This is all stuff I wrote for fun, just playing with major characters that weren't mine to write. I was doing this just to keep in practice, but with all the sudden activity spike I figured I could drop this here for shits and giggles. Because this was for fun and because these characters aren't mine, consider this PoW fanfiction and not necessarily cannon.
Most relevant to @Dinh AaronMk, @Pepperm1nts, and @gorgenmast
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May 1976: Beijing, New People's China
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Hou Sai Tang woke up, as he often did, hours before the sun came up. He had fallen asleep in his office again. This wasn't an accident; he had a short table in the corner of his office cleared so he could place a blanket and a pillow on it. It was from this spartan bed that he woke.
The room was dark. Rain pattered faintly on the windows. His record player, an old machine that originally belonged to his mother, had finished it's record and was now playing a scratchy sound that blended in with the weather. Nothing in the room was illuminated, but he knew his way around, having no trouble finding the lamp on his desk. The room filled with a mellow and lonely light.
Early morning was the only time the Chairman could trust to be alone. He opened a drawer concealing a tea set and prepared a kettle. While he waited for the water to heat up, he did calisthenics in the middle of his office. Memories of his youth regularly visited him in these quiet morning hours. When he bent, moving the old age out of his limbs, his mind filled with images of bespectacled students in western suits gathered as Wen Chu spoke fiery words to them in the garden. Wen had been such a handsome man, with a way of speaking so full of purpose and surety, that people thought they may be watching a man becoming a God. There were posters in the city now, made by the overzealous party propagandists, that showed Hou speaking to smiling peasants while sun bursts blazed like a halo behind him. Hou thought himself a slow and intellectual speaker; no miracles accompanied him in his work. But when Wen had spoke, everything happening around him seemed to have meaning, and the sun bursts, even if they were not there in fact, were there there in the imaginations of his listeners.
The tea kettle whistled. He stood up and attended it, making a cup of loose-leaf tea for himself. His muscles ached from his light workout - a reminder of old age. The idea of retirement teased him more these days. Work was all he did. He read, dictated, wrote, and commanded. Sometimes he suspected no other national leader in world history ever worked as much as he, but when he thought these things he recognized it as poisonous pride, and felt ashamed at what was an ideological failure of thought.
The cause of his overwork sat in two piles on his desk. On the right side was his work; military reports, economic reports and requests, decisions from the National Congress, and the like. He did not mind those. His headache came from the personal letters and official complaints from his underlings intermixed in the same pile. At all levels there was friction, so much that Hou's deeply feared his death would lead to a civil war and the making of old comrades into warlords, destroying everything him and Wen had struggled to build. What Wen had died to build.
In the distance, the shrill electric squeal of a woman's voice played over the street speakers and overcame the soft rain sounds. It was time for China to wake up. Hou put his cup down, put a record on the scratching player, and waited until the music started. It was an opera; an ungodly long opera that wouldn't be half-way done until afternoon. That would do. Now it was time to work.
Whereas the heaping pile on the right side of his desk was work, the smaller one on the left side was study. Marxism is the science of socialism, and every good scientist must keep up with the progress of their field. He preferred study to leadership. It was his habit to put the most unpleasant bit of scholarship on top - usually a Bolshevik denunciation of Chinese Communism as dressed up liberal trade-unionism, seeing as those were so common. Unpleasant play made work tolerable.
His tea tasted bitter, just how he liked it. Bitter tea made him feel alive.
There were petitions from the peasants of Henan about a local party official making himself fat off of their work. There was a spicy conflict in Sichuan between two party officials using their offices to battle each other over a woman; an actress who seemed to be playing them against each other for money. Of course, not every piece of intestine discord was so scandalous. Peasant petitions made the lot of them. But he had to treat each one diplomatically, no matter how strong his opinion was. He had no illusions about his power; he held on because of the oriental reverence his people held for their political elders. To stoop to their level would be to ruin that illusion. Each problem had to be handled with the patience of a Buddha, and he was no Buddha, so that meant agonizing over each word of his reply to create the effect of wisdom.
If only he was like Buddha, moving through a problem with wisdom so naturally it seemed it had been whispered to him by the air. Or did wise men spend their days agonizing over small problems, the final idea the soft puff of visible steam created by the grinding of hidden gears of their mental agony?
The sun was up by the time he was done with political matters, and a simple breakfast of noodles and lamb was brought up for him. He had a meeting soon, with the young African prince who's rebellious people put China in the precarious spot of hosting a leading member of a faction in a foreign civil war.
That reminded Hou of a piece of work the young African had done as part of his Chinese education; a reflection on Communism, from his perspective at least. Hou had read it several times, and wrote notes in the margin as he often did. In truth, it was poor academics. The young man showed a capacity for the western essay form, but his understanding of the Marxian science was weak. Hou supposed that was to be expected in a feudal monarch; he was well behind the times, dialectically speaking.
But there was a strength of youthful conviction in the man that reminded Hou of better times in his own life, when Hou's bureaucratic communism had instead been Wen Chu's communism of young men venting their hearts. This African prince was no Communist, but perhaps a reformer would do. Every revolution starts with well-meaning reformers, often with incomplete ideologies.
Outside his door was the sniping world of revolutionary politics. But beyond that was a world which the waning youth in Hou yearned to see improved. He went to his closet, put on new clothes, and went out to meet the day.
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Summer 1979: Berlin, Germany
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"The hundred and fifth concurrence of the drunkard's parliament comes to orders." Bulow said slowly, careful to not slur his words.
