“Did you know,” he muttered between gritted teeth, “that the estimated number of squatters in Texas actually increased last month?”
“No, I didn’t, Luca,” Minden responded politely. She always paid strict attention to everything that Luca said, no matter how disruptive to her own thoughts at the time. And she took great care to respond to him in an intelligent manner. “Can you tell why it’s happened? Do you think it’s those arrogant cowboys riding the ranges again, or do you think the Sixth Directorate is slipping?”
Turning lightly, she struck a pose in front of the immense mirror. Raising her arms high above her head, she concentrated on arranging her fingers in the most graceful pose possible, and repeated the little choreography twice more. That was it. It was looking very natural, very graceful now . . .
Luca frowned, concentrating, and shuffled a few more papers. “I just can’t tell. It would seem that the Sixth Directorate is stretched a little thin in the Konza Biome. It’s so vast, and those Texans are boron-headed people. They just refuse to understand. That’s all. They just refuse to.”
“I know, Luca, I know,” she sighed, practicing sweeping her arms out to the sides in an all-encompassing love-the-universe gesture. “It’s such an oddity, too, since the rest of that biome is so easy to manage. Nebraskans and Kansans beg to be assigned to the co-ops, and never wander out into the biosphere.”
She liked that particular finger arrangement, and she’d hit it by chance. With concentration she gestured until she captured it again, and then practiced until it became easy and unthinking.
She really was a lovely woman; even she saw it clearly. Her platinum hair was incandescent, her skin was like purest milk, her body shaped like every man’s dream. Her features, though surgically enhanced, were as near to perfect as a human being’s could be, and Minden had never been afflicted with that tight-edged, unreal look that some unfortunate women developed after extensive corrections. Minden had even had her jaws broken and reshaped when she thought she could discern an asymmetry in her full-face shots on Cyclops. She was satisfied with her looks, for now, at least, though it might be time for another touchup around her neck and under her chin before long. She was twenty-eight, looked twenty-two, and intended to stay that way for a long time.
“I’d better meet with the chief commissar tomorrow,” Luca said heavily. “We need to gain control of this situation before it gets out of hand. I’ll see what the Sixth Directorate needs to keep those renegades out of the biosphere areas. The First, Second, and Third Directorates are about 85 percent under control, except for those obnoxious little pockets of militants in Texas. It’s imperative that we keep the West, at least, under control while we’re struggling so hard in the Fourth and Fifth Directorates.” The Fourth and Fifth Directorates were the overseers of the Man and Biosphere Project in the eastern half of the United States.
“How long, Luca?” Minden sighed tragically. “How long before all of our beloved land is whole and free of this terrible plague we’ve inflicted on her?” Minden exuded such an earthy and a sensual power, she was one of the few persons in the world who could speak with such melodrama and be wholly believable. Millions of women wept, and many men got a lump in their throats, when listening to her live comms every day.
Even Luca was bewitched by her passionate pleas. Throwing down his papers, he stood and walked to the north windows to view the street below. It was empty, for it was only a little past dawn on a Tuesday morning. Of course, in this exclusive section of Virginia, with such a sparse population remaining, the century-old streets were never crowded, anyway.
“I don’t know, Minden,” he murmured. “It seems that we can never get a firm grasp on it, can we? We lose our direction, our life’s determination, our driving force, and get lost in the tables and charts and live comms of the day. We need a—a significant event. We need something stirring, something life-altering. An impetus, a mandate, that people can see as clearly as a torch on a mountaintop.”
Minden grew very still and finally turned away from her enchanted reflection. “What do you mean, exactly, Luca? I know you aren’t thinking of just another approach to the education, or more funding for the project, but I can’t . . . do you mean, an inspiration? A spiritual change in the hearts of these blind and ignorant humans who are so befouling our loving earth? But how? How can we make them see?”
He turned and gave her a grave smile. “You do it every day, My Lady of Light.”
“You’re so kind to me . . . ,” she murmured.
“Not at all. I merely answered your question. You do it, Minden, by the force and purity of your beliefs and the spiritual strength that you’ve gained from them. But no one else seems to be able to touch people the way you do, and even you have limitations. Sometimes people must be shocked out of their complacency, or their ignorance, or their deliberate blindness.”
“But how?” she asked plaintively. In her deepest heart she wanted the blind to see the truths that it seemed sometimes only she and Luca truly understood.
“I don’t know, I just can’t think of a way, or a method, or a tool, or even a beginning. Sometimes I think that the earth must do it herself. She must avenge herself for the terrible wrongs done her. Sometimes I think only a tragedy, grinding hardship, or terrible loss will bring people to a place where they can understand that we must stop killing this earth, now, not tomorrow, not later, not someday!”
He was on the verge of rage, and with his deeply ingrained politic self-control he made himself calm down. Luca was always a little surprised at how very deeply he felt about the earth, about each and every part of it, from the air to the soil to the wild animals to the rocks. The depth of his anger at man’s trespass on the earth, and man’s criminal ignorance of the power they disdained in it, amazed him sometimes. But he never analyzed his rage too closely. He had decided, long ago, that such close dissection might be a psyche-damaging thing to do to himself, when his mission was pure and far from finished. Luca comfortably decided that he needed that righteous anger for the agonizingly difficult task he must accomplish: the saving of the earth herself.
