Our Struggle
Stanovich knocked on the empty doorframe to let Sheriff Yates know he was there. Yates looked up, recognized him, and waved him in. "Take a seat."
Stanovich sat down, perched on the edge of the chair, his back straight. "You wanted to see me, sir?"
Yates picked up a slim stack of ragged paper from his desk and handed it across. "Read that."
Stanovich took the pages, frowning. "Right now, sir?"
"Right now. While I wait."
"What is it, sir?"
"It was found during our investigation of the last attack. I think you'll find it illuminating."
Stanovich sat back in the chair and began reading.
AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION
After years of uninterrupted labor pursuing base survival, it was now possible for the first time to begin a work which many had asked for and which I felt would be profitable for the Human race. So I decided to devote this book to a description not only of the aims of our Human League movement but also of its development. There is more to be learned from this than from any purely doctrinaire treatise.
This has also given me the opportunity of describing my own development in so far as such a description is necessary to the understanding of this book and to destroy the legendary fabrications and lies which the various Grand Canyon Province factions have circulated about me.
In this work I turn not only to strangers, but also to those followers of the Human League whose hearts belong to it and who wish to study it more profoundly. I know that fewer people are won over by the written word than by the spoken word, and that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great speakers and not to great writers.
Nevertheless, to produce more equality and uniformity in the defense of any doctrine, its fundamental principles must be committed to writing. May this volume serve as the cornerstone on which I contribute to the survival of the Human race.
I would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the sacrifice to those who have given their blood, sweat, tears, and lives to the rekindling of humankind. I dedicate this work as a common memorial, that the memory of those martyrs may be a permanent source of inspiration for all humankind.
~Tobias Praske, Grand Canyon Province
Papermill Press
WHY THE HUMAN RACE SURVIVED
The Fall was precipitated by the Shiva virus and the firestorm of nuclear exchanges. No other time in the history of the world was the human race on the brink of extinction. Despite Man's best effort to destroy himself, humankind survived.*
*I do not perceive any truth to the myth that the Shiva virus was a naturally occurring plague, for various reasons I will expound upon later.
The survival of man is not due to his technology, or chance, or divine intervention. The human creature is the pinnacle of evolution. Survival is coded into our DNA, our genetic code, and is perfection incarnate. Nature concentrates its greatest attention, not to the maintenance of what already exists, but on the selective breeding of offspring to carry on the species, so in human life also it is less a matter of artificially improving the existing generation--which, owing to human characteristics, is impossible in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. When artificial influence is applied to change these characteristics, be it Shiva or nuclear, the results are evolutionary dead ends, because Nature will weed out that which does not further or benefit the species. Ultimately, it was not any tool or science created by man, but the purity of man's DNA that saved humankind from his own self-created horrors.
THE CRADLE OF MAN
The Grand Canyon Province in many ways is the Cradle of Man. The forces involved in creating this bastion of humanity are myriad and I will not delve into them here. Suffice it to say that these lands are a new garden of Eden.
Like the Garden of old, there are serpents existing which are envious of Man's perfection and will do anything to bring about his permanent Fall from grace. These beasts are deceivers, and while most are abominations, monstrous in form, there are those with the most pleasing shape of man. Even so, they will bear some mark of abomination. For where man toils by natural means, the aberration can manipulate nature in terrible ways. The abomination, while not suffered by Nature, is too dangerous to be dealt with by Nature alone.
There is no land of Nod where man can start a new life if he is forced from the Garden. The lands outside this Cradle of Man are uninhabitable and devoid of any life-sustaining properties. The abominations in their fitful, violent fight against Nature and their eventual demise will lash out at Man in their rage and desperation. Humankind in this Cradle, this new Garden, has no place to flee.
As such, these lands are a paradise in peril. For the creator of this Garden was not a benevolent God of old, but the inhuman corporation of men, enslaved to the system that led to the Fall. As such, men are fallible, and the bastion that was Hoover Dam fell prey to one man's thirst for power and the allure of using mutants as a means to that end.
I was witness to those days, and my proximity to the horrors that Hoover Dam came to represent made me realize that this new Garden could easily become the final tomb of Humanity and Mankind.
Like those greed-filled inhuman corporations from before the Fall, Alec Masters in his pursuit of power found dominion over man a small morsel. With all his power it was not enough to fill the black pit of his soul. He did not see these aberrations as a danger to humanity but as a tool to be used in his quest for power. So he sought out God-like powers to create life that gave birth to even more monstrous abominations. Masters mirrored those Pre-Fall men so sure in their perceived mastery of Nature that they nearly extinguished the light of Man.
So in using the relics and viral creations of the pre-Fall, Alec Masters unleashed even more abominations into the Cradle of Man. Providence and Nature would have it that his abuses were not unpunished. The abominations, from within and without, cast down his throne of arrogance and ended his crimes against humanity. But the damage of the Fall and of Alec Masters is not easily undone. These distortions of Nature cannot be accepted by those who value the undisturbed perfection of mankind.
WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN AFTER THE FALL
Thus, after Hoover Dam I found myself in the same situation as all those who had shaken the dust of the desert off from their feet, with the steely determination to lay the foundations of a new existence in the Grand Canyon Province and acquire for themselves a new home. Liberated from all the paralyzing prejudices of class and calling, environment and tradition, we entered any service that our natural talent would open doors for us, accepted any work that came our way, filled more and more with the idea that honest work never disgraced anybody, no matter what kind it may be. And so I was resolved to set both feet in what was for me a new world and push forward on a road forged of man's labor.
