thrive, for oneself or, even worse, for society as a whole—was to court, not only a death sentence, but the erasure of all traces of one’s existence. There was no one more dangerous person than one who taught there were other ways to live. They must be held up to public ridicule, hated, despised, stamped out.

“There must be no ‘otherwise,’” said Petey, quietly.

“Exactly yes,” said Ruhtra.

But Ruhtra’s father knew this claim was, of course, not true. The Izan could destroy the intellectual professions that had kept an awareness of possibility alive, but they could not destroy his memory of the lessons of his parents: their very existence was disproof of the central doctrine of Izan. Izan had not yet perfected a technique for the destruction of individual memories, though this one of the secret projects pursued by the regime. 

And so the young man became a rebel. At the time, rebellion was as lonely as it was dangerous; there was no network of rebellion, however tentative, nothing to give him any plausible hope let alone a practical means of success. It was himself against the world—a hopeless cause. Yet his conscience would not allow him to conform to the monstrosity the country had become. At first he even hid his choice from Ruhtra’s mother. He could not yet trust her as he first began merely to imagine, then tentatively plan, then began to carry out his first small acts of sabotage.

There was the sand he put into the carburetor of the local Gauleiter’s car when it was brought in to the shop for repair. The damaged spark plugs in a Poliz van. The torn gas line in a local official’s sedan. The oil he removed from a low-level Izan’s Wagensvolk. He became bolder with these tiny successes and the looks of puzzlement when the owners returned their vehicles for repair. Once he put alcohol instead of water into an old battered bus used for carrying soldiers. It had only driven a block from the repair shop when it exploded, killing the driver and glowing for hours like a torch in the long cowed and beaten-down neighborhood. It was only then he was suspected; his shop was raided the next day. They believed a bomb had destroyed the bus and someone in the shop had planted it. Nothing was found, but from now on he was under watch. He had to be more careful; he became keenly aware that any of the several workers in his shop (who he was careful to make sure they knew nothing of his actions) might at any time turn on him if they found out. The rewards for turning in a mere dissenter, let alone a saboteur, were too great to spurn: a lifetime promotion into the lower levels of the Izan elite. Which would mean, among other things, the ability to eat meat every other day and even purchase an occasional bottle of wine from Aporue across the Grosse Dnop.  Most importantly, you were guaranteed a job, however low-paying, something craved by everyone in this defeated, humiliated and impoverished land.

Ruhtra of course knew nothing of his father’s actions, but he was painfully aware of the tension between his parents, and had listened late into the night to their arguments through the paper-thin walls of the family’s flat. He knew their main bone of contention was precisely their attitudes toward the regime: his mother would accuse his father of being a perpetual adolescent “in revolt” against a reality no one could change. He did not return the accusation, but his silence rang like a rebuke; it spoke more eloquently than anything he might have said. Ruhtra was torn bitterly between his loyalties to both parents when he realized just how much his father despised his wife as a coward and sellout to the Izan, though the boy could also see, with the clarity of vision children often possess regarding the adults among them, that his mother was doing what she was deeply convinced she must do to protect her family, which to her was paramount, whatever the political regime they lived under. She claimed that “democratie in Acirama,” as they called it, had failed because it was weak, incapable of organizing itself effectively against its enemies, or even of deciding what it wanted; it was a society based on contradictions, self-deception and lies, a deliberately designed chaos; it had lost the war against the Izan because it had deserved to lose. Her husband responded that it had not “lost,” it had been murdered—and they had a duty to execute its murderers; only then might it be rebuilt, from scratch if necessary, while taking into account the multitude of grotesque mistakes it had made in the past, and be built in future more sturdily, more powerfully, so it might fend off all contenders, including its own worst impulses. In his mind, the war was not over; it would never be over until they were victorious. His wife thought he was deluded and feared he was a danger not only to himself but to the family. Neither could possibly convince the other.

One day his father took Ruhtra to make some purchases. He drove him to a nearby wood and stopped the car. And there he told his son, in grave, almost despairing tones, what he had been doing to harm the regime. And why. He told Ruhtra the history of Acirema before the regime—something of course the boy had never heard in school. He said he did not expect Ruhtra to follow him if he didn’t choose to, but felt he had to make his son aware that he had a choice, though the choice was a stark one. Though some might think there was a middle ground, a way to be neutral, there was no such ground and no such way. The choice was to accede to the regime or to fight it.

