Who Killed Iron Joe? Part 9 Moon When the Plums are Scarlet

From the journal of Fialkov:

It’s been one mind-numbing bumble after another.


I don’t know how else to out it.  I consider the whole thing to be a fiasco and I want to leave.  I know it sounds petulant, and not forthcoming of a Governor, but these are my honest and true feelings, and if I can’t express them here, then there’s no reason to keep a journal.


These people are impossible.  At every turn I have been pressured by the Empire to get results, and every decision I have even simply considered has been questioned and browbeaten by the Tuska, by their leaders and their lowliest members, so that there is hardly a chance for anything to appear to be “the right thing.”  It is impossible and incorrigible.


The one bright spot remains Carrie Arosen.  She is the contradiction, the beacon of light on which all else pivots, the only thing I can focus on without feeling a total failure.  And she, too, will probably fail to acknowledge my existence.


She’s as bad as the rest of them, and yet I cannot help to single her out as the single most provocative member of the clan, which in itself is fighting a rapidly losing battle and everyone but themselves knows it, the very definition of a retrograde existence.  It’s her very defiance, even at the face of leadership within her own cause, that makes Carrie Arosen stand out.  She was one of those who was born to be bigger than the circumstances that naturally surround her, even if she herself does not understand how.  I was placed in such a position where hopefully I am granted greater perspective than most others.  If I do not recognize such things, if my staff doesn’t, then I have no business being here.


And yet, I do not know what to do with her.  I am homesick.  It seems strange to admit such a thing, but it’s true.  I do not want to be here, not just because it has proven difficult, but because I have failed in every way to find a position of comfort.  I’m not referring to the sycophants I am now at greater liberty to identify and despise, but rather that I find increasingly that I do not want them around.  I am solitary at all hours of the day in my office, and will only suffer a visit even from my secretary if they agree to refrain from conversation, with only a simple nod.  I tried for months to expand this liberty further, and could no longer stomach it.


Some will no doubt say that it is the pressure of it, that it should never be easy to oversee the extermination of a race.  The leadership will deny that this is what I was assigned here to accomplish, but in our efforts to suppress the rights and the lands and the very culture of the Tuska, that is exactly what we are affecting.  I cannot go into detail about the programs, even in my own journal, but suffice to say, that’s exactly what they are intended to accomplish.  I will do it, but I cannot make peace with it.  All the subtleties of our genius are lost on the will of individuals like Carrie Arosen.  The Tuska do not realize what we are doing, and yet they constantly rebel against it, none more so than that girl.  I cannot get her out of my mind.  She is an irritant.


I want to go home.  Yes, I am on the world that was claimed as the home of the Danab, but I have never lived here, have no family here, and have no emotional connection to it.  I am as much a stranger here as I am compelled to make the Tuska believe they are.  It no longer makes any sense.  I am slowly losing my mind, and there are no longer any justifications I can make.  The girl, the girl, she represents everything that is wrong, everything that I am meant to overcome, everything that a Danab was never supposed to be, and instead of a triumph over the will, I am fenced in, and that damned girl is to blame.