Everyone laughed. They were all in the mood for laughing. But nobody roared louder than the Kaiser: Friedrich IV. Here though, presiding over the drunkard's parliament, the Kais insisted everyone call him "Welpe: Kaiser aus der Rinne", or "Kaiser Welpe" for short. When everyone got enough drink in them, his foolish nickname became something like "Wep."
They took one big bench in the center of the Biergarten, letting citizens of Berlin watch their reverie, and participate sometimes, if it were a witty man or an attractive woman. Beer and wine flowed from the nearby restaurants, and to keep the men drinking, wursts were served in heaping piles of salty sauerkraut served fresh from barrels. Friedrich... or Welpe, as they called him, could down wursts by the handful and still find room for more. He was a big man in many ways; a near giant in height, towering above his friends and comrades; a booming talker, with a voice that carried like the word of an ancient god; and he had a bushy blonde beard, forked like the tines of an inverse solar crown, dripping with beer and brine.
Bulow, the secretary of their little parliament, had been a foreman in the same construction crew as his new Kaiser, before the ancient crown of Prussia found the latter and lifted him from his jackhammer. Bulow was a wiry man whose face went as red as a plum as soon as he had a beer in him. His dark hair, fading to grey and retreating form the back of his scalp, hung down like the matted fur of some animal, soaked with grease and sweat.
"First order of business, Von Kluck wishes to organize... a hunt! In honor of the esteemed Kaiser aus der Rinne."
Friedrich stood up to address his parliament. "Your Kaiser would love to hunt. But he must state that, for the record, Von Kluck couldn't catch a fart with his ass cheeks, so we do not expect him to bring us a kill." He roared, and so did his court. Even Feingold, a Jew who would never have been welcomed by this group if his conversation didn't entertain their Kaiser, and who was most of the time content to sit in the corner, hold his title of "Treasurer of the Bankruptcy" in the Drunkard's Parliament, and sip his beer in peace.
They went back to murmuring their jokes, laughter washing over them from time to time like tidal waves. The sun went down, and a pleasant summer twilight overcame the scene as the lights went on and musicians wandered in from the streets to busk the dinner crowd. They were beginning to sing a drinking song, and everyone in the beer garden joined in, but before they got to the chorus, a sound shut everybody down.
It was gunfire. One shot, and then two.
The Kaiser's bodyguards seemed to materialize from nowhere, sweeping him away from the Biergarten as chaos ensued and everybody ran.
-
"It is not safe to go in public."
Schimmel said this quietly in the hall of city palace, though there was nobody there to listen. Schimmel was a wary man who stood hunched over all the time and was a known chain smoker. He smelled like stale cigarettes by afternoon.
"Do not be ridiculous, Schimmel. This is my city and I can go where I like." Friedrich replied. Schimmel, like so many others, required Friedrich to look down on him to talk.
"A newspaperman was murdered by Houists. That is what the fuss was about. You must understand, my Kaiser, that these are difficult times for the world, and violent men prowl the streets."
"Then I will meet them head on." Friedrich puffed up. In the back of his mind, he felt his masculinity was being insulted. He had fought greater men then the bookish types Houists usually were. "I will break these men like twigs over my knee, and we will see how much of a problem Houism is."
"I cannot force you." Schimmel put up his hands. "But I cannot force the State Intelligence Bureau either. If they think you are a suicidal man, they will not back you with their resources. You cannot expect them to protect your family as they do, if you will not let them protect you. The safety of you and your family would be kaputt."
"Kaputt." Friedrich mimicked. He stroked his beard and thought. He could fight for himself, but his children were not old enough to defend themselves..."
"Yes." he said, thinking. "I do not like being cooped up in the house."
"Then build a new Biergarten." Schimmel suggested. "One that can be defended."
-
Thus came about his new project, which he dubbed the "KaiserbierSchloß". They built him a great stone enclosure, like the yard of a prison, girded in steel and cement. The walls were then decked in stone until they looked like an ancient castle, old and ruined on the outside, but alive on the inside. Where barracks might usually stand, he built a restaurant and staffed it with personnel suited for the task. The stone walls were manned by snipers, and to hide them from the sight of the courtyard, a line of plants were suspended in baskets in the air, their vines running down along the edges. The finished touch was a fountain that ran with wine in the center of it all.
It took months to build. It was his pride and joy. And when it was done, he wanted nothing more than to show it off.
"Your friends cannot come." he was told, to his disappointment. "They are poor and cannot be cleared. Plus there are... unsavory elements in that bunch. Did you know the Houist murderers were Jews?"
The proud giant raged. "I built this great project, and now I cannot man it? How foolish will I look, sipping my beer alone! Can the Kaiser not have his parliament?"
"Until our concerns blow over. That will be our agreement. Maybe the terrorists were a one-time problem. Until then, maybe it is not a bad idea to give the new employees of the KaiserbierSchloß some time to serve one man and get used to their new habitat."
He wanted to throw the fresh barrels, and break them against the walls, to watch the dripping sauerkraut run down along the cobblestone floor and fester there. But he didn't. He was a Kaiser now. Iron responsibility required an iron will. He got a beer, sat on a bench alone, and listened to the burbling of his wine fountain.
Perhaps, he thought, he could take up reading. He hadn't been in government long, but the intimate knowledge his advisors had of things he hardly understood made him feel like a child being led around by battling adults. He'd read a few books in his time, but he was a slow reader. Not that reading was hard... it was just boring, and there were always places he preferred to be.
He poked at the foaming head on his stein, thinking of times he had crashed steins with other men and spilled brew with the force of his arm. "It is lonely at the top." he muttered.