  Ruhtra thrilled to hear all of this. His father’s integrity and courage were all the more remarkable because his father hardly seemed aware of them himself; his attitudes and his actions merely seemed to him to be the only right ones given their wretched circumstances and therefore the ones he must have and must follow. 

So this was what lay at the heart of those arguments between his parents that Ruhtra had had to listen to, and be torn by, far into the night: it was not just a difference of attitudes but a difference between two mutually hostile ways of life: a belief in accommodation to inevitability and a refusal to believe that anything was inevitable— between resignation before fate and uncompromising revolt. The light in the forest shone brighter after his talk with his father, and his own direction became clear. Ruhtra was ten years old; he was just becoming aware of what lay ahead of him, gates of darkness and gates of light opening before his eyes to a profoundly ambiguous future.

Not long after the talk in the forest, he learned why his father told him when he did. It was his last chance to tell someone who might conceivably carry on the battle.

Ruhtra never knew who betrayed his father. His mother collapsed in hysteria after the Izan knocked on their door near midnight less than a week after their talk and took Ruhtra’s father away after beating him in front of his family and dragging him, half conscious, down two flights of stairs. He gave his son a last despairing glance as he was dragged out the front door of the house. It was the last time Ruhtra saw him.

His mother cried for the next two days, incoherently telling Ruhtra how mad her husband had been to try to fight the regime when he was so weak, then contradicting herself and saying how right he had been to confront the regime with weapons however weak. She had neither convinced him nor joined him.

“Wrong, wrong, I was,” she lamented. “Wrong, wrong, wrong…!”

It was months later that Ruhtra learned, through his best friend Nawog that several members of the local chapter of the Junge Izan—an international league of youth dedicated to creating the next generation of Izan elites—were in fact part of a shadowy network dedicated to the destruction of the regime.

“How that you know?” Ruhtra demanded, surprising himself by realizing how much he wanted to believe it. His heart had skipped a beat. Like everyone else, he had heard rumors of such a group but was afraid to believe it—it seemed too good to be true. Cynicism had become his default since his father’s abduction by the Poliz. Though in the world of Izan, which demanded not only loyalty but strenuous enthusiasm, cheering and shouting approval and dancing in the streets at every opportunity, cynicism itself was a passive form of rebellion, sand scattered at random into the machine, a kind of anemia weakening the blood of the Izan empire.

Nawog looked around cautiously before speaking. There was no need to; they were in a far corner of the playground on a bench under a tall locust tree and hardly looked suspicious as they bent over their lunches of onion and liverwurst sandwiches and Koka Kolas.

“I overheard my brother talking to one of them,” his friend said, in the old Anglish that, though made illegal in 1956, was still used by declassé kids outside of school as a cipher against the adults. “He was talking about strikes and downs and slam dunks—it was all about sports, but mixed up.”

“What’s so strange about that?”

Nawog looked straight at Ruhtra.
“My brother hates sports.”

“Hm! But how do you know the other thing?”

“When his friend said, ‘Do you want to join the team?’ and my brother said,

      ‘Only if I get to ace one,’ and his friend said, ‘That’s what it’s all about,’ and my brother said, ‘You sure they haven’t been found out? Other teams have spies everywhere,’ and his friend said, ‘They’ve all been swapped.’ ‘But are they vetted?’ asked my brother, who seemed to finally be getting it. ‘They’re vetted by the league,’ said his friend ‘And what’s the league?’ asked my brother. And his friend paused, and then said, as though it were nothing big: ‘The league of Freiheit.’ And my brother went silent. Do you see?”

“The league of Freiheit” had been a rumor for a long time, but few believed it really existed. All Izan sources of information—newspapers, magazines, radio and television networks—when the subject was raised, as it inevitably was, dismissed it as a childish fantasy, a “conspiracy theory” (which “everyone” knew was, by definition, delusional), and a distraction from the work of imposing Izan on the world for the rest of time. There was no such “league” nor was their hope of such a league, since the Izan dominated the country, the Poliz empowered to shoot suspected traitors on sight—and such a “league” was treasonous by definition. Assuming it existed, which of course it did not and could not. Anyway, there was “Freiheit” only in the “Grosse Reich” that would one day rule the world after a few remnants in the most primitive continents were finally pacified.

