The Saints of David (The Jonah Trilogy Book 3)

by Anthony Caplan

  Corporate Union of the Atlantic

  In the bar of the Maruequin there were a lot of boys singing all at once. It was the Hajduk supporters' club night. They sang:

  Na Poljudu, Na Poljudu

  Sa one strane Marjana

  Navijamo, navijamo,

  Navijamo za Hajduka!

  Ale ale, ale ale, ale ale ale ale,

  Ale ale, ale ale, ale ale ale...

  Their facial structures were heterogenous, their skin wet with sweat, but their eyes all had an intense, nostalgic blaze. Ludmilla thought sadly of the old purpose of keeping these organic lines of males honed around the world for reproductive work. It did not exist anymore, since the production of sperm lines had extended out in so many branches of specialization. But the spectacles of sport were still a component of the sedative patterning of mass culture, part of the Augment’s ability to rule so effectively. And some of them were good looking enough to catch her eye. Her companion, Fatima Khan-Schwab, kept laughing at her own tales of confusion and travel. She had gotten lost at the Strasbourg Tubit hub and ended up somewhere in Mongolia. There had been some lexical challenges, and the local word for water, if repeated rapidly enough, to Fatima sounded like a bodily function. Ludmilla stared at Fatima’s teeth. They glistened with healthy saliva. There was something forward and telling about her mouth. However, there was also something of decrepitude, rotten old age, that would need to be remedied at the ribonucleic level. Ludmilla tried so hard not to get lost in her own thoughts. She put her hand on Fatima’s hand. They locked eyes. Ludmilla saw Fatima’s acquiescence. The bottomless, fearless quality of how she accepted things that happened to her. She was the daughter of Chicago trade specialists and had gone to work as a Program Receipt for the Atreid Group in Evanston when Ludmilla had been there in her mid-twenties, interning with her cousin Hans’s Water Rights and Soil Carbon Remediation brief.

  “I’m so happy you made it,” said Ludmilla.

  Fatima smiled wisely, although she was probably just hungry.

  “You want to hear what I would like? I can see it now so clearly,” said Ludmilla.

  “I know. My child,” said Fatima sagely.

  “But it would be so perfect. Just look at these boys. Any one of them.”

  “How would it be? We’re never together.”

  “Well, of course. We’d have to make those decisions. I would spend more time at home and less traveling.”

  “But you never really talk to me, Ludmilla. You never really tell me anything.”

  It was Ludmilla’s turn to laugh. She raised her hand and waved at the waiter skulking stealthily by. He looked at her sourly and goose-stepped over to their table with an old Exe-tablet.

  “Two pints of scrumpy and two more glasses of grappa, if you would. Oh, and bring my dear friend a bowl of your best barley and mutton soup,” said Ludmilla.

  “Certainly,” said the waiter, retiring.

  “It’s a house specialty,” said Ludmilla.

  “I would have thought it was split pea.”

  “Oh, you’re so funny.”

  The soup and drinks came. Fatima ate and then excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. A motley group of older men and women at a nearby table vaped, and the smell of the tobacco and lemon oil mixed with the smells of the nearby port and the soapy, steroidal Hajduk boys. Ludmilla sipped at the grappa and thought of the artisanal pleasures more widely available in the Old World. The fashion in Akron and San Bernardino was still stuck on a night of pills and porn at the local. Fatima was here already and Antwine and Jesus were coming later that week. She could introduce them to a wider network of possibilities and have the added pleasure of mentoring. In the long term, there was the possibility of a family and adding to the Dimitrievsky lineage. Her generation was slow in that respect.

  The night air was frigid. It sobered them somewhat. The Hajduk boys were spilling out on the street in small groups and walking bravely with arms linked up the avenue. They surrounded Ludmilla and Fatima and wolfishly pranced. Fatima laughed, and Ludmilla moved them off with some wads of crisp, oversized CUA bills she tossed behind her. They escaped into the back of a porterbot.