-
That was his afternoon, day after day. He tried to read, but always got distracted. Schimmel began to join him, using the time to explain state issues. Schimmel wasn't a great drinker, though he would nurse a beer for his boss's sake. The company was better than loneliness though. He got to know his advisor. The little man was a grandfather, which blew the Kaiser's mind, as he looked much too young. They talked of Poland's Slavic Imperialism, and the duel threats of Communism and Spanish Hegemonic Capitalism.
Soon they invited Mueller, commander of the Kaiser's SiB attachment. The man was military stoic, and hadn't ever interested the Kaiser much, until he discovered that getting a few drinks in the man purchased some truly enthralling war stories. The threesome spent most afternoons together after a while, and when the summer nights came on, the three would wile away the nights swapping tales. Mueller claimed to have seen Ras Hassan, the infamous African bush commander, during the German intervention in the African war. Schimmel admitted to have read most of Hou's works. Knowing the enemy was part of his job. But he had gotten to respect the man a little, and he was able to explain Cultural Relativism as Revolutionary policy. Friedrich's stories were very different, more about life among the working classes, but he felt a little pride when the two intellectuals listened to his stories with sincere interest.
Summer turned to fall. The Houist threat subsided.
It was not long before Mueller decided to allow invitations to the KaiserbierSchloß. In came red-faced Bulow, and Von Kluck, and even the Jew Feingold, though that required some prodding. The Drunken Parliament was reestablished, with new members now. Mueller became "Unintelligence Commander", and Schimmel "Theoretician of the Length of Hou Sai Tang's Penis". They accepted it, and though neither men were avid partiers, they became regular members of the Kaiser's inner circle, and it was no longer so lonely at the top.
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Late July, 1980: Somewhere in the sky...
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This dishonesty of libido repulsed Prime Minister Alfonso Sotelo of Spain. After he went a while without a woman he would lust after one, but the moment he finished inside her she became another sack of flesh. Women were like that, soft and fatty, unless they were emaciated like some Berber tribal and therefore disgusting even when he was libidinous. A normal woman, went she bent, would show unflattering rolls of fat somewhere, whether it was her belly or her ass, and it always made him sick to see.
This was true for Alejandra Boveda, the scion of a wealthy Galacian family, who's money had put her into movies. She mostly starred in the droning religious kind, as a nun, or a prostitute who becomes a nun. The Church loved to fund these movies and show them in free-of-charge religious theatres across the country. She was a thin and titless redhead, but half his age and therefore still in possession of feminine skin. When he finished inside her, he crawled off and stumbled for his desk, sniffed, and shakily opened the drawer where he kept his cocaine.
She sat up in bed and bent forward. Even as thin as she was, her stomach made rolls, and Sotelo was repulsed.
"Can I have some?" she said, tapping at her nose. He did a line, quite violently even for him, and handed her some on a square brown 100 peseta note. She sniffed with less violence than he had, but there was nothing feminine or dainty about holding something to your nose and snorting.
He pretended she wasn't there. The nice thing about her was that she didn't care. She lit a cigarette and said nothing. A mutual disinterest kept her in his address book.
His head threatened to pound again. A headache had put him in bed for several days before they got aboard the Zepelin El Ponderoso. Outside his personal cabin, wealthy patrons who had paid dearly to join him on this flight enjoyed tapas in a genteel dining hall while respectable music was played by a live band. He was afraid the pressure of visiting with them would bring back his torturous headaches, but he could not avoid his job.
Politics at the top was not what it seemed. He looked back on his past, on the legal internship he had nearly lost when he punched one of the partners on the jaw. That had been easy to come back from. If he were to do the same thing now, he would fall as sure as if this Zepelín were hit by a rocket.
The sniff barely gave him a buzz anymore. That fact was one of the few things in his life that had ever made him feel anything like sadness. But he didn't understand the feeling, making it manifest in him as a sore kind of frustration.
"Put some clothes on." he said in an affectless tone. The young actress stopped, put her cigarette down, and slipped a cocktail dress on. He noted that she hadn't bothered to clean up, and the smoke was back in her mouth as quick as a blink.
He picked up a neat stack of paperwork and flipped through it mechanically. He had read it all so much that he felt he had it comfortably memorized. Several important bills were going through Parliament, and he wanted to understand them as if they were his own thoughts. They already were. He knew he had no more need to read them. But he liked this part of the job, and tried to use it to avoid... out there.
"I will go out first." he said, pocketing some sniff, knowing he wouldn't use it in front of the others, but wanting to have it on him anyway. "Wait thirty minutes, and then come out."
She said nothing. He got dressed in an unworn suit from the closet, straightened himself in the mirror, summoned a personable face, and walked out the door.
Spanish upper society was going through a black and white period in fashion that made women look like they had melted down chess boards for their clothing and put more white in men's clothes than Sotelo would prefer. They were out on the floor, eating olives, bread, and thin slices of sausage, wine close to them at all time as they mingled. There was a military presentation taking place near the band stand, complete with a projector. It showed the image of a thin Zepelín carrying a long pan.
"...the money you have provided will help field twenty of these vessels for patrols out of Djibouti." an aging officer said, dressed in a sharp uniform. "These platforms will allow snipers a view nearer to the ground, where they can spot and take out the desert barbarians that plague our supply lines in the Danakil. Since the maintenance of supply lines promises to be a constant threat..." his eyes caught Sotelo. Shit. "Well, here is our Prime Minister. I believe he has a few things to say about the subject."
Applause. Shit. Coward was not comfortable with the limelight, and he threw it to Sotelo like a Marshal throwing his baton and fleeing the battle. Sotelo put on his most politically facile smile.
