She heard a snap of a branch, and a figure, blacked out in the moonlight, jumped at her from a rock. She put her hands up in a fighting pose, about to strike, when the man’s hands shot to her mouth from behind. He was quick. It could only be Ben.
“Shh.”
“Mmmph.”
“Relax,” said Ben, squeezing her and clamping her mouth with one hand, the other forearm against the back of her neck. She complied. But when he let her go, she whirled and swung with an open hand, aiming for his face. He ducked, sensing her intent despite the lack of visibility. But she kicked with her knee and caught him in the ribs, sending him to the ground.
“Don’t ever sneak up on me again like that.”
“That was a mistake,” said Ben slowly getting to his knees. “Why are you so angry all the time?” he asked.
She was down by the water, staring off to the other side. She sensed that if she didn’t act now Ben's words would trap her again in the prison of all of their life together, all the compromises and bitter shortcomings. If it weren’t for Hera. Sometimes she hated her own daughter for holding up a barrier to clean solutions. Nothing would come out right.
“What’s going on?” He was up beside her now. As he reached to touch her, Corrag pulled away.
“Is it Shelley?”
Corrag shuddered, unable to hide her disgust.
“She's nothing. She’s just a little flirt.”
“Look. Don’t deny you’re attracted to her.”
“She’s half my age.”
“If you need that. Go get it. I don’t want to hold you back. If that’s who you are, far be it from me...”
“Stop.”
“Don’t touch me.”
Corrag walked out in the water. She felt it curling against her knees, pulling her in deeper. She felt its cleansing energy, the way something true and infinite could feel, and wanted to be part of it. If it was death, so be it. Death was the ultimate fear factor, the ultimate border between the known and the unknowable. With two strides she was out and going under, letting the water pull her. She imagined how it would feel, a green wall climbing inside her, pushing her over the top, unstoppable. The first taste of the water in her lungs convulsed her before she blacked out.
When Corrag sat up, she saw the fire and the people around it, halos of sparks ascending around them. She thought she was in the dimensionless universe of all-time. She managed to turn her head, and it was just Ben kneeling beside her, his thinning hair damp and slicked down on his scalp. He was studying her intently.
“I thought you were gone. I couldn’t find you.”
“I thought I was gone.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know.” She honestly couldn’t put her feelings into words. She wasn’t disappointed. She liked seeing the fire and Ben’s profile. She was ashamed of herself.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“No, I let you down. I am sorry. You shouldn’t have gone to all the trouble. I’m no good anymore, Ben. I’m cooked. I’m just going to be a liability to you and Hera. I can’t do it anymore.”
“Do what? We need you. We’ll get it together, Corrag. Believe me. There’s a cure for your disease.”
“No, there isn’t. Not according to the doctors in the Hilton.”
“What do they know? We need to find a healer, a medicine man.”
“Don’t tell me any more stories about the Naguani, Ben.”
“We can find the cure, I promise. When you hit bottom you need to listen to the spin of what’s going on out there in your force field. You will be our compass, Corrag. Listen to the spin. When we’ve hit bottom, that’s when we can find the way forward. We don’t know where we’re going. You’ve given us a purpose. We need you. I need you and Hera needs you. Don’t go on us again like that.”
There were other people around the fire. A man and woman, together, wearing slouch hats and ragged fiber wear against the cold. They sat and stared at the fire and told about where they had been. They were headed north, looking for work, looking to be augmented. Ben nodded. He understood. He didn’t dissuade them from the Augment. He knew what it meant to be poor and perpetually hungry. He was a veteran of the Basin Wars and appreciated the fact that everyone was fighting the same invisible enemies, the twin evils of want and fear. In the Basin, he had learned that all of what the people, augmented and unaugmented alike, took for granted was nothing but the ultimate hologram, the collective ideas embedded in the pulpy workings of the human brainpan. The Naguani had reached a higher level in their understanding of the illusions of duality. To the Naguani, the eternal mind was everything. It was how they understood their relation to the world, as participants in an endless revelation of the Sky God to his estranged and wounded twin, the Water God. All of the universe, seen and unseen, animate and inanimate, was the net of moves thrown up by the play of sky and water. Eventually, of course, the Naguani had forced the retreat of the technologically superior invaders from Democravia and their allies, the trained jungle troops of the Braso-Peruvian armed forces. But more to the point, their spiritual world had found a way to stick in the cross hairs of Ben and other Basin veterans and found its way home, like an invasive species of the mind, to light fires of dissent and imaginative resistance.
