An Enemy of the State Read online

  An Enemy

  of the State

  F. Paul Wilson

  AN ENEMY OF THE STATE

  Copyright © 1980, 2001 by F. Paul Wilson

  “Ratman” Copyright © 2000 by F. Paul Wilson

  “Lipidleggin’” Copyright © 2000 by F. Paul Wilson

  “Preface” Copyright © 2001 by F. Paul Wilson

  AN ENEMY OF THE STATE, was first published in the US by Doubleday & Company in 1980.

  All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission from the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the authors listed below; excerpts from their work have been used to open the following chapters:

  CHAPTER V: from The Fall by Albert Camus © 1956 by Librairie Gallimard, Paris.

  CHAPTER VIII: “Affair with a Green Monkey” which appeared originally in Venture, May, 1957. © 1957 by Theodore Sturgeon. Used here by permission of the author.

  CHAPTER XI: from Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman © 1962 by The University of Chicago.

  CHAPTER XIII: from The Plague by Albert Camus © 1947 by Librairie Gallimard, Paris.

  CHAPTER XIV: from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce © 1957 by Hill and Wang, Inc.

  CHAPTER XXI: from Dune by Frank Herbert ©1965 by Frank Herbert. Used here by permission of the author.

  For My Parents

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Prologue

  Part One: THE NIHILIST

  The Year of the Tortoise

  Part Two: THE ANARCHIST

  The Year of the Tiller

  The Year of the Malak

  Part Three: “ABOVE ALL ELSE: KYFHO”

  The Year of the Sickle

  The Year of the Dragon

  Epilogue

  RATMAN

  LIPIDLEGGIN’

  PREFACE

  The year was 1979. I had written and sold Healer and Wheels Within Wheels, both patchwork novels extrapolated and expanded from shorter works previously published in Analog. Now I was ready to write a novel from scratch. I decided to stick with the LaNague Federation future history, but this time I'd write about the roots of the Federation, about its founder, the reluctant revolutionary Peter LaNague.

  I saw LaNague as a non-violent man trying to bring down a repressive government without bloodshed—or at least with very little. But how to go about that?

  At the time I was pursuing a personal radicalism based on the anarchocapitalist writings of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard and others. They contend that the soul of a free society is a free economy: if individuals are not allowed to deal freely with each other, then they are not free. I became fascinated with the Weimar hyperinflation during the early 1920s (a well into which I'd dip again decades later for Aryans and Absinthe, the novella I wrote for the anthology Revelations, edited by Douglas E. Winter, 1997). I began to wonder: if a government can manipulate the economy to further its own ends, why couldn't a clever revolutionary do the same to bring down a government?

  And when I realized that Peter LaNague's target and weapon could be one and the same, the story clattered into place.

  All this dovetailed perfectly with my long-term disdain for that hoary SF cliché, the galactic empire. Really, even with a faster-than-light drive, the idea of an ironfisted centralized power micromanaging a collection of worlds spanning dozens of light years is absurd. My concept was a little more practical: a loose confederation of colonized worlds left pretty much to their own devices with a centralized Big Stick hanging over them to dampen any aggressive or acquisitive tendencies. In other words: Hands Off. Laissez Faire.

  What a concept. It's now called libertarianism. Today there's a libertarian movement and a Libertarian Party, but back in the late sixties when I first arrived at my—for want of a better word—Weltanshauung, it didn't have a name. I spent the years 1964–68 at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. I made the marches, mixing with the gathering hordes around the Lincoln Memorial and trooping en masse across the Potomac toward the Pentagon. It was a happening, a huge party, and sure I wanted the war ended, but I was alone in that crowd, a political and philosophical orphan.

  My problem was an inability to perceive much functional difference between state socialism/communism and fascism. The rhetoric was certainly different, but the result either way was central control of business, industry, media, and education, all at the expense of the individual. It didn't matter to me whether the state or the collective slipped the cuffs around my wrists, either way I was shackled.

  So I struck out in a different direction, away from the Left-Right axis, and let me tell you, it was lonely out there. I turned off the Lefties with my espousal of a free-market economy (one woman at an anti-war rally cried, “You've must have been frozen for a hundred years!”) and Young Republican types all but held up crosses when I suggested legalizing drugs and prostitution.

  From the outset I wanted my science fiction to incorporate this odd but fundamentally consistent view of the world. It felt right. Lots of SF concerns aliens, and this nameless philosophy seemed pretty damn alien to just about everyone I knew.

  When I finally got around to writing An Enemy of the State, I decided to make it a manifesto of sorts. But I didn't want it to be too deadly serious, so I had some fun with the quotes that opened the chapters, using a wide array of sources ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Roger Ramjet. And when I couldn't and something that suited the mood, I fabricated a quote and attributed it to The Second Book of Kyfho (Revised Eastern Sect Edition).

