by Roman McClay
Then they’d take those two trucks -the first of five total- to Alle des Marines and then to cours du port and then to the gates of Château Du Sours . The first blue glow of petro-fires were too low and still yet too cool for him to see the yellow and white of higher climbing and roaring élan-a-blaze as he drove first east then south and, cravenly, side-eyed the vines; seeing just a comet tail of white arc along the vineyard, scant but sufficient evidence of the idée fixe of the flames.
II. 2036 e.v.
Jack Two had never noticed that he never thought of his mother that way; as a person before him, maybe because they both had conspired to make her life about his birth and his success. She had been as responsible as he for this, he was quite sure, as she focused all her energy -even the energy of her memories- into him as if mother’s milk could be imparted telekinetically.
But, Jack’s father had explained the whole strangeness -not that Jack felt it was strange- of how he came to be. The euphemism employed had to be dug around and sifted and brushed off like something delicate buried just below surface. But Jack had figured it out and yet had had the class not to say the word aloud. Miscarriage sounds almost benign until you realize how to a mother, certainly his mother, it feels like a failure, not something that happens to a woman -for she is back to being merely a woman, not a mother- but rather, it’s something a woman does .
Woman is to mother what boy is to man: potential.
Jack stood in the vineyards of Haut Brion and handled some clusters almost too haphazardly for him to justify even touching them. The coulure , the floral abortive, he saw; the tiny lime green grapes that would not be. The Spring must have been cold; a quick climate report going 13 months back revealed that it was. And now in winter, with 9 hours of day and 15 of night, these aborted grapes seemed a bad omen somehow. He felt they were unloved, and thus could not be capable of love themselves .
He wondered if vingnobles feel like mother’s do when the wine doesn’t come in? The Lafite vintages of 1927, 1932, 1936, were all labeled as déclassé , to wit: Paulliac and not, certainly not, Lafite .
Do you not name the abortion, for this reason? because this, it, is not what you are capable of as a mother, you insist. If nature will co-operate just slightly , you say; as your boy Jack, born just a year later, is proof. Look at vintages like ‘82 that follow ‘81; look at how one year in climate can make the difference that the chef de culture cannot.
He thought of the late picking, delayed by just one week, that can elevate sugar, alcohol, structure and lower acidity; giving a wine greatness -defined by elegance and power conjoined; a trait chimera he aspired to and saw in Blax- a potential that nature leaves for to you to decide upon. One week, hangs there, but nature could rain on your skins and reduce yeast and dilute each cask with rainwater, and ruin what would have been outstanding -not classic, not perfect, but still pretty damn good- if one had not gotten greedy. Man can barely -even with massive insight and Herculean effort- make things better, but he can ruin things without much work at all.
How much of man himself is nature, how much should he show wisdom enough to leave alone? Jack wondered. But that is the price of men who strive for greatness, the risk of catastrophe. Great men live -they must- on the edge.
At Lafite , Jack thought -and he was really thinking of Blax in this oblique way- they had brayed about the 1966 vintage and that the delay in picking -after a call to the Baron - had been the genius of bravery and the courage of brilliance and something the regissuer -Andre Protet - and George Revelle had made. It was these men, who walked the vineyards, who ate grapes each day, who watched flower and sunlight and felt temperatures low by the soil and up by the canopy, who as Cyril put, were “cocking their eyes to the skies as much as the weather reports, trusting as much to their own experience and judgement as to the laboratory’s analysis of the sugar content and the acidity of the grapes. ”
These men almost died .9 out of 9 times in the harness, and would never mechanically pick grapes, as this was what made a premier cru , that the grapes made it to the cuves with no marring of their bloom on their skins. This could only be effected by the hand of the vingneron and those who lived -and working is living to all but modern men- in the vines.
He imagined Blax in the vineyard right now, and in fact checked his PGC to locate him. They were supposed to have all cross-signaling turned off, but a ping for his location would never give the cops a signal they could use; even if they retrieved it post hoc . It was the breaking of a small rule for a noble reason, with no consequences , he thought.