  The next morning, Ludmilla watched the first light streaming through the large upstairs window in the house on the terraced hill facing the east. She walked over and slid the terrace door open. The air was cold and wet with the mistral blowing in from around the corner. Fatima lay in bed awake. Augments never slept. She sprawled under the sheets. Ludmilla pulled the curtain back to bring more light in the room. She snapped a reality check of the shadows and beige tones of the rumpled bed with the reposing body of her lover and posted it to her official timeline, as required of Secretariat members. It was a pretty and pleasing sight, but something odd scratched at the corner of her consciousness, a lack, some gap in synthetic thought. The Augment was not providing her with enough data force. There was a utility fault. She seemed to feel these more intensely as she got older -- the emotion deficit of the present tense. Some of the engineers thought that it could be fixed with more efficient linguistic programming. The lines of an Emily Dickinson poem were coming to mind:

  Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

  We can find no scar,

  But internal difference,

  Where the Meanings, are –

  She hadn’t thought of Emily Dickinson since her undergraduate years -- her lecture course with Quince Vully on the art of pre-modern man. The “internal difference.” Was that a reference to her and Fatima? Sometimes it wasn’t clear what the Augment intended. Maybe a walk in the hills would be a good idea, she thought. When Fatima got out of bed that was what they would do. And she would talk directly to Fatima about her fears: the Oort cloud and the need to inject chaos in the system, squeeze more raw inputs from the creative class, and the possible disruptions that would cause. It wasn’t easy being a Dimitrievsky.

  Chapter Three - December 6, 2072

  Sealscroft, Maine,

  Republican Homeland of North America

  It was his task to write coherently on the historical subject of the disillusionment of the modernist state. The paper was intended for the informal quarterly publication of social science pensioners, The Radical Pragmatist. He liked to keep his arm warm, so to speak, in the academic fields, waiting to be struck by real inspiration and make a significant contribution in narrative to the Augment. But it was increasingly difficult. He was distracted. Regrets and memories came out of nowhere. Fragments of thoughts and insights flitted through his brain as if inhabited by another personality, another time. Especially late at night. And even in sleep he could not escape the recurring dreams. He saw his father buried deep in the earth in some inescapable cavern. Next to his father, buried in the mud of ages, was always a strange machine. What was that machine? What was it for? Was his dream telling him to somehow rescue his father, years after his death? He thought the answer lay in one of his father’s books. He had all of them scattered in the collection lining every foot of wall space in the cabin. There was one missing, Al Lyons's last work: Aviation and the Long Night. It had been his lifelong desire to find it. Even after all these years his happiness lay somehow bound up in the legacy of his father, the Democravian writer that had fought so long and so hard and in the end fruitlessly against the embryonic Repho state and its model of public opinion control. Ricky felt always that he had been a disappointment to the old man, accepting the Augment against his recommendations and taking his place in that flawed Democravian societal experiment that had fallen in time to the Republican Homeland’s sturdier governing precepts.

  He was tired and would sleep soon. It was one of the pleasures of being off the Augment, this tiredness of mental effort and knowing it would be replenished by the morning with a good night’s sleep and the rejuvenating connections made to the world beyond, the world of dreams.

  The light from the old fashioned incandescent bulb flickered, as the wind raged in the first nor’easter of the winter. The cat jumped on the
desk and walked across the ancient chrome keyboard, arching its back as he picked it up and put it on his lap. He looked into the cat’s eyes. It soothed his jumping heart. He thought what a comfort it was to him. Like all animals, it yearned for companionship.

  It had been just him and a succession of cats for several years. The cabin was greatly changed by the presence of Gretchen in the next room, lying in bed asleep. He could hear her wheezing with the asthmatic, ex-smoker’s whine. She’d been a mixed blessing since she’d moved in after the equinox. She had appeared, as wild as the ocean current, a revelation and a harbor stirring in the light of the bonfire that autumn night. The island’s storytellers around the circle had ascended spiralling, ever wider avenues of song and invention when they saw the fire reflected in her eyes. Her flaxen hair lay damp and wet now on the pillow in the only other room in the house. She was prone to fits of depression, and her inspired rants were sometimes directed at all men, including him, as if he were to blame. She’d been hurt. And like many, her hope was filtered through layers of suspicion and desires.

