End Time

by G. A. Matiasz

  The Spanish Monarchy’s refusal to recognize San Cristobal’s independence extended to not locating the Andean republic on official maps of Spain’s New World Empire, and not acknowledging its existence in diplomatic dealings with other world powers of the age. Not only did this drop San Cristobal from the world’s atlases, it allowed autarchy to bloom into total isolationism under siege. In turn, this blended into complete anonymity under quarantine. When Bolivar and Martin liberated South America, San Cristobal quite literally, deliberately dropped out of history. The country’s red, blue and green flag had no witness other than the valleys’ inhabitants, as commerce with the outside world was rare and one way. What necessities were needed, the republic’s government obtained through strictly clandestine trade. San Cristobalan traders in Chile claimed to be from Argentina, and the reverse, so as to preserve the Andean nation’s anonymity. Yet it remained the Shambhala of humanity’s Left wing. A mythic refuge for freedom fighters, it started its reputation by taking in the followers of Tupac Amaru fleeing the Spanish Imperial crackdown. It absorbed many of the refugees from Europe’s 1848 liberal and romantic revolutions and the transitional 1871 Paris Commune. All the while San Cristobal was to the 19th century what Switzerland was to the 20th; an isolationist, prosperous, democratic capitalist republic.

  Then came the influx of proletarians in flight from 1918 Germany, 1918-22 Russia, 1919-20 Mexico, 1919-21 United States, and 1921-24 Italy. San Cristobal’s transition to a council communist society in 1929 was virtually bloodless as revolutions go; a portend of future developments. Spanish CNT and FAI immigrants after 1938 shifted the country’s social organization toward anarchism, deepening its commitment to bottom-up federalism. The red-and-black flag, which was raised without violence in 1929, was in turn done away with, replaced with nothing. B. Traven stayed in San Cristobal for a time in the late 1950’s, but ultimately returned to die in Mexico. The early 1960’s witnessed a peaceful “green revolution” in San Cristobal, which also saw women in the valleys successfully assert sexual equality in what still had been a substantially Latin culture. The assemblies of San Cristobal voted in 1995, against all of their isolationist traditions, to take part in the world and its “community of nations,” in order to promote its version of the social project. Southern Mexico became its first substantive intervention into the outside world.

  Twenty-first century San Cristobal is an interweaving of selected post-industrial technologies with a self conscious culture of voluntary simplicity. Some 1,290,000 people live in the valleys. The main urban arcology, the capital Tupac Amaru, climbs the western wall of the second valley and is home to a third of the population. Every valley habitat outside of the urban arcologies focuses a number of decentralized energy sources with intensive farming—soil, hydroponic and aquaculture—alongside hobby home industries. Photovoltaic and geothermal energy sources supply San Cristobal. Breakthrough hydroponics and protein farming feed it. Automated, pollution free, compact heavy industries supply it. Much of the country’s industry and agriculture is built into the cliffs, in natural and artificial caverns, so that the valley floors are cultivated in intentional wildness. A network of geosync satellites, launched clandestinely in the late 1960’s from scientific platforms adrift in the world’s wide oceans, can link the country into the world media. Autonomist computer hardware and software allow it to cut into the international information web without the world detecting it. Laser and particle beam weapons run by popular militias defend it. State-of-the-science photon displacement fields camouflage it. And a horizontal, neighborhood by city, factory by industry democracy governs it, aided by an inclusive, participatory media net.

  At the same time, virtually every San Cristobalan is a mountaineer and survivalist by upbringing. A Cristobalan can repair electronic solid state as readily as she or he can repair a primitive iron plow. Most every 12-year-old can teach an advanced lesson or two in mountain warfare to US special forces. And the citizenry evinces an absolute disdain for possessions, as well as a joyful, voluntary communalism, both culturally reinforced by adoption of native American cultural elements, so that freedom is equated with not being tied down by too many things, and good character with the capacity to share.