He just wanted to know where the Lt stood right now as he thought of this moment; this combination of his mother’s connection to the precarious transfer of life each season, and the grandeur of these château and their people, and the generations after generations that were born and died right here in Bordeaux . It was a thing that was not merely romantic or nostalgic, it was something organic and righteous and what America lacked in its soul.
We, Jack thought of Americans, move too much, we move like children, spastically, unthinkingly; as reaction to inner storms . We move like people with neurological disorders; while the bordelaise can have families like the Lavanceau -vingernon from generation to generation- be born in the workers’ cottage at Lafite since before the Rothschild’s first purchased it in 1869 .
Even the French are losing their minds though, as Andre Lavanceau’s only son in 1977 went and worked at Shell Oil -of all places- instead of at Lafite . Jack thought that if it were possible one day he would come back here to one of the first growths and see if he couldn’t get hired on as a picker or a puncher in the chai . It was the farm laboring that piqued his interest as much as the wine. He loved the soil and had talked to Blax for hours about the trellis of overhead vines -like cathedrals- in Marlborough in New Zealand that covered the ground and the walker both. It was all hidden from the direct eye of the sun.
But, he had a job to do now, and the moment of reflection was nice, needed even, but he had to attend to the cave now that a bot had reported an error of detection as it searched out barrels from 2005 and 2010.
He received a DM from Blax: “You need me?”
He DMd back that he was just wondering if he -Blax- was in the vineyard and Blax agreed that he was, to which Jack had said that was what he wondered, as he too was in the rows and thinking of him. Blax had maintained radio-silence but once the silence was pierced, he was feeling things that burst now over his comms .
“It’s epic and forlorn and lonely and grand and just all so much for me; I mean, the greatness of this place, all these places, the greatness generation after generation, can you feel it Jack?” Blax asked in the quiet of the vineyards above all that limestone, all that time. Jack smiled, as he admitted to himself that he had known that if he just pinged his Lt, that the man would have to respond in a gush like this.
“I can,” Jack said. “I mean not like you can, but I can feel it; its age, its depth. This is not commerce, not mere commerce with these people. There is something beyond what money can even measure here; you know?”
“Yeah,” Blax replied, “my friend Chen used to say that money wasn’t complex enough to measure the reality of what something’s value was, it didn’t account, didn’t take account of the inputs and exports, all the little nuances that went into a commodity or service. I know these wines are expensive, but truly they are priceless. We place a price on them, a high one, but, would anyone pay any price to have it all and never be able to share it, would anyone receive any price to have it all dumped into the Gironde ? A truly fungible product -something with proper value ascribed- would we be able to handle such a concept?
“But these wines, nobody would be able to come up with a price high enough to justify either outcome. They are -thus- priceless in real life,” Blax said.
“That’s poetry LT,” Jack said and walked into Le Château and thought -clear mindedly- of Thomas Jefferson’s visit to Haut Brion on Friday the 24th of 1787, after drink
ing from this very château first at Benjamin Franklin’s table.
Jack smiled as he wove through the château and then down to the caves and found the bot who had signaled the error with bin markings. He tagged the 2010 that had the “0” defaced and was looking more -to the bot- like a crescent moon and possibly now a “1”. Once tagged the bot was able to grab it and load it into the container on the flatbed of the diesel truck that sat outside cooling and popping and looking ghost grey in the albedo of the moon.
He passed by two bodies of ladies who had been -for whatever reason- wandering the caves at midnight. They were pressed together like lovers but the blood had soaked into their clothes and hair and they had begun to look slightly bloated, although he knew they had not changed much in the 30 minutes or so since he shot them; he took note of this and then he made sure the bot had picked up the brass.
