The Land Across by Gene Wolfe

said.
    “That is the progress for which you have wished.” Raincoat turned away from me and stood looking out the porthole.
    I drank a little sweet wine and waited.
    “I have taken away from you my handcuffs.”
    “That’s nice. I really appreciate it.”
    “You will seize my pistol. Shoot me in the back. Escape.”
    I had been thinking the same thing, only my legs were still tied. So I said he had been nice to me and the Light of Stability said it would be better to let him live.
    “Exactly so. What is, is right. The enlightened will preserve it. The unenlightened destroy it, promising to bring into being something better, but to bring into being is more difficult than to destroy, and the somethings they bring better are always worse. Thus it is that we do not seek to overthrow the government, though the government seeks to overthrow us.”
    “If you don’t want to overthrow the government,” I said, “why would the government want to overthrow you? It would seem to me that it would just pat you on the head and tell you to go ahead and have some fun.”
    He turned to face me. “Ah! You do not understand governments.”
    “That’s the flipping truth,” I said. I said flipping because I had the feeling he was not the type that would overlook fucking .
    “A government is not so many men behind desks,” he told me. “A government is an idea. Without the idea…” He shrugged.
    “Only you’ve got a different idea?”
    “Exactly so.”
    “But you ought to preserve the government, right? I mean from what you said a minute ago.”
    “Which we seek to do. A government is an idea; if that idea is mistaken, it is a building built upon the water. Such a building may float for a time. You come to see him and are told, ‘This is our foundation, a foundation so solid it can never fail. Islands wash away. Continents rise but sink again into the sea. But there has always been water and there will always be water. Here we stand!’ The next day they are gone.”
    I said, “I got it.”
    “There was in the cellar a door that must not be opened, you see. Someone opened—the water rushed in. The communists sink while I watch. It was very quick. Very quiet, too.”
    “So you want to change government’s idea.”
    Raincoat nodded. “We are the Legion of the Light. We will tow it to shore, you see, and because you are Amerikan you will help us.”
    “That’s right,” I said. It was not a lie the way I meant it.
    From then on I was loose on the boat. Yes, I could have grabbed somebody’s gun and maybe I could have killed all three of them, but what were the odds? I figured I had about one chance in fifty. And maybe I would not even be wounded. And maybe, just maybe, I could handle that big boat all by myself. But the sails generally took two men and during the thunder storms (we hit a couple of bad ones before we tied up at the capital) they took at least three. We had four because I pitched in, figuring that if we sunk I would drown, too.

8
    THE CAPITAL
    What they wanted was for me to make radio broadcasts. I told them it would not help and nobody in America would even listen, but they said it did not matter. What did was that the government would hear them and think it mattered. The government would tune in and have everything I said translated and study it, and in that way the idea of the Light of Stability would sink in.
    When Raincoat told me that, I pointed out that he had a gun.
    “It is a tool,” he said. “To do good work, one must have tools.”
    That is the way it was with those people. On the one hand they did not like to destroy anything. On the other hand they were willing to destroy everything. The Light of Stability was really important to them, but winning was a lot more important. That was one way to put it.
    I had taped two or three broadcasts for them when it hit me. None of them spoke English, but if the government had me translated like they said it would, the government had somebody who