Ben asked them questions using a stick and his hands. He never told any of them what the emigrants had communicated to him.
The next day they got back in the two portervans and drove across the Sierra. They drove for ten days and eleven nights following Ben in the lead portervan. Corrag and Hera sat together next to him in the passenger’s seat. Whenever there was a fork in the road, they stopped. Corrag and Hera would get out and walk into each corner. Hera was very certain she had been in these places before. On the eleventh morning, they descended a narrow, rutted, unpaved track down into a distant valley. There was a mountain stream, and butterflies flitted in the wind vortexes made by the van’s descent. Women walked down the road with baskets of strange desert fruits on their heads. The two portervans stopped along the side of the road, and they all piled out and into the pool made by the stream where it crossed the hairpin. Six adults and three children, washing themselves, taking their clothes off and thrashing around in fits of laughter, made a sight for the women. Their children emerged from a trailhead in a grove of cactus. The theater troupe started doing impromptu tricks in the pool, flipping from each other’s shoulders and doing handstands from each other’s hands. Fisher and Uko sat on the bank and watched. Some of the women approached them, and they started talking. Corrag could see Fisher was uncomfortable with the language. She pulled Ben by the arm.
“Go over and help them,” she said.
Ben went over, pulling up his pants.
“Wow,” said Hera.
“What?” said Corrag.
“You’re not fighting.”
“I don’t anymore,” said Corrag.
“This is like, news,” said Hera.
If that was true, then maybe things were improving, thought Corrag. Since her urge to drown herself and Ben’s rescue, she had felt a new acceptance of the good things in her life, especially Hera. The trip through the Sierra had given her a lot of time to think. The unaugmented needed time like that to catch up with themselves. The forced doubling back in your thoughts, like the turns in a mountain road, pressed the false patterns out of your mind. She could honestly, if momentarily, say she felt clear about the value of being where she was. She wanted to continue to grow and watch Hera develop into the amazing creature that she was rapidly becoming.
She heard a van door slide shut. Hera returned with juggling balls. They stood along the shoulder of the road in the sunlight and practiced. Hera laughed when she dropped a ball. Her laugh was a light-hearted song. Hearing the music of Hera’s high, girlish laugh, Corrag felt a wave of nostalgia sweep through her body, an instant nostalgia for the past, all the past, especially every precious moment with Hera and Ben.
It was hot. In the distance, the valley gave off waves of green heat. They dried off in the sun. It was noon and most of the troupe were making food in the back of the portervans and washing their clothes in the silver water of the stream. Ben, Fisher and Uko were still speaking to the women who had approached them. Corrag passed the balls to Hera. She was getting good.
“You keep going. I’m going to rest,” said Corrag. She sat down in a spot of shade and pulled up her knees. There were so many birds in the trees. Her hands and toes tingled, and she thought it had something to do with the rot in her nerves. Slowly the invading forces of death were assembling in every one of her cells for a coordinated attack. It was ironic that she could feel approaching death at the same time life was flourishing. They must be in the tropics by now, she thought. The seasons seemed distinctly mingled together -- a jumble of simultaneous feeding and being fed upon.
When the women left with a formal leave-taking, it seemed like something from a story. It didn’t seem real. Hera understood that it was an important moment. She took Corrag’s hand and urged her to her feet. Together they walked over to the portervans. The troupe was coming together. Again it seemed unreal, as if choreographed, to Corrag. She wanted to ask questions, but just as suddenly she was tired. Fisher explained.
“We are in the territory of the Saint. They have invited us to their city,” he said.
“What? I thought we were going to PV. They love us there. We don’t know these people,” said Harper.
“Don’t worry about it, man. There is no road anymore,” said Ben.
Harper’s face had the mask of anger and disdain on it. He stood and walked away.
Ben took Hera aside and spoke with her. Corrag overheard, or thought she could make out what Hera said in response.
“The most important thing is our safety,” said Hera. She was taking on a prophetic tone. Ben took her words very seriously. He explained to Corrag later, as they were hiking with their belongings on their shoulders and backs, as much as they could carry, that Hera somehow sensed they were in danger, which was the kick he and Paul needed to immediately act on the invitation they’d received from the mountain women.
After removing the batteries, Harper, Ben and Uko pushed the two portervans off a cliff, one after the other, and listened as their falls down the mountainside ended in dull screeches of twisted metal.
“The expedition of Cortez,” said Uko.
“Except we come in peace,” said Fisher.
