An excerpt from the Meobican Military Memoranda: Forgotten Heroes book two, written in approximately standard Galactic year 2004. This ancient book was found in an archeological grave site near planet # 3378.901, sector A/99.V84, and was unusually well preserved. Traces of this story have also been discovered in books from planet # 701.33, called Earth by the natives. While the accuracy and truth of this story has not been proven, the matter is being looked into by Gallian officials, and shall be further investigated in the near future.
I am honored to have been chosen for the duty of remembering--and immortalizing, I should hope--the honorable Lieutenant Arh. I am very aged now, and am growing older as the minutes tick past. Yet, I still remember the events of Earth-year 1832 as clearly and as vividly as if they had occurred mere hours ago. I hope that what humble contributions I can give to the tale of this great man will be of some benefit.
I knew Lieutenant Arh from my youth, though at the time that he was promoted to Lieutenant, I was just beginning my duties as a Private. Nevertheless, I was chosen as Arh's personal subordinate, and spent a great deal of my time running errands for him. At that time, Arh had just begun his service to the Emperor as an official inspector, and I was pleased and honored to be serving such a prestigious master. It was a good time to be in the military service: benefits and creditionary pay was at its peak, and promotions were generously given and plentiful. Perhaps they were too generously given, for many an undeserving soldier was given a position of power, and with power comes greed, and hatred of those more powerful than you. Two weeks after the promotion of Arh, a serious--but unsuccessful--attempt on the life of the Emperor was made. Though there was little evidence as to the true perpetrator of this heinous crime, surreptitious fingers pointed at Arh, and he was brought before court. Though he strove honorably to prove his innocence, he was convicted and sentenced to exile.
Exile was, in those bygone days, an unusual and horrifying thing. Earth was the nearest safe planet to send those who had committed crimes deserving of the punishment, despite the terribly primitive technology and living conditions. To go there was to die, according to the beliefs of many. In a way, one would die. To fit into Earthling culture, one must first assume an Earth-type body, divested of their glorious Meobican body like a beautiful cloak, replaced with an Earth body--a veritable burlap sack. And for the exiled, there was no privacy. Detailed reports were made monthly on every aspect: emotions were dissected and read, heart rate was studied, blood pressure, hair length, finger and toenail conditions checked, even the health of the gut and excrement levels were examined. Only thoughts were too complex to study; even today, Meobican scientists are struggling to find a way to read them. But in the face of what is to come, thoughts offered little respite from the dreary life ahead. A yawning chasm of despair loomed ominously before Arh.
Yet in this despair, he hardly flinched, so courageous was the convicted ex-Lieutenant. Even then, when others expressed theatrical disgust at his very name, I and his betrothed, Wehn, remained faithful to his memory. I am certain that, secretly, many others shared these beliefs. To voice them was high treason; not even Wehn was willing to risk execution. On the day that Arh was drummed out of service to the Emperor and his citizenship was revoked, he walked straight, tall, and with noble dignity to the transporter that was to send him to the Lab, where his Meobican body would be "translated", so to speak, into the graceless form of a Human (unfortunately for Arh, his handsome Meobic features translated poorly, and he was a less than handsome human, if that is not redundant). And when he left that lab, he stepped not onto the marvelous metal walkways of Meobica, but onto the filthy soil of the Earth country known as France.
I suppose Arh was expecting to live out his life in tepid isolation, but that was not the truth, as he much too quickly discovered. Arh was paid a meager allowance of the equivalent of ten francs--a franc is, it seems, the ungainly term for currency--every month. Two months after he began his life in exile, he was swindled out of everything he had. Penniless and desperate, he was--unknown to us--evicted from his small apartment and lived in the streets for over a week, starving and freezing like a lion lost in the arctic tundra. We lost track of him for a time, but when we found him, he was quickly re-established in an apartment home and his losses were restored to him. Despite the serious emotional blows he suffered, Arh was relatively unharmed, and we assumed that he would get by without problems. Apparently, this was not to be the case.
Arh had by now adopted a suitable name for himself. His true Meobic name sounded remarkably like a letter of the French alphabet, R. Given this, he combined the word "grand", describing a capital R, with the letter "R", and came up with Grantaire. He had also, through means unknown to us in Head Control, grown quite fond of both alcoholic drinks and, even more disgraceful, human women. When the unfortunate Wehn heard of this--dear, gentle Wehn!--she flushed with shame and sorrow for her lost love, though she never truly forsake him. After studying his emotional readouts, we found that the typical feelings of loneliness and sorrow had vanished. Curious, we investigated further. We found, through remarkable new technology that allowed us to view directly the subject, that he had acquired a kitten, a little black ragamuffin street cat. He had named her Streiph, presumably after the legendary heroine of many Meobican children's tales. The Control lab was intrigued by this new development, and took it upon themselves to study it further. I was secretly grateful to this kitten; if not for her, Arh might have been all but forgotten, and it would have been difficult for a mere Private to get unimportant reports on a simple exile. I was also grateful to this kitten for providing him with a sense of happiness; I looked up to Arh, as I do today, and it pained me to know he was unhappy.