  If, as some claim, socialism was betrayed by the counter-revolutionary ultra-Leftism of a Trotsky, Bukharin, Kollantai, or Pannekoek, and the liberalism of a Gorbachev, then San Cristobal is socialism’s Clytemnestra, or Fanny Kaplan. If, on the other hand, socialism was betrayed by the Jacobinism of a Lenin and Trotsky, and the Bonapartism of a Stalin, Mao and Castro, as others maintain, then San Cristobal is socialism’s Penelope and resurrected Rosa Luxemburg. The citizens of those distant valleys do not bother themselves with matters of loyalty or betrayal on such a cosmic scale. They simply live the way they always have and enjoy their good fortune.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Greg woke just before dawn, in the New Afrika Center bunk room he had been assigned to with Smoke and others. Woke from a strange dream. The dream setting was his memories of last academic year’s Liberated Zone put on by Smoke and the MDRG at ASU on May 1. It incorporated many of their other theatrical pieces; butcher paper strewn with art utensils taped to the sidewalks leading to Remley Plaza, and plenty of cannabis circulating. Large plywood panels, hinged together so that they could stand free, displayed revolutionary posters from a variety of historic periods across the side fronting the library arcologies. An open microphone highlighted a free speech soapbox amidst the usual MDRG circus chaos; erotic mime around the fountain, a modest sized chess field drawn next to the administration fortress with students and junior professors playing pieces on the field, tanks of nitrous oxide on the grass with people lined up for hits, an annihilation derby of robotic machines constructed by a circle of graduate students and designed to rip each other limb from limb in a maximum display of pyrotechnics, etc. But the show stopper had been set in the plaza, dead center.

  There, the MDRG constructed a suburban living room, sans the walls. Plush blue carpeting defined what at first most who traversed the plaza treated as an art exhibit. A large sofa and small, old easy chair bracketed a coffee table Uttered with up-to-date quick news and personality mags, not to mention an ashtray full of cigarette butts and several empty Coors beer bottles. The corner arrangement faced a long home entertainment cabinet. Its video ran suggestive softcore German beer advertising loops, the CD/DAT blazed the latest ultra-synch neodisco beat, and the small holodeck modeled an anatomically correct human brain, a computer generated graphic which rotated for several minutes before detonating, finally to leave a smoldering stem before the repeat. A large, old set of golf clubs rested in their golf bag against the back of the couch. And, slouched into the couch, a well-dressed mannequin sprawled, its wrists slit by a broken Coors bottle. The mannequin and couch were covered in fake blood. Several more Coors bot-ties lay scattered about on the rug. Three pieces of commentary underscored this exhibit. Two lengths of butcher paper invited audience comment with the questions: “Why did he do it?” and “Who is he?” And a title for the piece had been scrawled across the plaza’s stones, reading “Suburban Suicide.”

  Spray painted on a blank wall of the Humanities/Social Science complex was the slogan: “It Is Forbidden To Forbid.” Sandwich board signs at all entrances to the plaza informed folks in a variety of languages that: “You Are Now Leaving The American Sector.”

  In real life, people had been slow to invade the apparent art piece. But, as the day progressed, and the MDRG’s marijuana and other drugs made the rounds, students started sitting with the mannequin and reading the coffee table magazines. Soon, they discovered the box of drugs hidden under the cushions of the easy chair packed with large, mutant kief buds from Larry’s farms, and a container of 300 very expensive and very illegal Rita derms, saturated with the latest, powerful, Swiss concoction of neural stimulants. As the crowd distributed the derms, applied them, and combined them with the smoke, the tone in the plaza heightened.

  First
, they took the golf clubs to the home entertainment center. They shattered and broke up the equipment, culminating as the mannequin was shoved, head first, through the video screen. The old easy chair was quickly broken up, as was the coffee table. A burly knot of males, with a few females, managed to heft and angle up the home entertainment cabinet. With a labored run they tossed the large, boxy object end over, and it exploded into splintering wood, slivered glass and plastic, and scattering solid state parts. The same demolition crew however failed to make more than a dent in the solidly built couch, even after eight fervent tosses. Apparently they abandoned their efforts, only to have the couch first wisp and then billow white smoke. Someone had wedged their lit cigarette beneath the cushions. Ironically, the MDRG wound up running around for fire extinguishers to desperately, unsuccessfully put out the smoldering piece of furniture. The campus fire department finally had to be summoned to douse it cold.