"Thanks" he said to the polite applause. He sniffed lightly. "I would ask Don Castor, the President of Buenas-Armas de Bilbao, to explain this plan that his engineers have presented to us." he said, motioning to a man so old he looked like a cross between a turnip and a burn-victim. The man only seemed to vaguely acknowledge that he had been mentioned. "But if I did that, the coming and going might never stop. I think I can explain the important details of this vessel."
"Why not use airplanes?" asked a vapid looking housewife attached to the arm of an infamous Carlist.
"We have been doing this thus far, but it is neither tactically practical nor cost effective. The use of our precious air power and oil to hunt down what, as the brave colonel mentioned earlier, are essentially barbarians seems impractical. The people in that desert are basically camel herders who shoot anything they see. We cannot allow them to harass our roads in the Danakil, but to sending high-speed vehicles to burn through oil and bullets in order to strafe these barbarians... it simply won't do. Africa is a wild continent. The use of these aerial platforms, on top of being less resource heavy, allows our soldiers to find enemy combatants from a great height and attack them. It's like a portable high ground..."
The crowd was already losing interest, and went back to mingling. He sniffed. "With these in the air, the occupation of enemy territory in Africa will be easier to manage. The government thanks you for your contributions. Viva España." They returned the salute, and the music started up again, playing a gentle quintet. He went to the viewing deck and stared hazily down at the ocean below the clouds. A waitress delivered him glass of amber orujo. He hadn't asked for it, but he welcomed it all the same.
"You have been scarce, senor." the speaker came from behind, but Sotelo knew that fatty voice to be that of Xavier Maria Royas, the bishop of Getafe. He was dressed a priest's frock, but the designer watch on his corpulent wrist hinted at the massive wealth the Bishop was infamous for. Wealth was well respected in Spain, but the greed of individual clergymen chafed with the traditional image of what the Church was supposed.
"I have headaches. They have been a constant problem for me since I was a boy." Sotelo said blandly. Of course, it was more than that. His headaches altered him. There was no doubting that, though no doctor said it out right. That much pain had to leave lasting changes.
"All suffering is the lord's will, and we all suffer our own pains." said a bishop who spend a life fleeing anything to do with pain.
After his violent run in as an intern in his early career, Sotelo had invented a new way to handle his feelings toward others. For several years he kept a journal, where he wrote the names of colleagues he particularly disliked, and he jotted down all the ways he imagined they could die. Violence, disease, acts of God, anything creative enough to sooth him. When he realized that the discovery of such a book could compromise him, and that there was always a danger that it could be discovered and leaked, he burned the book over his open toilet and flushed the ashes. The lack of the compendium did not alter his ability to imagine things though. The Bishop's labored breathing annoyed him, and he imagined himself sewing the man's mouth shut, with blood running from the holes made by the needle, and the muffled screams from the panicking prelate as he slowly suffocated.
"You should tell the socialists that, your excellency." Sotelo said. "They are the ones so obsessed with forcing the fortunate to take away all their pain, at gun point no less."
"This war will be a lesson to them." the Bishop said approvingly.
Sotelo forced a smile. "Excuse me." he said politely, slipping away. On his way to the bathroom he saw Alejandra leaving his room. They didn't make eye contact.
"Prime Minister." a man walked in front of him and blocked his path. It was Tiburcio de Espejo, the President of Mejores-Armas. "I am glad your government could make money for my competitor, but now I am thinking, where are my government contracts?"
"You know I do not make those decisions, Don Tiburcio. You will have to speak with the war department."
"Come on, Sotelo, do you think I am a fool? Power is power, and you have the power to effect things." Tiburcio stood there, sort of glowering, a drink in hand. "Do not think that light-armored cars is all we can afford you. With the right connections, we could produce any vehicle you want. All we need is the permit."
"You are asking me to do your job for you." Sotelo replied. "I am not a telephone exchange for government officials. You will have to make those connections on your own." He slid past before Tiburcio, putting his drink in the man's open hand, and went straight for the bathroom.
The urinal was a silver trough in front of which three people could stand shoulder to shoulder to empty their bladders. There was one toilet stall at the end, and a single sink with a mirror. Sotelo went for the sink. He fumbled, pulling some extra sniff from his pocket, pouring it in a line on his finger, holding it up to his nose, and snorting it. In the mirror he saw his nose go bright red. No blood. That was disappointing in a weird way. He wanted an excuse to stay in here, something to clean up. Now he was left staring at his own face listening to the sound of the band outside for what seemed like ten minutes. Then the band stopped. That had to mean something. He went back out.
"Prime Minister." The officer from the presentation called out. "Come look. We are there!"
recommended musics
The crowd moved around the viewing window with the scattered intelligence of ants. Some lingered and looked out; the men especially. Women took quick peeks and looked away. Others showed no interest at all and mingled in the background. Sotelo knew what to expect, and he began to smile as he walked toward the scene with the airs of a conqueror. Without looking at her, he gently retrieved a glass of wine from a waitress's tray. They let him through, and they gave him looks. Some grinned, or winced, or looked blandly at their Prime Minister. He didn't pay attention. When he was face-to-face with the glass, he looked out and took a drink.
The sky was a hazy blue, like a beautiful day in an industrial park, but the desert below was bright, getting swallowed by the haze somewhere in the far-away foothills. Airplanes patrolled the skies. To their side, they could see a sea full of long grey ships. In the middle of all that, directly below them and stretching for several miles, was him the ruins of Djibouti. It bubbled black and ugly below, a smoking backdrop for a Hieronymus Bosch vision of perdition. A scene that he had painted on the world. Ruined concrete, the skeletons of mosques, a black tar of a landscape covering who knew how many bodies, pock marks from bombs and splotches of oil in the water. Military camps skirted the disaster of a city. He had done it all. His word had made this place. It took him away from his annoying company and made him feel mercifully alone.