Minden had become intent, standing still and motionless, a faraway look on her perfect face. Finally she roused and came over to Luca’s luxuriant half of the room. Sitting on one of the gold-brocade sofas, she patted the seat beside her. Like a loyal terrier, Luca sat down close, his eyes burning as he listened to her every word, relished every nuance.
“Early yesterday morning,” she began in a reverent voice, “I had a visit from a friend. Alia Silverthorne, the third commissar of the Shortgrass Steppe Biome.”
“I remember her,” Luca said thoughtfully. “Young woman, well-suited to the commissary. Dedicated member of Earth’s Light.”
“Yes,” Minden said modestly at the mention of her enormous “church.” “And a dedicated friend to me, too. She brought me some news of a new earth-being, a new life-form, Luca. I’ve been meditating on it ever since. It was a sign, I knew it then, but I couldn’t exactly divine the portent. But I knew it was a strong sign, a vivid sign, that it would be a source of power to me. To us. For our sweet Lady Earth.”
Luca’s voice was hushed with awe. “A new life-form? A special sign to us? How can you be certain?”
She smiled a Madonna’s smile. “The name of the new life form is Thiobacillus chaco. ‘Chaco’ means ‘children of light.’”
Luca said nothing; he merely swallowed hard, his face drawn with passion, his eyes blazing with dark fires.
“This morning, just now, I have seen what this portends, Luca. I’ve seen, as you yourself said, that the earth herself is defending herself. She’s given us, her most dedicated guardians and lovers, the tool.”
“Tell me.”
Minden nodded and took a few moments, both to decide how to begin and for dramatic effect. Then she began in a more prosaic tone, “Forty years ago, Luca, you know very well that the military establishment in this country had diminished in power, in size, in approp
riations, in respect—in every way.”
“Yes,” he responded with a hint of puzzlement.
“And then what happened?”
“Libya. Those stupid, accursed savages. The aborted missile attack. On American soil!” He felt gall rising, bitter and strong, in his throat. It wasn’t because the Libyans had dared to attack his country; it was because they had dirtied his ocean (even though Luca had only been two years old at the time).
The missiles had been deployed from an ancient and half-functioning Russian Typhoon-class submarine that some Duma member, probably, sold to an insanely fanatical—but oil-wealthy— jihad militant group. The old sub just stumbled through the SOSUS net, and was detected by the U.S. nuclear sub Dalton, prowling the coast of Newfoundland. Mostly it was sheer blind luck, considering the unreadiness of America’s defenses, particularly the lack of naval defenses of its own coastal waters. The first strike fell short—luckily—and all four shabby and rusted Mako missiles fell into the southern Labrador Sea. Dalton blasted the Russian sub with Harpoon missiles, and the two five-hundred-pound warheads practically dissolved the craft and, of course, all of its submariners, most of whom were mercenary Russians. The debris of the aborted missiles and the oil slick, which was all that remained of what was found out to be named Allah’s Thunder, had polluted the waters off Newfoundland for two years. Canada had grown exceedingly irritated, not with Libya, but with the United States, for dirtying up their Labrador Sea and Gulf of St. Lawrence.
“Yes, it was terrible for the coastal Atlantic ecosystems,” Minden agreed, “and that’s the only viewpoint I’ve had of it—until now. I’m sure you, however, realized the far-reaching effects of that attack on American culture.”
“Of course,” he said impatiently. “It resulted in America’s insistence on the deployment of the Strategic Defense Initiative, and then the Galaxy Guardian satellite defense systems. Expensive toys the military concocted there. But I must say, it’s an unrivaled defense mechanism that has allowed us as a people to turn to other, more important things,” he admitted grudgingly.
“Yes. But the missile strike had one more important, long-lasting effect. Even now, forty years later, the results are still with us,”
Minden prodded him gently.
“Of course, the sharpening and polishing of the armed forces and advancement in weaponry,” Luca said with an edge to his voice. “And you’re right. It’s been forty years, and still we spend money on our military as if we were on the verge of a world war. It’s absurd. No one would dare attack us, ever again, with SDI/GG systems. Finally we’ve matured as a nation, so that we’re not nosing around in every little flare-up in every little corner of the world, like the Germanic Union. Let Tor von Eisenhalt and his Goths fight in every meaningless little argument that erupts in piddling little nations. At least we’ve moved on to a higher spiritual meaning in America. Anyway, it’s obvious that even such a relatively small military presence, in our homeland, is unnecessary and redundant. But still, the American people hero-worship the military, and for some reason that I can never quite fathom, they’re proud of their hateful high-tech weaponry systems.”
The American people had, indeed, come to a very odd polarization in their culture, and the conflict had gelled to a curious impasse between the military and the vast and powerful Man and Biosphere Project bureaucracy.