“So they were only pretending to talk about sports,” said Ruhtra, “but it was really about rebellion?” 

“No,” said his friend in an excited whisper. “It was about revolution!”

The two boys paused and stared at a point a yard or so in front of them on the ground, as if contemplating the meaning of the word. 

They had read about such things in history texts, despite the fact the books were mostly propaganda, and ineffective propaganda at that, since none of the kids, except a few of the gullible, believed anything they learned in school anyway. But the “revolutions,” as much as their textbooks tried to make them look as futile as possible, were at least interesting. The textbook authors rewrote a lot of history, but they had not reached the point of ignoring everything that had happened in the past that might inconvenience the regime; in other words, they did not yet make it all up. That would take a few more years. In the meantime, a few chapters about the revolutions in ancient Acirema, Frankreich, Russland, Sinoland and elsewhere remained, supposedly as warnings to their pupils against even thinking about revolting. In the telling, the revolutions had all eventually been crushed by Izan or its precursors. There was no point to revolution because there was no hope in it; all revolutions had done was lead to destruction and self-destruction and ultimately to the consolidation of the overwhelming power of Izan. 

And yet the more hopeless they made revolution seem, the more strangely enticing it was. And the idea ignited and began a slow burn in the minds of some young students that it was precisely a revolution that might be one way, and perhaps the only way, to overthrow the utter desolation and hopelessness caused by the Izan regime.

“And so,” Ruhtra said thoughtfully as a tingling sensation rose along his spine; although he was still unwilling to believe and have his hopes destroyed once more by an unforgiving reality, his body was rebelling with hope; “‘the league of Freiheit’ is real after all.”

His friend gave him a long look, then slowly nodded.

At that moment Ruhtra made the most serious decision of his young life. He would join the league and devote his life to bringing down the regime. 

“Maybe you will find your father,” Petey said in the darkness of the oil truck as Ruhtra paused.

The young man sighed.

“If alive he yet be,” he said. His tone said that he was very doubtful. Petey wanted to assure him that, in their strange English, “if doubt was, hope was,” but was afraid he would just sound foolish, and so said nothing.

It took some time for Ruhtra and his friend to joined the league—they had to prove themselves first—but eventually they were able to, through Nawog’s brother, at first serving as lowly couriers between smaller factions in various local schools, meeting in parks and public playgrounds, often as part of school teams—fütball, sabre, or the one old Acireman sport still allowed, bassball—though their main purpose was espionage of local Izan facilities and forwarding the information to larger units and higher authorities of the organization, which they learned spanned the entire kolonie and was beginning to have “affiliates” abroad, in the kolonies of Adanac to the north and Dnalgne and Frankreich across the sea called the Grosse Dnop to the east. 

They learned that, internally, the league called itself “the Link”—between the past and the future: the freedom and self-government that Acirema had once known and that the rebels were determined it would have again, but stronger and mightier than ever. “This time upon genuine democratie shall it based be, not the false kind that to their defeat to the Izan led, because the rot within had long set in: the slavery of the people to the dictatorship of wealth. The hypocrisy at the heart of the old Acirema shall abolished be and true self-command in common weal for the benefit of all rooted, erected, founded, for Acirema and, at the last, for all humankind.”

“For Acirema, then for the world?” asked Chace’s voice from where he was lying somewhere in the darkness to Petey’s right. Chace’s usual sarcasm was replaced by a skepticism that sounded to Petey as if it almost wanted to believe. 

“Yes. But Acirema first must liberated be. Only when Izan everywhere defeated, shall it anywhere defeated be.”

After what Petey had seen so far of this world, whether reality or “otherwise,”
that sounded almost certainly right. Though he was dismayed at the insane ambition of a children’s crusade having to save its country by conquering the whole world. The ancient example was too stark in its warning. What could children do against a world that was armed from its soul to the farthest reach of its will, and determined to destroy everything that stood in its way?

____

Christopher Bernard is a prize-winning author of both poetry and fiction. The two earlier stories in the “Otherwise” series are If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia (winner of the Independent Press Award in Preteen Fiction and short-listed for the K M Anthru International Literature Award).