He felt at peace.
Most relevant to @Dinh AaronMk, @Pepperm1nts, and @gorgenmast
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May 1976: Beijing, New People's China
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Hou Sai Tang woke up, as he often did, hours before the sun came up. He had fallen asleep in his office again. This wasn't an accident; he had a short table in the corner of his office cleared so he could place a blanket and a pillow on it. It was from this spartan bed that he woke.
The room was dark. Rain pattered faintly on the windows. His record player, an old machine that originally belonged to his mother, had finished it's record and was now playing a scratchy sound that blended in with the weather. Nothing in the room was illuminated, but he knew his way around, having no trouble finding the lamp on his desk. The room filled with a mellow and lonely light.
Early morning was the only time the Chairman could trust to be alone. He opened a drawer concealing a tea set and prepared a kettle. While he waited for the water to heat up, he did calisthenics in the middle of his office. Memories of his youth regularly visited him in these quiet morning hours. When he bent, moving the old age out of his limbs, his mind filled with images of bespectacled students in western suits gathered as Wen Chu spoke fiery words to them in the garden. Wen had been such a handsome man, with a way of speaking so full of purpose and surety, that people thought they may be watching a man becoming a God. There were posters in the city now, made by the overzealous party propagandists, that showed Hou speaking to smiling peasants while sun bursts blazed like a halo behind him. Hou thought himself a slow and intellectual speaker; no miracles accompanied him in his work. But when Wen had spoke, everything happening around him seemed to have meaning, and the sun bursts, even if they were not there in fact, were there there in the imaginations of his listeners.
The tea kettle whistled. He stood up and attended it, making a cup of loose-leaf tea for himself. His muscles ached from his light workout - a reminder of old age. The idea of retirement teased him more these days. Work was all he did. He read, dictated, wrote, and commanded. Sometimes he suspected no other national leader in world history ever worked as much as he, but when he thought these things he recognized it as poisonous pride, and felt ashamed at what was an ideological failure of thought.
The cause of his overwork sat in two piles on his desk. On the right side was his work; military reports, economic reports and requests, decisions from the National Congress, and the like. He did not mind those. His headache came from the personal letters and official complaints from his underlings intermixed in the same pile. At all levels there was friction, so much that Hou's deeply feared his death would lead to a civil war and the making of old comrades into warlords, destroying everything him and Wen had struggled to build. What Wen had died to build.
In the distance, the shrill electric squeal of a woman's voice played over the street speakers and overcame the soft rain sounds. It was time for China to wake up. Hou put his cup down, put a record on the scratching player, and waited until the music started. It was an opera; an ungodly long opera that wouldn't be half-way done until afternoon. That would do. Now it was time to work.
Whereas the heaping pile on the right side of his desk was work, the smaller one on the left side was study. Marxism is the science of socialism, and every good scientist must keep up with the progress of their field. He preferred study to leadership. It was his habit to put the most unpleasant bit of scholarship on top - usually a Bolshevik denunciation of Chinese Communism as dressed up liberal trade-unionism, seeing as those were so common. Unpleasant play made work tolerable.
His tea tasted bitter, just how he liked it. Bitter tea made him feel alive.
There were petitions from the peasants of Henan about a local party official making himself fat off of their work. There was a spicy conflict in Sichuan between two party officials using their offices to battle each other over a woman; an actress who seemed to be playing them against each other for money. Of course, not every piece of intestine discord was so scandalous. Peasant petitions made the lot of them. But he had to treat each one diplomatically, no matter how strong his opinion was. He had no illusions about his power; he held on because of the oriental reverence his people held for their political elders. To stoop to their level would be to ruin that illusion. Each problem had to be handled with the patience of a Buddha, and he was no Buddha, so that meant agonizing over each word of his reply to create the effect of wisdom.
If only he was like Buddha, moving through a problem with wisdom so naturally it seemed it had been whispered to him by the air. Or did wise men spend their days agonizing over small problems, the final idea the soft puff of visible steam created by the grinding of hidden gears of their mental agony?
The sun was up by the time he was done with political matters, and a simple breakfast of noodles and lamb was brought up for him. He had a meeting soon, with the young African prince who's rebellious people put China in the precarious spot of hosting a leading member of a faction in a foreign civil war.
That reminded Hou of a piece of work the young African had done as part of his Chinese education; a reflection on Communism, from his perspective at least. Hou had read it several times, and wrote notes in the margin as he often did. In truth, it was poor academics. The young man showed a capacity for the western essay form, but his understanding of the Marxian science was weak. Hou supposed that was to be expected in a feudal monarch; he was well behind the times, dialectically speaking.
But there was a strength of youthful conviction in the man that reminded Hou of better times in his own life, when Hou's bureaucratic communism had instead been Wen Chu's communism of young men venting their hearts. This African prince was no Communist, but perhaps a reformer would do. Every revolution starts with well-meaning reformers, often with incomplete ideologies.
Outside his door was the sniping world of revolutionary politics. But beyond that was a world which the waning youth in Hou yearned to see improved. He went to his closet, put on new clothes, and went out to meet the day.
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Summer 1979: Berlin, Germany
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"The hundred and fifth concurrence of the drunkard's parliament comes to orders." Bulow said slowly, careful to not slur his words.
Everyone laughed. They were all in the mood for laughing. But nobody roared louder than the Kaiser: Friedrich IV. Here though, presiding over the drunkard's parliament, the Kais insisted everyone call him "Welpe: Kaiser aus der Rinne", or "Kaiser Welpe" for short. When everyone got enough drink in them, his foolish nickname became something like "Wep."