  In his dream, encapsulated time loops shuffled together. Putting out the couch fire occupied him, incongruously at the same time a group of people worked setting up the Suburban Suicide display to begin with. Janet worked among the latter group. She waved once, but otherwise remained preoccupied with her work. Greg did not wave, his hands full with putting out the burning sofa. He simply stared after her, watching her work. Rachel, Margaret and Lori were also in the dream, though he remembered them vaguely, as if they were not fully formed images on the edges of his attention.

  Next to his clothes piled on the floor, he found the Timpo grenade’s shell he had placed there the night before. The soldier who had helped him unload the truck, Gabriel, had been assigned the bunk room as well, and he had given it to Greg.

  “How’d it get this way?” Greg asked, from his corner cot.

  “Captain had me take a case o’ them grenades to a machine shop coupla blocks away,” Gabe relayed. “They cut them open to extract the explosive, don’t ask me why. Anyway, when I saw the empty grenade casings, I thought they might make a smart souvenir.”

  “Thanks,” Greg had accepted the empty grenade. He left it on his cot in the morning. He dressed quietly, made sure he had his arm band on, and tiptoed out of the room. Smoke’s bunk was empty. The center’s activity was muted, though not entirely still. Two women and a man talked softly over fragrant cups of tea in the foyer. They smiled at him as he walked past. The girl at the switchboard was engrossed in a book, a serial romance.

  “Can I use the phone?” Greg asked.

  “Sure,” she said and gave him a wide smile. He called around Alabaster until he woke a member of the recycling coop scheduled to make the run that morning. He explained his situation as well as the truck’s location. When he hung up he silently hoped that the man he had given it to last night had lived up to his promise.

  “Where you headed,” the girl asked, lowering the book.

  “Breakfast, first,” Greg smiled, “Then I think I’ll walk around the city and see what there is to see.”

  “Maybe 111 still be here when you get back,” she winked, “111 show you around this town.”

  Greg blushed and stepped out, into the fog worried streets of the Oakland Free Territory. Across the street, at the Commons, a cluster of people helped unload a truckload of food stuffs. He joined the group, gulping down coffee the consistency of thin mud from a paper cup in between carrying large vats of hot breakfast in through the front doors.

  “There’s a central kitchen for each five or six commons,” Freddie, one of the servers explained, “That’s where the food’s cooked. We can keep it warm. It’d be too much effort to put in a kitchen at every commons. Not now at least.”

  A line had formed by the time they finished. They got to head it up, first helping each other, then alternating bites of breakfast while serving others.

  “Thems that work, get fed first,” Freddie chuckled. Breakfast was a choice between biscuits and gravy, a scramble of real and powdered eggs, cream-of-wheat by the gallon, fried and fresh scallions, hard boiled eggs, dozens of loaves of bread, buckwheat groats and milk, and an array of whole fruits and vegetables. Greg had a little eggs on his biscuits and gravy, alongside sliced tomato and more coffee. He worked off his meal with several hours serving breakfast to others. Those in line at this early hour were mainly Liberation soldiers. When more help, and more diners arrived, he took the opportunity to stroll about the city

  The hazy morning sun stretched opposite clouds forming in the west. Lots of people were already up and about, the pace leisurely. Only cars, buses or trucks with the New Afrika seal, identical to his arm band, cruised the street. The rest of the population’s autos were parked. When he passed a gas station, he noticed it guarded by a militia woman. Large boxes and crates crammed with empty bottles and piles of rags cut into strips waited in the mechanics bay; quick assembly molotovs as weapons of last resort.

  On a corner further along, a three story office building bore the crudely painted sign: Women’s Shelter. Greg glanced in. A woman behind the counter read a magazine. Another woman, very pregnant, sat knitting in a chair near the stairwell.

  “Excuse me.” Greg said politely, “What is this place?”

  “Home fo’ the homeless,” the knitting woman said, not missing a stitch, not looking up.

