A Desert Called Peace Read Online Free PDF Page A

Earth. Music, too, was popular, in particular the wild and violent sounds of the twentieth century. Earth literature also had its place on the new world. Both had been brought by the original immigrants in the form of computer discs. Much had been lost, of course, but much had survived the days from when the old computers wore out. Indeed, developing new machines capable of reading the old discs had given Terra Nova a leg up in artificial intelligence, generally.
     
    As with many immigrant tongues on Old Earth—American English, Quebecois French and South African Dutch, for example— many of the languages of Terra Nova retained many features that had been lost to their mother tongues. Indeed, a man or woman of the twentieth century would likely have found the English of the Federated States more comprehensible than that commonly used by the Anglic-speaking proles of Old Earth. In any case, this made much of the older music of Old Earth quite in tune with Terra Novan listeners.
    Of course, Latin hadn't changed in millennia. It was Latin— Satanic flavored Latin at that—which flowed from the speakers in the book-stuffed library:
 
O Fortuna
Velut Luna . . . 
    High on one wall of the library hung an ornate, embossed certificate, in Spanish, signifying a high decoration for valor from the Republic of San Vicente. The gilt name emblazoned on the award was Patricio Hennessey de Carrera. Posted beneath the certificate, framed with obvious pride, hung a letter of reprimand—in English—from a general officer of the Army of the Federated States of Columbia. It was addressed merely to "CPT Patrick Hennessey." Both certificates—dated fifteen years prior, long before Hennessey's promotion to his terminal rank—described the same series of events, though in rather different terms.
    The library was large, with bookcases covering three of the substantial room's four walls. Against the fourth, under the certificate and the letter of reprimand, stood a desk and chair, each made in the main of dark-finished Lempiran mahogany, hand crafted and richly carved. A man approaching middle age, just beginning to go gray at the temples and with a face weathered beyond its years with the wear of sun and rain, sat at the desk, eyes fixed on a book.
    The book was one of many. Reaching floor to ceiling, the volume- packed shelves of the library held the essence of a lifetime's interest and study, more than seven thousand volumes in all. Even over the broad, deep desk more bookshelf space was stacked and—like the other shelves—filled to overflowing. Still more reference material resided on computer micro-discs inside cases stuffed to the brim.
    Despite appearances, there was an order and a theme to the volumes. The library was, in the main, about war. If there was a book on the plastic arts—and there were several—the owner had studied them because he knew that art had propaganda value in war. If there was a book on music—and there were dozens—that was because music, too, was both a weapon of war and a remarkably subtle yet powerful tool for training for war. If there were books on the Marxism that had made its reappearance under the Volgan tsar during the Great Global War—and there were some few—it was because the reader believed in knowing one's enemy.
    There was even a copy of the Koran.
    However, most of the library was more obviously military. The collection covered, as nearly and completely as possible on Terra Nova, every human age and culture as it pertained to armed conflict. An English translation of Vegetius rested next to another copy in the original Latin. Apparently not as confident in his Greek as in his Latin, the reader kept most of Xenophon in bilingual texts—Greek and English alternating pages. Plato, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Aristotle, Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Annan, Nussbaum, Harris, Steyn, Fallacci, Yen, Peng and Rostov . . . war was about philosophy and politics, too, and so the reader studied those as