Sometimes, sitting on a log or rock, resting the damaged limb, he got furious with his body, as if its ruined leg were its own doing. After coming through so much, he could not contend with the idea that his own inability to go on the last couple of miles would spell the end for them. But he soon realized that a hatred of himself and a disgust with his own weaknesses only depressed him and made it more difficult to go on. On the other hand, if he turned his fury into hatred of the Alliance, a personal, intimate hatred of the little rep and of each and every soldier that had been after them, the anger gave him strength, roused him to the accomplishment of things he had not known possible. When the rage was most brilliant in his mind, he could even put weight on the wounded leg without feeling much pain, if only for a few steps;
And so they progressed, Leah adding her support when he stumbled, Davis’s face flushed with fury at the men who had put them in these circumstances, had driven them to this insane flight, banished them from the company of “normal” people. In the writing of so many historical novels, he had become intimately acquainted with nearly every era of mankind’s past. It always amazed him that taboos changed so radically from historical moment to historical moment and from one culture to another—even when those cultures might exist in countries whose lands were side by side, or even when they existed within the larger society of a single nation. It was one of the things he tried so hard to make his readers grasp. The structuring of taboos which have nothing to do with the health of a nation but merely interfere with another man’s rights is a silly and useless practice. Why tell a man what he may wear or with whom he may make love and under what conditions? In a hundred years, you will be laughed at for your narrow-mindedness. He thought of all this as they walked, and he forced himself to explore the ideas in more detail than ever, in an attempt to relieve his mind of too much consideration of his pain.
Eventually, he came to understand something important about the men who constituted the Alliance, the men who held power over the masses. They had never discovered the concept of “us.” Indeed, they had even rejected the concept of “me” in order to regress to one more barbaric level—the concept of “it.” Each man in the Alliance was part of “it”: the government, the great machine of the laws and the prisons and the councils. Each man was a cog inside the overall mechanism, without individuality outside of his operating perspective. This view of the world, this “it” concept was the most dangerous unconscious philosophy ever adopted by a large segment of humanity, for it allowed its adherents—the bureaucrats and soldiers and politicians—to commit the most atrocious acts of physical, emotional, and mental slaughter and abuse against their people that the human mind could conceive. A member of the Alliance government who murdered a “traitor” or other enemy of the state never actually thought of “me” as the responsible party. “It” was to blame, if anyone. The soldier who killed in the war, the general who gave him his orders to destroy, and the president whose policies initiated the combat to begin with—none of them were responsible (in their own minds) as individuals, for they had only been acting in the name of the government, as a small—or even a large—size hardly mattered; the excuse could always apply—cog in the mechanics of “it.” And, in the last level, “it,” the government, was protected as well, since the machine could always rely on the cliché that “the government gets its power from the people”—a ruse to get the people to vote for the same megalomaniacs the next time they went to the polls.
He was jolted out of one of these tangled reveries as they passed out of the forest and climbed up a brush-covered foothill at the base of one of the largest mountains he had ever seen, a gargantuan peak of rock whose form vaguely resembled a wisdom tooth. They had been walking and resting, walking and resting in an almost hypnotic cycle for nine hours, ever since they had left the burned woods. To stop and not sit to raise his leg broke the chain of events, if only a trifle, and called forth his attention.