  Kyfho is my word (an anagram that's explained in the novel) but it seems to have taken on a life of its own. A moment ago I did a Google search for the word and got 187 hits. I've seen a Kyfho license plate; newsgroup participants have incorporated quotes from The Second Book of Kyfho into their signature files; I've had readers contact me asking me where they can buy a copy of the book (sorry, you can't); someone wrote and suggested that I should write the book and sell it, and if I didn't have time, he'd do it for me (sorry, you can't).

  A number of people wrote to tell me that An Enemy of the State changed their lives. Now that's scary. If you change someone's life, aren't you responsible for what they do with it?

  An even more unsettling result of the success of An Enemy of the State was that I began to hear myself referred to as “that libertarian sci-fi writer.” Not wanting to be stuck in that or any other pigeonhole, I decided to take a vacation from SF. My next novel was The Keep, but that's a whole other story.

  The original 1980 hardcover edition of An Enemy of the State, when you can find one, goes for a hefty price these days. Stealth Press remedied the availability situation in 2001 with handsome hardcover re-issues of both An Enemy of the State and Healer, the just-as-rare third book of the LaNague series. Now copies of these two hardcover books are difficult to come by and Stealth never got around to re-publishing the second LaNague novel, Wheels Within Wheels, at all. Infrapress is now publishing new complimentary editions of all three books for the first time. Each volume also contains LaNague-associated short fiction, too.

  As in the Stealth edition, An Enemy of the State includes LaNague lagniappe—“Ratman” (Analog, August 1971), my first professional sale and the very first LaNague Federation story (so please excuse the humongous pre-microchip computers); plus “Lipidleggin’” (Asimov's SF Magazine, May-June 1978), featuring the ancestor Peter LaNague is trying to trace in Chapter Eight of this novel.

  F. Paul Wilson


  The Jersey Shore

  September 2005

  It appears there will always be unanswered questions about the Great Conspiracy, especially since its chief engineer, Peter LaNague, was not available afterward for questioning. The remarkable depth of his conspiracy's penetration into the fabric of Imperial society left many traceable elements in its wake, and so we have a reasonably clear picture of events during the five-year pre-insurrection period.

  But what preceded the conspiracy itself? What started it all? What made Peter LaNague decide that the time was ripe for revolution? Scholars diverge at this point, but the single-incident theory appears to be coming into favor in recent texts. The arrival of LaNague on Throne and the cessation of attempts to assassinate Metep VII follow closely on the heels of a small anti-militia riot on Neeka. There was one fatality in that riot—a young woman named Liza Kirowicz. But Kirowicz was her married name. Her maiden name was Boedekker. And there's the rub…

  from LANAGUE: A BIOGRAPHY

  by Emmerz Fent

  PROLOGUE

  “…And I say we've had just about enough!”

  Liza Kirowicz was in the front row with her husband, cheering, stamping her feet, and shouting with the rest of them. There were about two hundred angry people packed into the hall; the air was hot and reeked of sweat, but no one seemed to take much notice. All were tightly enmeshed in the speaker's word-web.

  “It's been well over two standard centuries since we kicked the Earthie militia back to Sol System. They were sucking us dry, taking what we produced and shipping it back to Earth. So our great-great-grandparents revolted and set up the Imperium, supposedly to keep us free. But look at us now: are we any better off? The Imperium has been taxing us since it was formed; and if that wasn't bad enough, it later came around and said Neekan currency was no good—we'd have to pay in Imperial marks. Now, instead of Earthie militia, we have the Imperial Guard all over the planet, to ‘protect’ us from any possible countermoves by Earth! They must think we're all idiots! The Imperial Guard is here for one reason: to make sure we pay our taxes, and to make sure those taxes go into Metep's coffers on Throne! That's why they're here! And I for one have had enough of it!”

  Again the audience broke into wild cheering. Jugs were being passed and sampled while coats and inhibitions were being shed. Her lips and finger tips were already starting to tingle, so Liza let the jug pass untasted this time and watched with amusement as her husband Frey took a long pull. They had both been born and bred on Earth, a fact impossible to discern from their appearance. Even their parents would have been hard pressed to recognize their children under the layers of grime and callus.

  Like many young couples of their generation, and of generations before them, they had been seduced by the call of pioneer life on the out-worlds. Farm workers now, they had been such for almost five local years. Soon they would have enough saved to homestead a tract of their own, and that would mean working even harder. But they were where they wanted to be and loving every minute of it.

  The economic situation was far from perfect, however. The standard of living was low on Neeka in the best of times; the taxes that went to the Imperium made things worse. If it hadn't been for those taxes, Liza and Frey would probably have their own place by now. It was galling: taxes were withheld from every pay voucher…their pay represented time, and time was life…little bits of their lives were being snipped off every pay period and sent to Throne…little bits of life trailing off into space.

  And now a new levy from Throne: a 2 per cent across the board tax hike to defray further the expenses of the Imperial Guard garrisons on Neeka.

  That did it. No more. The garrisons would go. This fellow up on the platform said they didn't need the garrisons and, by the Core, he was right!