Today it is hard and almost impossible for me to say when the word "Mutant" first began to raise any particular thought in my mind. I do not remember even having heard the word at home during my father's lifetime in the context of a man-like animal.
The term is now so ingrained into daily conversation that it is hard to know when there was a time when it meant something other than an abomination of man. This reality is an illustration of the insidiousness of the mutant crisis. Familiarity breeds toleration, then acceptance, and finally the affection. Only utmost rejection of the mutant will save us from this path leading to our own destruction.
Humans individually are peaceful and for the most part "live and let live," even in these hard days. Men help their neighbors, create communities, and mutually beneficial societies. These noble features of mankind are used and misused when it comes to the mutant.
THE THREAT TO MAN
The unity of Humanity will help man combat the threat to mankind. The Human League is one example of this unity. We strive to improve the lives of all those we come in contact with to further the human condition in the face of dangers posed by mutants as well as the everyday problems involved in reestablishing civil institutions.
Unfortunately there are those much more shortsighted than the Human League and only serve their own self-interests. Worse yet, there are many who, in their ignorance, have embraced the mutant as an equal to man. It is our mission to teach these men and women the perfection of being human and the path to a fruitful and prosperous life of security. Where the Human League extends its hand in peace, there are those who respond with arrows of scorn, the axe of rage, and the sword of envy. Men will see our actions and know which path is more beneficial.
The fear of the Human League, to improve the miserable conditions of the human Grand Canyon Provincials, ought to have induced the so-called "factions" to make the most energetic efforts in this direction and thus snatch from the hands of the Human League leaders their most important weapon; but nothing of this kind happened.
Instead of attacking the position of their adversaries, the factions allowed themselves to become more and more insular and self-indulgent. Finally, they adopted means that were so tardy and so insignificant that they are ineffective and to be scorned. Many times the aid the factions do offer is mired in plots that end up only serving the faction directly or hurting their enemies. This abuse of men by men is self-defeating and to be abhorred. So the whole situation has returned to just as it had been before the end of Alec Masters; but the threat has thereby become more serious.
Like a threatening storm, the mutants have begun to hover above the political horizon and above the life of each individual human. It is one of the most frightful instruments of terror that threatened the security and independence of the humans in the Grand Canyon Province, the foundations of a new civilization, and the liberty of the human. Above all, it was the factions that have turned freedom into a ridiculous and scorned phrase, insulting the ideal of liberty and stigmatizing that sort of fraternity with the slogan, "If you will not become our comrade we shall crack your skull."
But how many people really ask themselves why it is that their own sentiments are better? How many of them understand that their natural pride in being members of humanity arises from the innumerable succession of instances they have encountered which remind them of the greatness of Mankind's cultural achievements and civility? How many of them realize that pride in being Human is largely dependent on knowledge of its greatness in all those spheres? Do our so-called factions ever think what a ridiculously meager share the people have in that knowledge which is a necessary prerequisite for the feeling of pride in one's humanity?
It cannot be objected here that in the so-called factions similar conditions exist, and that, nevertheless, those working in those causes have remained proud to be human. Even if that were so, it would be no excuse for our negligent attitude. But it is not so. What we call chauvinistic education--in the case of the Travelers, for example--is only the excessive exaltation of the greatness of the Traveler way of life in all spheres of culture or, as the Travelers may say, a "free trade" society. The Traveler child is not educated on purely objective principles. Wherever the importance of the political and cultural greatness of his faction is concerned, he is taught in the most subjective way that one can imagine.
It was thus that I then came to know that humanity needed to be saved from itself once again. During the years that followed my knowledge of it became wider and deeper; but I have never changed anything in that regard. The factions themselves are pierced through or otherwise controlled by the mutants that threaten the survival of humanity in its most perfect form.
DO NOT SUFFER THE MUTANT
This method is first, to create better fundamental conditions of social development by establishing a profound feeling for social responsibilities among Humankind; second, to combine this feeling for social responsibilities with a ruthless determination to prune away all excrescences which are incapable of being improved.
The mythic strains of memory, stretching from every field of battle, and human grave, to every living heart, town and homestead, all over this broad Province, will yet swell the chorus of Humanity, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our Nature...In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow Men, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of not only the mutant threat but the threat we face from those unwilling to hear the truth.
Ultimately, Man's survival is incumbent on you, my dear reader, to consider my words and to realize that the battle will require every single human acting in concert to ensure our future.
Stanovich's hands trembled slightly as he set the pages back on Yates's desk. He kept his voice level--barely--as he asked, "Why did you want me to read that, sir?"
Yates laced his fingers over his belly. "I thought you might need just a touch of extra motivation. I want these men found. Found and eliminated."
The vertical-slit pupils in Stanovich's brilliant green eyes narrowed, boiling with outrage. "I'll make it a personal priority, sir."
Sheriff Hank Yates gave Stanovich a humorless grin. Yates wanted the Human League wiped out...and he wanted the Enforcers to be the ones to do it. If that meant showing Tobias Praske's hate-filled propaganda to one of his troops, or to all of them, so be it. Motivation was motivation.
"Good, son. That's what I want to hear. Dismissed."
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