Most Americans had supported the MAB Project, at least in theory, in the beginning. When it started, of course the average person didn’t understand that the end result would be a massive population shift—which was effected by a loss of property rights and civil liberties. But as the program advanced, the federal government quietly began to offer them exactly what they wanted: programs to take care of them, such as nationalized health and food credits; programs to shelter them, in MAB Project–subsidized housing at very low cost; blanket provisions for each person of a multimedia computer, Internet, telephone, fax, and most important, entertainment, in the form of the Cyclops system, which was standard in every MAB home in America. Still, Americans seemed not to realize the high costs of such coddling. The tax rate was more than 60 percent for most upper-middle-class and prosperous Americans. And there was no accounting for the loss of personal freedom and self-determination.
At the same time, Americans loved their shiny toy soldiers. They were young, they were highly intelligent, they were fit and strong and dedicated. They were a small, elite force, as the standards for military service had been raised high, mostly as a result of the technical expertise involved in the advanced weaponry and the lack of need for a sizable force merely to guard America’s borders. The American people paid these men and women well, too.
“But you do see my point, do you not, Luca?”
Minden’s throaty, insistent voice penetrated the fog of antimilitary resentment in his thoughts. “No, I’m afraid I don’t, love,” he answered with a touch of impatience. “The Libyan attack had far-reaching effects on the American people, of course. And ultimately it strengthened our defense capability.”
“And it gave the people a vision, it changed their hearts and minds, Luca,” Minden continued softly. “It was a significant event. It was an impetus. It was a mandate. And it made the people worship their soldiers.”
He stared at her as if he were trying to see inside her head, her mind, her thoughts. “But the missile strike was deliberate—an engineered event.”
“That artificial event resulted in a spiritual transformation. If certain circumstances came about that furthered our cause, that would get the people to see, to leave the forbidden places of wilderness and move to the co-op cities, then their hearts would follow them.”
His thoughts wandered; he admired her heavy-lidded dark eyes, such a startling contrast to her glowing hair and skin. He reflected how luscious her mouth was, and how voluptuous she was, like the richest of velvets.
He wondered if she was suggesting high treason.
He decided that she was, and one small part of his mind was appalled. But he quickly stifled that. After all, it was all for the most noble of causes: the re-wilding of the earth. And just as cauterization might be painful, so does it stop corruption, and any human would finally, ultimately, be grateful for the suffering in order to save the earth, and thereby attain a higher spiritual plane.
“As usual, my lady, you have shed some light on a dark and difficult terrain,” Luca said in a low voice. “What’s in your mind and heart, Minden? What do you see?”
“I see people weeping, afraid because they’ve offended our mother. I see people, many of them, lost, because they are blind, and ignorant, and have no love for this earth. I believe, Luca, that we can change that.”
“How?” he demanded.
She cocked her head to one side, an assessing pose, as if she were measuring him. At length, she spoke in a more matter-of-fact tone, all fey Lady of Light gone. “The ‘children of light’ is a sign that we’re nearing the source of all power. But we must be strong, and not look to the left nor the right, and stay the course.”
“I will,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll do anything, Minden, for this power. So few could wield it with meaning and purpose. But I could, with you at my side.”
Secretly Minden thought it more likely that she would wield power with him at her side, but that could wait. Now she pressed in. “Then I will begin it, Luca. I’ll call Alia, and then I’ll call Gerade von Eisenhalt.”
“Why him? Why the Germans?” Luca asked rather petulantly. Count Gerade von Eisenhalt and his son, Commandant Tor von Eisenhalt, were central figures on the world stage. Luca resented this, as he was still very much in the shadow of his chief executive, President Bishop Beckwith.
Minden answered soothingly, “We must have help, and friends who are with us and can offer us the support we need. And Luca, surely you understand that we can’t involve the president, or any of his military monkeys in this.”
“No . . . no, of course not.”
“We must look to other loya
l followers of the Earth’s Light.
Since Gerade von Eisenhalt has become the director of the UN Trusteeship Council for international oversight of the Man and Biosphere Project, he’s been our staunchest supporter. And you do recall that he is one of my distant kinsmen? Very distant, to be truthful, but he has honored me by recalling our kinship often. He will help us.”
“All right,” Luca said decisively. “Let’s begin. Set up a meeting with Count von Eisenhalt in six weeks. Get all the information on this new life-form, our newest child of earth.”
“I would also like to make the information available to Count von Eisenhalt’s German team of eco-scientists. They are so much more dedicated than American scientists. I think they’ll be able to apply the information on the ‘children of light’ in a way that will be more beneficial to us, and to our loving earth.”
“You’re right. Very well, send them all the data. And you’re certain of Commissar Silverthorne’s loyalty?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then we shall use her and a team of her own choosing as security. No military men.”
“Good,” Minden said approvingly. “Very, very good. I have begun this journey, Luca. But we both will finish it, you and I. We will triumph, no matter the cost.”
“No matter the cost,” he repeated as if in a trance.
One day he would recall those arrogant and foolish words; but on that day, he would be unable to repent of them, and so they would bind him forever.
The Beginning of Sorrows Page 10