  “And for the resented, and the battered, and the unloved, and the unwanted,” the counter woman looked up from her magazine, “Why you asking?”

  “I’m just visiting Oakland,” Greg admitted, “Kind of a tourist.”

  “That band says you more than that,” she raised an eyebrow, “Say’s you support and guard New Afrika.”

  “Guess I kind of know Captain Morris Johnson,” Greg said.

  The woman knitting stopped, looked Greg up and down critically, humphed, and continued her needlework.

  “How’s this place work?”

  “The women, we run it,” the woman rustled her magazine, as if impatient to return to its contents, “We got house rules. No drugs. No male guests. No parties. The girls, we run it, democratic-like. We set up the clean up schedules. We keep the peace, and we enforce the rules.”

  “Was this here?” Greg persisted, “Before...”

  “The original project operated out of a church basement,” she suddenly looked tired, “Could only hold a dozen, maybe eighteen. So, after Liberation, we found this place. Hakim turned it up for us actually. It was a vacant office building, til we converted it last Friday. Now we got two hundred women here. It’s like a dormitory. It’s safe ‘cause we don’t allow cooking in the rooms. There’s a Commons right down the way.”

  “It’s gotten a little too big, if you ask me,” the knitter stopped momentarily, “Awkward as hell to run this size, and hard to keep people to their responsibilities. More fights.”

  “Like the one I’m gonna have with the girl whose time I’m covering on the counter ‘cause she didn’t come home last night.”

  “Thanks for your information,” Greg smiled, and left them to their morning. City buses ran, not exactly on schedule, but giving good coverage of New Afrika. Greg grabbed one, not sure where it was headed.

  “Why not keep them running?” Roy, the bus driver, spoke over his shoulder as he drove, “Folks still gotta get around. Young and old particularly need the bus. Not everybody’s got a car, and the Coalition’s nationalized all the gas. The Union was the one actually decided to keep the buses running. They went to the Coalition when the Transit Authority, what remained of it, didn’t want to go along. Lotsa things Union run now.”

  “You’re not getting paid are you?”

  “Well, not technically,” Roy swung the bus over to the curb on the relatively empty street. People got on and off without fare. “I mean, no one knows where all of this is going. I’m just doing my bit to keep it on its way. You know, what you might want to catch is The Wall. They painted it on Friday. It’s a couple of stops up.”

  A long stretch of wall isolating an industrial park was now a community mural. It began, on the left, with key revolutio
nary figures— Garvey, King, Malcolm X, Zapata, Villa, Chavez, Gerónimo, Joseph— and scrolled to the right with scenes of common people working, creating, celebrating, playing, and defending themselves. The wall was part outdoor polytech mural paint, part vibrant spray paint, part expropriated house paints in a panoply of styles. A crew of juveniles busied themselves with detail work at the far corner.

  Four men in two trucks worked among the derelict cars in a more residential neighborhood near The Wall.

  “We was here yesterday,” one of the crew said, “Asking “bout these heaps o’junk. They’re abandoned all right.”

  “So you’re cleaning up the streets.” Greg jumped to the conclusion, watching the men snake chains wherever they could among the rusted metal and flaked paint.

  “Yeh, that too,” the man shrugged, “But these wrecks gonna build up the barricades. We takin’ these to the front, so as key areas ‘round the city can be blocked ‘gainst invasion.”

  Two people argued on a street corner further along. A man and a woman yelled at each other at a considerable volume, about him staying out all night and about her not being woman enough for him. Typical lover’s quarrel. A modest crowd of neighbors had gathered to hear them out, probably not for the first time given their amusement and side comments. When she started impugning his lovemaking and his manhood, he smacked her. The crowd responded quickly. Two women and a man jumped him and immediately pulled him back. Another woman stepped out of the bystanders. She dressed down the man, lecturing him, finger wagging, about how he was the neighborhood bully and why was he picking on someone smaller and weaker than him. Another male in the crowd, about the same size and build, swaggered out and offered to take on the original man in a “fair fight.” The women did not appreciate the challenging display. Only after a good deal of effort did they calm things down.