  Liza felt good. There was an exhilarating warmth spreading evenly throughout her body. She looked at Frey and loved him. She looked at all the weathered, impassioned faces around her and loved them, too. These were real people, solid people, people who were grappling with an alien ecology, aided by a minimal amount of technology and a lot of physical effort. No gentleman farmers here—owner and field hand worked side by side.

  The hall had begun to empty, not in an aimless, unhurried dribble, but with a direction. The man on the platform must have said something to activate his listeners—something Liza had missed—because they were pulling on their coats and following him out the double rear doors. Frey pulled her into the surge and she trotted along. They were headed for the local garrison.

  The cold night air refreshed her and heightened her perceptions. Shielding her blue eyes against the wind that ran through her auburn hair, Liza glanced at the onyx sky and knew she was no longer an Earthie. The stars looked so right tonight. There had been such wrongness up there in the early years after her arrival—the sun had been the wrong shade of fire and the wrong size, the day sky was the wrong shade of blue and by night there were two moons. Both of Neeka's satellites were out tonight; the small, playful Mayna swinging after her remote, austere sister, Palo. Both belonged there. Liza was a Neekan now.

  The local garrison was a faceless white block at the corner of the landing pad complex. Two shuttles stood by on the pads ready to scramble the troops up to their orbiting cruiser should the need arise—an eventuality that had become increasingly unlikely with each passing decade since the out-worlds’ break with Earth, and considered an Imperial fantasy for well over a century. Earth still coveted the out-worlds and their resources, but the risk and expense of reclaiming them would be prohibitive.

  And so the garrison troopers had it easy. They were reasonably well behaved and their major task throughout their hitch on Neeka was the alleviation of boredom. Until tonight. As the crowd approached, the troopers filed out of the single door on the town side of the building and formed an uneasy semicircle between the locals and Imperial property. The commander had placed a ringer in the meeting hall to give them early warning should the gathering boil over into a confrontation.

  Someone in the crowd started chanting, “Back to Throne, leave us alone! Back to Throne, leave us alone!” It was quickly picked up by the rest and all began to stamp their feet in time as they marched and chanted.

  Liza had become separated from Frey in the press of bodies and had pushed herself to the front rank in search of him. Once there, however, she quickly forgot about her husband. Her stride was long and determined as she was buoyed along on a wave of fraternity and purpose. They were going to send Metep a message: Yes, Neeka counted itself among the out worlds free from Earth; yes, Neeka counted itself as part of the Imperium. But no more tribute to Metep. No more pieces of life shipped to Throne.

  An amplified masculine voice blared from the garrison roof:

  “PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR HOMES BEFORE SOMEONE SAYS OR DOES SOMETHING WE'LL ALL REGRET LATER. YOUR FIGHT IS NOT WITH US. YOU SHOULD CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES ON THRONE IF YOU HAVE A GRIEVANCE.” The message was repeated. “PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR…”

  The crowd ignored the warning and doubled the volume of its chant: “Back to Throne, leave us alone!”

  The troopers, edgy and fidgety, held their weapons at ready. Most of them were young, Throners by birth, soldiers by choice due to the sagging job situation on their homeworld. Their training and seasoning to date had consisted of short sessions in holographic simulators. Most of them viewed the locals as stupid dirt-scratchers who spent their lives breaking their backs on reluctant soil because they didn't know any better; but they also knew the locals to be a tough bunch. The troopers had the weapons but the locals had the numbers, and the troopers faced them uneasily.

  “COME NO FURTHER!” the voice atop the garrison shouted into the night. “Stop where you are or the guard will be forced to fire to protect imperial property!”

  The crowd came on. “Back to Throne, leave us alone!”

  A lieutenant on the ground shouted to his men. “Make certain all weapons are locked onto the stun mode—we don't want any marty
rs tonight!” Glancing quickly at the angry mob that was almost upon him, he said, “Fire at will!”

  Tight, intense ultrasonic beams began to play against the front ranks of the crowd with immediate effect. Those caught in the wash of inaudible sound began to reel and crumble to the ground as the microvibrations, pitched especially for the human nervous system, wrought havoc on conduction through their neuronal cytoplasm. As the leaders fell twitching and writhing, those being pushed from behind began to trip over their fallen comrades. Soon the entire march was in complete disarray.

  With its momentum broken, the crowd backed off to a safe distance and resigned itself to verbal assaults. The troopers turned off their stunners and returned them to the ready position. In a little while, the marchers on the ground began to stir and rise and stagger back to their waiting friends.

  All but one.

  Liza Kirowicz was not breathing. It would later be discovered that she had been suffering from an unsuspected and, until then, asymptomatic demyelinating disease of the central nervous system. The result was an exaggerated response to the ultrasonic stun beams, resulting in a temporary paralysis of the mid-brain respiratory center. Without oxygen, temporary soon became permanent. Liza Kirowicz was dead.

  It was an incident genuinely regretted by both sides as a tragic and unforeseeable accident. But that made little difference to Liza's father when the news finally reached him on Earth a full standard year later. He immediately began searching for a means of retaliating against the Imperium. And when Peter LaNague learned of that search, he knew his time had come round at last.