  She was not a quiet soul -- very different from most of the people on the island. Sometimes an islander would resort to years of silence in order to persevere with an artistic whimsy. He had done it himself, counting on his almost telepathic communion with his daughter Corrag to get him through the lonely stretches. He thought of her now. Sometimes it was like the wind, her voice whispering a soft greeting full of tender, resigned wisdom. He wondered about her life, his grandson Arthur’s evasions of the choices facing his generation, his son-in-law Ben’s simple dodges to get them bread. Tonight, he could only hope she was safe. In a world out of hope, these familiar desires for the safety of loved ones were the only thing left.

  It was a meager but satisfying existence, he thought. Even with his daughter thousands of miles away and the strange dreams assaulting his peace of mind. He had his cup of cold island water, his cat, the woman in his bed and the words on the screen, assembled into ideas that would feed into the current of the Augment and gain for the island a few grains of freedom. It was valued work, although he sometimes wished he could trade it for a spot as deckhand on a lobster boat, hauling in the pots at night, in the strange luminescent waters of the rocky coast, the odd light bobbing in the distant land from a cottager burning the midnight oil in a similar quest as his for new ideas. After all he was not as much of an original as he fancied. The rewards of manual labor were a more direct and healthy relationship with the elements. But his body was getting to that stage of inelasticity that would have made such a scenario difficult to envision. He reminded himself that the satisfaction and mystery of his work was of a higher order, however difficult it was for the average Augment denizen to understand. For the most part, the augmented took their mental energy source for granted, not realizing that their life of ease and security in the neural network, even as it guaranteed health and longevity, came at the price of initiative and free will, and was based on the presumption of constant inputs of new information structures. The Creatives, gathered and sustained in Living Water centers, did the work reserved for them by the Repho Department of Education, which for reasons of bureaucratic history was charged with the administration of Augment downloads in the Homeland. Overseas acquisitions were contracted out to the diplomatic corps. The firewall was not foolproof, and he knew several former acquaintances who had moved from one side to the other, from the life of a hermetically sealed, yet free Creative to the greater power and access to the mental and physical goods afforded by the Augment.

  What he didn’t yet understand was the empty heart he felt on nights like this when the wind blew. These were the languages of matter, the various dialects of the planet itself that he was beginning to discern. He felt he hadn’t paid them enough attention. He still had some ambition, but it was dissipating. According to Corrag, it was only when ambition had burned itself out that the heart could understand what the wind was whistling. He missed her and wished he could see her, engage in those nights of talk in the quiet cabin, waiting, always waiting for the words to come. He needed to move, to keep the blood flowing, the ideas coming, not so much for the Repho but for his own salvation.

  There was a cry from the other room. She was dreaming badly, or maybe something had woken her. He should go see. Slowly, he rose to his feet. He crossed the cabin’s central room and opened the bedroom door. The moon was a slanted, thick strap, cupped on the eastern horizon, giving just enough light to make a fragmenting cone of reflection on the water. He turned and looked to the bed. Her teeth were showing. She seemed to be in some pain. He closed the door and went to the bedside. He couldn’t bring himself to touch her.

  “Gretchen,” he called in the moonlight softly, stooping to get closer to her ear. “Are you having a bad dream?”

  “Aaargh!” she sat up and stared at him with wide eyes, as if seeing a ghost.

  “What is it?” he asked, straightening. She gripped his arm and tugged him down on the bedside.

  “Hold me. Can’t you hold me?”

  “Are you being hysterical? What is wrong with you?”

  “I just need touch. A human touch. Is that asking too much? You and your thoughts. You keep your own company. Selfish.”

  “No, that’s not right. I love you.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don't know,” he said exasperatedly.

  She relaxed her grip, and he slid his arm away. Thinking ahead, he sat down on the bed by her side. She was not ready to be alone. She would need more time, perhaps something new, a twist. He could ask her about her family, her childhood. She didn’t like to talk about the past, but in an unguarded moment they could break through. Perhaps this was the time to show that concern, that love she was always talking about.