They took one big bench in the center of the Biergarten, letting citizens of Berlin watch their reverie, and participate sometimes, if it were a witty man or an attractive woman. Beer and wine flowed from the nearby restaurants, and to keep the men drinking, wursts were served in heaping piles of salty sauerkraut served fresh from barrels. Friedrich... or Welpe, as they called him, could down wursts by the handful and still find room for more. He was a big man in many ways; a near giant in height, towering above his friends and comrades; a booming talker, with a voice that carried like the word of an ancient god; and he had a bushy blonde beard, forked like the tines of an inverse solar crown, dripping with beer and brine.
Bulow, the secretary of their little parliament, had been a foreman in the same construction crew as his new Kaiser, before the ancient crown of Prussia found the latter and lifted him from his jackhammer. Bulow was a wiry man whose face went as red as a plum as soon as he had a beer in him. His dark hair, fading to grey and retreating form the back of his scalp, hung down like the matted fur of some animal, soaked with grease and sweat.
"First order of business, Von Kluck wishes to organize... a hunt! In honor of the esteemed Kaiser aus der Rinne."
Friedrich stood up to address his parliament. "Your Kaiser would love to hunt. But he must state that, for the record, Von Kluck couldn't catch a fart with his ass cheeks, so we do not expect him to bring us a kill." He roared, and so did his court. Even Feingold, a Jew who would never have been welcomed by this group if his conversation didn't entertain their Kaiser, and who was most of the time content to sit in the corner, hold his title of "Treasurer of the Bankruptcy" in the Drunkard's Parliament, and sip his beer in peace.
They went back to murmuring their jokes, laughter washing over them from time to time like tidal waves. The sun went down, and a pleasant summer twilight overcame the scene as the lights went on and musicians wandered in from the streets to busk the dinner crowd. They were beginning to sing a drinking song, and everyone in the beer garden joined in, but before they got to the chorus, a sound shut everybody down.
It was gunfire. One shot, and then two.
The Kaiser's bodyguards seemed to materialize from nowhere, sweeping him away from the Biergarten as chaos ensued and everybody ran.
-
"It is not safe to go in public."
Schimmel said this quietly in the hall of city palace, though there was nobody there to listen. Schimmel was a wary man who stood hunched over all the time and was a known chain smoker. He smelled like stale cigarettes by afternoon.
"Do not be ridiculous, Schimmel. This is my city and I can go where I like." Friedrich replied. Schimmel, like so many others, required Friedrich to look down on him to talk.
"A newspaperman was murdered by Houists. That is what the fuss was about. You must understand, my Kaiser, that these are difficult times for the world, and violent men prowl the streets."
"Then I will meet them head on." Friedrich puffed up. In the back of his mind, he felt his masculinity was being insulted. He had fought greater men then the bookish types Houists usually were. "I will break these men like twigs over my knee, and we will see how much of a problem Houism is."
"I cannot force you." Schimmel put up his hands. "But I cannot force the State Intelligence Bureau either. If they think you are a suicidal man, they will not back you with their resources. You cannot expect them to protect your family as they do, if you will not let them protect you. The safety of you and your family would be kaputt."
"Kaputt." Friedrich mimicked. He stroked his beard and thought. He could fight for himself, but his children were not old enough to defend themselves..."
"Yes." he said, thinking. "I do not like being cooped up in the house."
"Then build a new Biergarten." Schimmel suggested. "One that can be defended."
-
Thus came about his new project, which he dubbed the "KaiserbierSchloß". They built him a great stone enclosure, like the yard of a prison, girded in steel and cement. The walls were then decked in stone until they looked like an ancient castle, old and ruined on the outside, but alive on the inside. Where barracks might usually stand, he built a restaurant and staffed it with personnel suited for the task. The stone walls were manned by snipers, and to hide them from the sight of the courtyard, a line of plants were suspended in baskets in the air, their vines running down along the edges. The finished touch was a fountain that ran with wine in the center of it all.
It took months to build. It was his pride and joy. And when it was done, he wanted nothing more than to show it off.
"Your friends cannot come." he was told, to his disappointment. "They are poor and cannot be cleared. Plus there are... unsavory elements in that bunch. Did you know the Houist murderers were Jews?"
The proud giant raged. "I built this great project, and now I cannot man it? How foolish will I look, sipping my beer alone! Can the Kaiser not have his parliament?"
"Until our concerns blow over. That will be our agreement. Maybe the terrorists were a one-time problem. Until then, maybe it is not a bad idea to give the new employees of the KaiserbierSchloß some time to serve one man and get used to their new habitat."
He wanted to throw the fresh barrels, and break them against the walls, to watch the dripping sauerkraut run down along the cobblestone floor and fester there. But he didn't. He was a Kaiser now. Iron responsibility required an iron will. He got a beer, sat on a bench alone, and listened to the burbling of his wine fountain.
Perhaps, he thought, he could take up reading. He hadn't been in government long, but the intimate knowledge his advisors had of things he hardly understood made him feel like a child being led around by battling adults. He'd read a few books in his time, but he was a slow reader. Not that reading was hard... it was just boring, and there were always places he preferred to be.
He poked at the foaming head on his stein, thinking of times he had crashed steins with other men and spilled brew with the force of his arm. "It is lonely at the top." he muttered.
-
That was his afternoon, day after day. He tried to read, but always got distracted. Schimmel began to join him, using the time to explain state issues. Schimmel wasn't a great drinker, though he would nurse a beer for his boss's sake. The company was better than loneliness though. He got to know his advisor. The little man was a grandfather, which blew the Kaiser's mind, as he looked much too young. They talked of Poland's Slavic Imperialism, and the duel threats of Communism and Spanish Hegemonic Capitalism.