He felt terrible, guilt and shame and fear, all at once then, more that when he had killed them, and he toggled his PGC to regulate his allostatic function to tamp down these abrading feelings. The coder had already begun the process as his affect had been set to ‘mission critical’ which didn’t allow for much emotion beyond what was needed to get the job done. He could process his feelings later, but now was no time to go soft. He knew it; the PGC knew it and so in .05 seconds he felt fine again and stepped over the bodies and began checking the cellar for individual bottles he could drink on the ride to de Sours .
III. 2036 e.v.
Jacques Margaux , as he was for a night, stood 10 paces from the four colonnades of the façade and thought it still looked pink and crème in the moonlight, and he dug his heals into the gravel to settle into this POV. His PGC took images for his reminiscences; he sniffed the cork he had pulled from a 1945 Margaux that had been laid down in the upstairs cooler; a drinking wine for the château . These people, he thought, drank one day of the week, any day, a bottle most men would save for once in a lifetime.
The bottle was under his arm like a book, and his lips were red from the slap of the cab against them each time he pressed the mise-en-boutille-en-château to them; he had almost grabbed a glass that hung in the kitchen but decided against it and now drank right from the bottle as if it were a Bourbon County mash.
The bots had signaled that they were ready, hundreds of OWC loaded, with back vintages to 1801. He -like Jack Two- thought of Jefferson at Haut Brion , at a Voltaire play the next day, and by Sunday the man who would invade Tripoli as President, had ordered 24 cases of the 1784 vintage, and 250 bottles from Lafite .
Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana territory from the French for $15 million, six years later. Thus, what the Jacks were stealing tonight would be the second largest swindle of the French by the Americans ever; likely totaling $100 billion in wine. $500 billion, maybe , Jack thought. It was not like they could ever make more of these back vintages; that ship, he thought as he placed the ’45 Margaux to his lips, had sailed.
He checked his boots for the calcareous clay that lived below the Bordeaux gravel layer, but his boots -like his conscience- were clean. He took a Cabernet Sauvignon grape from his breast pocket; he had found one in the rows unblemished and uneaten, half-frozen, and still dusty from the natural sugar seep and yeast. He felt reckless and salty and like he ought to be promoted to something more; but he banished the thought as puerile and stupid, as all men, he thought, overvalued themselves by at least 20% and he likely by more . But he smiled at his wild swings of emotion, from arrogance to overestimation of his overestimation, even his humility was tinged with hubris, he -it seemed- just had to be even more irrationally arrogant than the norm.
He wished he could be here for all winter, the frost on the vines, the soil black and white, the pruning in early morning of the Petit Verdot . He wanted to plow the ground with himself in harness alongside working-class men and first-class beasts. He wiped the bottle’s label to look at it once more, then allowing his cleaner-fish bot to do its job he set the bottle down on the ground and walked toward the second truck. The first autonomous truck was already leaving and would meet Jacques Brion there at the dock; it downloaded the directions to the Gironde and the waiting boat.
The bot picked up the bottle -deleting all of Jack’s DNA- and added one slight sample of Jack Ma’s friend and fixer, Xing-Pang Chen’s genome that Blax had captured those many months ago as he and Ma Yun had dined. The sample was placed in the well of the bottle bunt so as to seem missed and careless; which would be suspicious, considering the professionalism of the heist, but the French would find it too irresistible to ignore as evidence. The middlebrow -the police- always thought their foils could be captured by the doggedness and cleverness of the intrepid hunter. These ostensible mistakes would be converted into the currency of the genius of those that found such errors.
The bot would stay behind and keep the bottle hidden until Isaiah needed it to be found. So, floating as if by magic -which would not seem crazy to anyone who had actually tasted the magnificent ‘45 Mothe - the bottle headed for the trees.
Jack One, first among equals , he would sometimes think, had the bots pick up the three bodies and take them out to the vineyard and bury them a meter down; he thought the absence of these men might look perfectly suspicious and thus cause a manhunt for them, since the other bodies were left as is and the police would assume such burials would be unlikely. The chaos of the investigation would be augmented by such a small detail, and Jack was glad he thought of it.