This cat soon became what he lived for. He was friendless, distrusted humans, was overly dubious of anything and everything, and was condemned to live on a land occupied by, as he saw it, nothing but traitors and thieves. But this kitten--there could be nothing so huge as evil in so small a creature, and he found joy in her sense of trust and her childish mannerisms. Imagine his distress when one day she fell ill! Sick with fear at losing her, he went to the nearest shady peddler and bought a "magickal elixir, guaranteed to cure all!" and rushed home with it. In what left of his innocence, he gave the "magickal elixir" to Streiph. She died later that evening, probably more of the elixir than of any sickness. Arh knew it, too. He sank into a deep depression, blaming himself, his stupidity, the world and every thing on it. When he emerged from this dark period, he was markedly changed. Little remained of the Arh I once served; he had become bluntly cynical, skeptical, a drunk, and a drifter. He left the small village he had lived in for five years, and traveled onto the very large city, which I believe was called Paris.
It became remarkably hard to keep track of Arh. And since the kitten was gone, the scientists had had little interest in him; I was promoted up a rank, and life went on. I'll admit, more than one day went past that I did not think of him. I heard little snatches here and there--he had fallen in with a group of young men, he was drinking at an alarming rate, he had something to do with a plan to overthrow the government. None of this really surprised me. Discontented souls tend to find solace in other discontented souls, regardless of the nature of the discontentment. Nobody really found anything remarkable until the readouts began to get interesting once again: he was experiencing love. This was shocking almost to the point of scandal. Love a human? Was it truly possible? Even know, I have my doubts as to how he could feel any such thing for such low beings. But it was true. The readouts stated this quite firmly. The old interest in Arh flared up once more, and he was monitored again, this time to find out who this love interest was.
His name was Enjolras. He was a young man who resembled marble in demeanor, and was leading a rebellion. I was shocked at first, but now I think I understand the source of Arh's love; regardless of the opinions of most of the scientists, I do not believe it was the sort of love he felt for Wehn, or the love he felt for Streiph. It was something so much more complex and beautiful. Sadly, Enjolras could not see this. He loathed Arh, whom he knew as Grantaire, and refused to acknowledge even the slightest sense of camaraderie with him. I hated him for it. How dare he make a believer of so devoted a skeptic, transform everything in Arh's dreary life, give him a reason to keep on living, and then refuse to know he had done so? Alas, I could not communicate with him. I could merely sit by and watch as the events unfolded, a helpless observer.
As I said, Enjolras was leading a rebellion. This rebellion--or, as it was called, insurrection--broke out on June 5, 1832. It was a modest affair, barricades blocking many streets, whole troops marching in on the insurgents. It was to my chagrin to know that the insurgents had vastly overestimated their resources; help which they had been expecting apparently never arrived. To my further dismay, I found that Arh was among the number, though he was not in active combat. He was dead drunk at a little table in the top floor of a small cafe, and would probably not awaken until everyone at the barricade was dead, I hoped. This was not to be.
The events after this are difficult to relay, as many of them I did not see clearly, and many others I did not see at all. However, I have enough pieces of this puzzle to fill in the blanks so that you may gain an understanding of what happened. Once the barricades had been breached, the few living insurgents were forced back into this very cafe, the cafe which held Arh. The strong wooden doors brought only temporary relief; there was just enough time for Enjolras and his few men to go up the stairs to the risky shelter of the stairwell. Even so, it was only a matter of time before the army broke down the doors and swarmed into the cafe. Though they fought with all the courage possible for humans, they were killed one by one, until the only man left standing was Enjolras.
Then came a message from the Court. They had found the Emperor's attempted assassin. In a whirlwind that was almost a daze, I found myself scrambling, at the head scientist's order, to set up a link directly to Arh's mind. This was very difficult to do, but somehow, in my detachment, I managed to get it right the first time.
"Arh! Lieutenant Arh!" barked the Emperor's general, who had swept and bustled his way into here unnoticed, "The court has found you not guilty. You will now be allowed to return home. Prepare for immediate transport upon your consent!"
"Arh! Arh, you can come back to us! Oh, my Arh!" wept the faithful Wehn joyfully.
I, and everyone else, gasped in shock, amazement, and almost a little joy. After all those years of misery, suffering, pain and torture, home was a word that would have brought joy to even the most scarred of hearts. I eagerly awaited his assent, grinning joyfully to myself as I thought of how wonderful it would be to have him back. Arh smiled, thanked us, and broke the connection. Arh broke the connection. The General had offered the possible; Arh had done the impossible. In that moment, I stopped admiring Arh. He was taken from his pedestal to become something greater: Arh was, and is, my hero. We watched in a mixture of disbelief and horror as he stood, turned, and began to walk towards away, towards a wall. It was only now that we noticed the marble-man, Enjolras, was standing with his back to that wall. Enjolras was to be executed.
When Arh neared him, Enjolras turned and looked at Arh. As I stared into his eyes, any hatred I felt for Enjolras was diminished in the sudden camaraderie, almost friendship, that rained from his eyes like water for the parched and thirsting plant. And even as they grasped hands and I reached for the screen, the general's knuckles white around the microphone, the scientists tense with awe, the monitor crackling, I heard the volley of shots that ended the life of my hero. I can still hear the volley of shots, clear and crisp as the death-tolling of a bell at a churchyard. I can still hear each shot together and individually, at the same time, hear them mingled with the last words he ever said to us: Thank you. Thank you, but I am now human.
Heroes never die, if they are not forgotten. I shall never forget.
Commander Xang,
Earth-year 1987