Soon they invited Mueller, commander of the Kaiser's SiB attachment. The man was military stoic, and hadn't ever interested the Kaiser much, until he discovered that getting a few drinks in the man purchased some truly enthralling war stories. The threesome spent most afternoons together after a while, and when the summer nights came on, the three would wile away the nights swapping tales. Mueller claimed to have seen Ras Hassan, the infamous African bush commander, during the German intervention in the African war. Schimmel admitted to have read most of Hou's works. Knowing the enemy was part of his job. But he had gotten to respect the man a little, and he was able to explain Cultural Relativism as Revolutionary policy. Friedrich's stories were very different, more about life among the working classes, but he felt a little pride when the two intellectuals listened to his stories with sincere interest.
Summer turned to fall. The Houist threat subsided.
It was not long before Mueller decided to allow invitations to the KaiserbierSchloß. In came red-faced Bulow, and Von Kluck, and even the Jew Feingold, though that required some prodding. The Drunken Parliament was reestablished, with new members now. Mueller became "Unintelligence Commander", and Schimmel "Theoretician of the Length of Hou Sai Tang's Penis". They accepted it, and though neither men were avid partiers, they became regular members of the Kaiser's inner circle, and it was no longer so lonely at the top.
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Late July, 1980: Somewhere in the sky...
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This dishonesty of libido repulsed Prime Minister Alfonso Sotelo of Spain. After he went a while without a woman he would lust after one, but the moment he finished inside her she became another sack of flesh. Women were like that, soft and fatty, unless they were emaciated like some Berber tribal and therefore disgusting even when he was libidinous. A normal woman, went she bent, would show unflattering rolls of fat somewhere, whether it was her belly or her ass, and it always made him sick to see.
This was true for Alejandra Boveda, the scion of a wealthy Galacian family, who's money had put her into movies. She mostly starred in the droning religious kind, as a nun, or a prostitute who becomes a nun. The Church loved to fund these movies and show them in free-of-charge religious theatres across the country. She was a thin and titless redhead, but half his age and therefore still in possession of feminine skin. When he finished inside her, he crawled off and stumbled for his desk, sniffed, and shakily opened the drawer where he kept his cocaine.
She sat up in bed and bent forward. Even as thin as she was, her stomach made rolls, and Sotelo was repulsed.
"Can I have some?" she said, tapping at her nose. He did a line, quite violently even for him, and handed her some on a square brown 100 peseta note. She sniffed with less violence than he had, but there was nothing feminine or dainty about holding something to your nose and snorting.
He pretended she wasn't there. The nice thing about her was that she didn't care. She lit a cigarette and said nothing. A mutual disinterest kept her in his address book.
His head threatened to pound again. A headache had put him in bed for several days before they got aboard the Zepelin El Ponderoso. Outside his personal cabin, wealthy patrons who had paid dearly to join him on this flight enjoyed tapas in a genteel dining hall while respectable music was played by a live band. He was afraid the pressure of visiting with them would bring back his torturous headaches, but he could not avoid his job.
Politics at the top was not what it seemed. He looked back on his past, on the legal internship he had nearly lost when he punched one of the partners on the jaw. That had been easy to come back from. If he were to do the same thing now, he would fall as sure as if this Zepelín were hit by a rocket.
The sniff barely gave him a buzz anymore. That fact was one of the few things in his life that had ever made him feel anything like sadness. But he didn't understand the feeling, making it manifest in him as a sore kind of frustration.
"Put some clothes on." he said in an affectless tone. The young actress stopped, put her cigarette down, and slipped a cocktail dress on. He noted that she hadn't bothered to clean up, and the smoke was back in her mouth as quick as a blink.
He picked up a neat stack of paperwork and flipped through it mechanically. He had read it all so much that he felt he had it comfortably memorized. Several important bills were going through Parliament, and he wanted to understand them as if they were his own thoughts. They already were. He knew he had no more need to read them. But he liked this part of the job, and tried to use it to avoid... out there.
"I will go out first." he said, pocketing some sniff, knowing he wouldn't use it in front of the others, but wanting to have it on him anyway. "Wait thirty minutes, and then come out."
She said nothing. He got dressed in an unworn suit from the closet, straightened himself in the mirror, summoned a personable face, and walked out the door.
Spanish upper society was going through a black and white period in fashion that made women look like they had melted down chess boards for their clothing and put more white in men's clothes than Sotelo would prefer. They were out on the floor, eating olives, bread, and thin slices of sausage, wine close to them at all time as they mingled. There was a military presentation taking place near the band stand, complete with a projector. It showed the image of a thin Zepelín carrying a long pan.
"...the money you have provided will help field twenty of these vessels for patrols out of Djibouti." an aging officer said, dressed in a sharp uniform. "These platforms will allow snipers a view nearer to the ground, where they can spot and take out the desert barbarians that plague our supply lines in the Danakil. Since the maintenance of supply lines promises to be a constant threat..." his eyes caught Sotelo. Shit. "Well, here is our Prime Minister. I believe he has a few things to say about the subject."
Applause. Shit. Coward was not comfortable with the limelight, and he threw it to Sotelo like a Marshal throwing his baton and fleeing the battle. Sotelo put on his most politically facile smile.
"Thanks" he said to the polite applause. He sniffed lightly. "I would ask Don Castor, the President of Buenas-Armas de Bilbao, to explain this plan that his engineers have presented to us." he said, motioning to a man so old he looked like a cross between a turnip and a burn-victim. The man only seemed to vaguely acknowledge that he had been mentioned. "But if I did that, the coming and going might never stop. I think I can explain the important details of this vessel."