He wished he could pour sand in the cops’ pockets and give them all limps, and flatten their tires and make the wind blow in their faces until they refused to come out doors any more.
Anyone who likes cops or those who enforce any rules that cannot be enforced by the men solely effected by their contravening, anyone who likes such bureaucrats is a fucking worm, a plague, a bringer of curses , Jack thought. Real men handle shit themselves; they don’t need the fucking cops . To even sign up to be a cop was to admit that the society one protected was corrupt and needed such men to do the dirty work of the weak and disloyal.
The bots scrubbed the blood and any evidence of conflict, and the bodies would not be dug up by animals for a week or so. He felt nothing about these men; he felt nothing for their history or talents or how the château would replace them. He cared nothing for the history of what Frenchmen did; even if he admired their wine. He saw them as obstacles, the way they saw him, abstractly, when they made their $1,000 a bottle wine. These people, he thought with contempt, did not care about the foolishness of paying such sums for a beverage; how it distorted the minds of men, how it elevated wine over humans, how it corrupted entire countries, like the Chinese who had gone mad with wine status . A man, in Jack’s mind, need not directly insult or injure him to be an enemy, that man need only be capable of such offenses to earn the status of ‘target’.
And all men were capable of all things; he had never met a man that would not sell any man out, fuck any man’s woman, lie to any man’s face, show cowardice over trifles, and thus reveal a trifling soul.
Of course, this was the whole point of this, well, half the point; to entice the Chinese with this wine. But, he thought, if the world was not ruled by such stupid need for things and status and markers of class, then a con like this would never work. But the French and the Chinese would likely go to war over this, over a goddamn bottle of wine. Of course, it was more than that, but Jack could synthesize things, it was his métier . He could cut away the fat and reveal the medallion of tenderloin, and it allowed him to act. This was the other side of his brutality: he was a doer. If something needed done, he would do it while three other men would argue how it couldn’t be. And this was the most ancient genome of all biological history, the patient zero of life: the doer. He would not apologize for being the thing most ancient and thus, he thought, most right.
He moved, and to move is to see, obstacle or tool -and to ignore the irrelevant- and to see is to thus, have a moral code born of this hierarchy of obstacle, tool or that
which is irrelevant. We know this now due to science, Jack thought, especially understanding the orienting reflex and the work on embodied AI; an organism cannot see without this hierarchy already in place . He was more moral than most, evidenced by his ability to see clearly, and by his ability to act inside of a maelstrom while others kept stupidly chasing the elliptical flight of the wind. It was difficult for the amoral to understand this; they were children stumbling after butterflies. They saw morality wrapped up in hesitation and hang-wringing and ambiguity. His tao was incompatible with what they’d call moral thinking ; irreconcilable with what was moral for them, for 99% of men.
The opposite was of course true, he was the most moral, he saw everything in moral terms, the way a man dressed was to his credit or an indictment, there was no such thing as casual Friday, the man who did not think of each garment was sloppy, not just sartorially, but morally too. The way a man spoke, what he spoke of, how much shit he owned, how much he put up with from his wife, what he spent his money on, how he drove, my God how he drove , Jack repeated in his head, all of these were moral choices and moral acts, and nobody would agree with this; but they were, of course, wrong.
He thought of other people as he drove on the public roads, always; always making sure to go quickly when in traffic so the guy behind him could make the light, or not be impeded; to drive quickly was proof of thinking of others and thus proof of moral thinking. The guy who sat at the green light fucking around, to only notice it is in fact green as it is in fact turning yellow, and thus nobody else makes it through, is not just dumb, he is immoral, Jack thought, that guy thought of nobody else but himself . People lamented this annoyance of modern life, but Jack saw it clearly for what it was: a sign of the sociopath, the man who thought of nobody else on the road, or, thus, in life.