  He didn’t know what love was. He’d been married to Alana for twenty years. They’d raised Corrag and lived conventional lives in the Democravian Augment before his demotion and the years of turmoil during which the Republican Homeland reclaimed continental hegemony. He stroked the hair on the pillow.

  “You know you need me. Without me you’d have nobody. Just you and the cat in here. It’s not healthy,” said Gretchen.

  She was better, her voice less screechy. She reached for the book by her bedside and flipped through the pages. She stopped on one and read. She was reading one of his books, something by Doris Lessing. South African writer, big personality. Traveled and lived in England. Gretchen liked England. What was left of it, anyway. They both looked for answers in books. That’s why he had so many. He needed to expand the cabin to make more room.

  “Deven's coming tonight,” she said, looking up and past him to the rest of the house. It was like she read his mind. She'd heard his stories about Deven. Deven was going to help him plan and build the wing on the cabin for his library.

  “I know,” he answered.

  “I didn’t think you’d forget. He’s traveled far.”

  “I know.”

  Ricky walked to the kitchen counter and took a crust of bread, carrying it to his mouth. He chewed slowly, tasting the crumbs and the crust. Deven and him in Florida, crazy surfers. Now Deven lived in Galway. As a coincidence, or maybe not, they’d both ended up living off-augment in their dotage. But Deven was truly out on the fringe.

  He was coming for a few days, he said, to get away from his unnamed trouble and help Ricky with any projects he had for him to do. Ricky had mentioned the library. Told Deven he could stay for as long as he needed. It was good to be settled in a Living Water community like the island and be able to offer refuge to the troubled ones. In some ways Ricky was jealous of Deven and his outlaw life, but he liked his comforts. He thought he wouldn’t trade it for Deven’s freedom. He tried to have it both ways, to do something honest and good and yet be safe from repercussions. But it was possible that he could still get something wrong, step in shit unwittingly in his writing. That was the price they paid, the Creatives. Free
dom was essentially a fiction, like the voices in his head. He was just a useful tool and could be laid aside or discarded at any moment. He tried to be careful, but he paid a price for that, too. Something wild was dying in him. He could feel it, like the buzz in a missing limb; his spirit soul was missing. Every detail in the environment was a clue to a puzzle beyond his range of attention. And yet he would not be augmented again. That was the biggest hurt, the irreversible damage of the Augment. The inheritance he had sold out for a professorship, a house and a respectable place at the tables of council in Edmundstown. It had all just rotted out the core somehow. Art, love, friendship -- they had come a long way towards reconnecting him, but he was still in rehab. He had to live on an island because he was one.

  He picked up a book and went to sit under the other lamp. They both read. The unaugmented still had their books, those objects of paper and ink, old glass screens and lighted displays and strange ribbons of letters. That was where they downloaded pieces of heart. They were still sentimental about words, the trails of tears and truth, reminders of why certain people were proud of the stubborn, questing nature of the old ones, the hard wiring that meant they could never be at peace, but also never vanquished. That had been true. But entertainment had tipped the scales in favor of the rule of technocracy over the masses wishing for freedom from care rather than answers to vague questions they did not know how to name.

  “But I’ll need six days. I’ve already worked it out on the abacus. Six days and not before.”

  Page 357. Dostoyevsky started the book in the fall of 1869. Two hundred years ago he had sat at a similar table and written those words in his head, projected now on the screen of Ricky's mind. And why did this matter? There was a clue in the moment. Ricky could sense it below the horizon of understanding. The relationships provided details about the spin of events down to this very second inside him, his thoughts about Gretchen, Deven, his life on the island, where and when it would likely spin next. There was a measure in the wobbly night. The walls were contracting and expanding with the breath of the planet. They were all apart and yet a part. Ricky had not reconnected his heart and mind. His limbic nature was wounded, but sometimes he felt that he was close to the truth. That was a burning, buzzing sensation. But his thoughts were not clear. He decided he needed some brandy. The bottle was behind the house in the crawl space.