Free The Coup by John Updike

traitor? Ezana smiled reassuringly. His plump fingers, loaded with gems like especially bright droplets of an enveloping lubricity, slid descriptively through the air. "The air of Kush is transparent, there are no secrets, only reticences," he said. "The truck is the thing. I cannot account for it. It is unaccountable." "Also," Ellellou ventured, comforted by the other's thoroughness, which brought all things shadowy into the light of numerical investigation, and might dispel even the dictator's unconfessed lassitude, "on the way north, in a gap of the Bulub hills, I glimpsed far off a golden arc, perhaps two golden arcs, I am not certain." Ezana's fluid manner stiffened. "Did anyone other than yourself, my President, observe this apparition?" "Neither Mtesa nor Opuku could confirm my sighting, though we halted the car and prowled the terrain for a vantage. Opuku had just pointed out the smoke of an encampment, and thus had drawn my gaze in that direction. If they had... one would have said... I thought... the region is strange." "This was, I believe, the morning after your fatiguing night in the ICBM crib with the Russians, an experience in itself rather conducive to the unwilling suspension of reality." "It was. But I was not so tired, nor so susceptible to the fumes of the alcohol spilled by uproarious barbarians, as to mistake my own eyesight. Could there be, I wonder, an ancient ruin in the vicinity, or an accessory Soviet installation the Minister of the Interior has omitted to acknowledge?" "You are the Minister of Defense, and you know my opin- ion of this paramilitary foolery between the superparanoids. No need exists to double dummy rockets; and if it were the case why advertise the site with shining spires?" "Not spires, arches." "Whatever. The shimmer of the sand and the heated layers of air play strange tricks. Roul the desert devil delights in trompe-Voeil. Rest your mind, my President; I think the rumors of famine have troubled your peace of mind unduly." "Rumors? They are facts." "Exaggerated, moot facts. The Western press delights in making us appear incompetent. The nomads have always dragged our statistics down. Their way of life is archaic, wasteful, and destructive. Their absurd coinage of cattle has become ruinously clumsy. We must seize this opportunity to urbanize them. Already, the displaced nomads, and the sedentary farmers whose crops have failed or been consumed by the lawless herds, crowd to the edges of Istiqlal, where the tents and shacks, adjacent to the airport in full view of incoming flights, breed misery unalloyed by any suggestion of the picturesque. Their ancient nations have failed them; they are the citizens of our new nation, no longer of the Tuareg or the Salu or the Fulani or the Moundang but of Kush; Kush must reach down and house them, educate them, enlist them. This famine that so troubles you in truth is L'fimergence, given a fortuitous climatic dimension." Ellellou, though moved by echoes of his own rhetoric, asked, "Who will supply the wealth to house, educate, enlist as you describe?" Ezana contemplated an upper corner of the room. "In the Ippi Rift," he began, "there is some interesting geology." Ellellou didn't hear. He had stood, to declaim, "The rich blocs each have client states whose prosperity is of more strategic moment than ours. Our place at the table will be the nethermost chair; let us remain standing, and at least trouble the conscience of the feast." Impatience cinched shut the shining curves of Ezana's visage. "This feast has never had a conscience," he said. "We are at the table, Comrade, there is no helping it. There is no way a nation cannot live in the world. A man, yes, can withdraw into sainthood; but a nation of its very collective essence strives to prosper. A nation is like a plant; it is a lower thing than a man, not a higher, as you would have it." "Yet the people look up, and must see something. You speak of the fortuitous; this is blasphemy. The