"Why not use airplanes?" asked a vapid looking housewife attached to the arm of an infamous Carlist.
"We have been doing this thus far, but it is neither tactically practical nor cost effective. The use of our precious air power and oil to hunt down what, as the brave colonel mentioned earlier, are essentially barbarians seems impractical. The people in that desert are basically camel herders who shoot anything they see. We cannot allow them to harass our roads in the Danakil, but to sending high-speed vehicles to burn through oil and bullets in order to strafe these barbarians... it simply won't do. Africa is a wild continent. The use of these aerial platforms, on top of being less resource heavy, allows our soldiers to find enemy combatants from a great height and attack them. It's like a portable high ground..."
The crowd was already losing interest, and went back to mingling. He sniffed. "With these in the air, the occupation of enemy territory in Africa will be easier to manage. The government thanks you for your contributions. Viva España." They returned the salute, and the music started up again, playing a gentle quintet. He went to the viewing deck and stared hazily down at the ocean below the clouds. A waitress delivered him glass of amber orujo. He hadn't asked for it, but he welcomed it all the same.
"You have been scarce, senor." the speaker came from behind, but Sotelo knew that fatty voice to be that of Xavier Maria Royas, the bishop of Getafe. He was dressed a priest's frock, but the designer watch on his corpulent wrist hinted at the massive wealth the Bishop was infamous for. Wealth was well respected in Spain, but the greed of individual clergymen chafed with the traditional image of what the Church was supposed.
"I have headaches. They have been a constant problem for me since I was a boy." Sotelo said blandly. Of course, it was more than that. His headaches altered him. There was no doubting that, though no doctor said it out right. That much pain had to leave lasting changes.
"All suffering is the lord's will, and we all suffer our own pains." said a bishop who spend a life fleeing anything to do with pain.
After his violent run in as an intern in his early career, Sotelo had invented a new way to handle his feelings toward others. For several years he kept a journal, where he wrote the names of colleagues he particularly disliked, and he jotted down all the ways he imagined they could die. Violence, disease, acts of God, anything creative enough to sooth him. When he realized that the discovery of such a book could compromise him, and that there was always a danger that it could be discovered and leaked, he burned the book over his open toilet and flushed the ashes. The lack of the compendium did not alter his ability to imagine things though. The Bishop's labored breathing annoyed him, and he imagined himself sewing the man's mouth shut, with blood running from the holes made by the needle, and the muffled screams from the panicking prelate as he slowly suffocated.
"You should tell the socialists that, your excellency." Sotelo said. "They are the ones so obsessed with forcing the fortunate to take away all their pain, at gun point no less."
"This war will be a lesson to them." the Bishop said approvingly.
Sotelo forced a smile. "Excuse me." he said politely, slipping away. On his way to the bathroom he saw Alejandra leaving his room. They didn't make eye contact.
"Prime Minister." a man walked in front of him and blocked his path. It was Tiburcio de Espejo, the President of Mejores-Armas. "I am glad your government could make money for my competitor, but now I am thinking, where are my government contracts?"
"You know I do not make those decisions, Don Tiburcio. You will have to speak with the war department."
"Come on, Sotelo, do you think I am a fool? Power is power, and you have the power to effect things." Tiburcio stood there, sort of glowering, a drink in hand. "Do not think that light-armored cars is all we can afford you. With the right connections, we could produce any vehicle you want. All we need is the permit."
"You are asking me to do your job for you." Sotelo replied. "I am not a telephone exchange for government officials. You will have to make those connections on your own." He slid past before Tiburcio, putting his drink in the man's open hand, and went straight for the bathroom.
The urinal was a silver trough in front of which three people could stand shoulder to shoulder to empty their bladders. There was one toilet stall at the end, and a single sink with a mirror. Sotelo went for the sink. He fumbled, pulling some extra sniff from his pocket, pouring it in a line on his finger, holding it up to his nose, and snorting it. In the mirror he saw his nose go bright red. No blood. That was disappointing in a weird way. He wanted an excuse to stay in here, something to clean up. Now he was left staring at his own face listening to the sound of the band outside for what seemed like ten minutes. Then the band stopped. That had to mean something. He went back out.
"Prime Minister." The officer from the presentation called out. "Come look. We are there!"
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The crowd moved around the viewing window with the scattered intelligence of ants. Some lingered and looked out; the men especially. Women took quick peeks and looked away. Others showed no interest at all and mingled in the background. Sotelo knew what to expect, and he began to smile as he walked toward the scene with the airs of a conqueror. Without looking at her, he gently retrieved a glass of wine from a waitress's tray. They let him through, and they gave him looks. Some grinned, or winced, or looked blandly at their Prime Minister. He didn't pay attention. When he was face-to-face with the glass, he looked out and took a drink.
The sky was a hazy blue, like a beautiful day in an industrial park, but the desert below was bright, getting swallowed by the haze somewhere in the far-away foothills. Airplanes patrolled the skies. To their side, they could see a sea full of long grey ships. In the middle of all that, directly below them and stretching for several miles, was him the ruins of Djibouti. It bubbled black and ugly below, a smoking backdrop for a Hieronymus Bosch vision of perdition. A scene that he had painted on the world. Ruined concrete, the skeletons of mosques, a black tar of a landscape covering who knew how many bodies, pock marks from bombs and splotches of oil in the water. Military camps skirted the disaster of a city. He had done it all. His word had made this place. It took him away from his annoying company and made him feel mercifully alone.
He felt at peace.
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