They hiked for hours, following the trail left by the women and children, waist-high, broken branches and young trees with machete-hacked trunks cut just above the ground. The group strung out through the trees. Ben took the lead along with Uko and Gannon, Uko’s Nepalese-Republican wife. Hera and Corrag were about forty yards behind this initial group. Taking up the rear were Fisher, Shelley, the twins and Harper. At some point Harper came crashing ahead in a panic, the two car batteries in a sling on his back.
“Where’s Ben? Where is he?” he asked, breathlessly, as if huffing on some fear-inducing psychotropic. He liked to bend his mind around recreational drugs. But Fisher liked his physicality and his acting ability.
“He’s just up there, Harper,” said Corrag, pointing with her walking stick. “Take it easy,” she added.
“We’re lost,” he said.
“No, we’re not,” yelled Corrag after him. She could see the back of Ben just visible ahead. Harper went running and stumbling towards it. God only knew what he wanted. She hurried, with Hera’s hand on her back steadying her.
She felt like her legs would buckle from the effort. The mud and tree roots made it treacherous going. She heard the tones of Ben and Harper arguing before she could make out their exact words. The intensity of their anger surprised her. Instead of shock she felt tired of their bickering. She wanted to blame Harper, but felt that his fear might have a genuine basis in reality. None of them had a good idea of what they were getting into or where it was they were going.
Chapter Five -- December 8, 2072
The Fire,
Tamaulipas
When Arthur first heard of the Saint, it was from the people fleeing the clinic in Matamoros that had been bombed by the Perros. The Perros had bombed the clinic in order to kill the wife of the governor of the state, who was being treated there for a spinal disorder. There were very few survivors; the governor’s wife was not one of them. It had been a successful job. Arthur stood outside the clinic with that empty feeling he often got after a success. It was the absence of pain, not quite pleasure. He was not hungry. He was not angry. He could think things through and remember them long enough.
For instance, Junior had split back to the zipbike. This was not pleasurable, but it wasn’t painful either. He looked at the people. They were the survivors, the survivors that were fleeing the still smoldering clinic in the rain. He asked them where they were going, suddenly curious since they obviously had a plan despite the hasty nature of their exodus, clutching their nanoscreens and beaten-up, salvaged Exe-play tablets. They told Arthur where they were going. The Saint would take care of them, they said. They were holding their belongings and clutching wildly at their children. Many microcephalics, toddlers, some adolescents, and the few elderly straggled along still in their hospital robes and barefoot. They didn’t blame the Perros, the people said.
Arthur walked along the road south with them to the edge of town where the flatlands of barren mud stretched to the mountains in blue-tinted distance, drawn by their words and their lack of restraint, now that they had made up their minds to go somewhere where war did not exist, where the Perros and the Azueto regime would not struggle for dominance, where the suffering of the earth had a man on their side, the proclaimed Saint whose name everyone had on their lips, and where the ocean's winter storms did not reach. The Perros were mostly good boys, they said. The Perros mainly had been made into animals by the wars. They were not to blame. Arthur tried hard to remember this. He was not to blame and neither was Junior.
Arthur was valued for his abilities. He had been in the Perros for five years, beginning with the raids on the submarine production facilities of the Republican Homeland in collaboration with the various philanthropies. But the Perros’ thirst for power and wealth was no longer so fascinating. What was more mysterious was the existence of people who did not fear or blame them. Arthur felt at first that their stance was based on ignorance. If they only knew how depraved the Perros were, actually. They believed in drinking the blood of their beheaded victims, for instance. This was encouraged by the leadership to show toughness and dedication to their ruthless methodology.
But beyond their ignorance of the Perros, there was the obvious tenderness these people held for each other that was based on a reverence for the weakest among them. Arthur followed them along the road even when they had stopped speaking to him and offered him sips of water from their worn, plastic bottles. welcoming him into their rootless fold.
When he had at last turned and straggled back to the compound alongside the main road to the Uelas monument, Arthur was a changed man. This difference in his thoughts extended down to the microscopic level. He felt electrified. There must have been something in the water. He went to Benque the cook and asked him what he knew of the Saint. Benque had been around. He was a Filipino, a former junkie from Chicago who had lost the Augment in a bad head wound in a train crash and turned to a life of crime practically automatically, not only in order to survive, but because he found that he enjoyed being beyond the reach of the law. By the time he got to the Perros he had done everything that a career criminal could possibly aspire to: kidnap, rape, extortion, fraud, betrayal. He admittedly had joined the Perros for their brutality and for the semi-religious fervor they used to do their work. As a cook, he also functioned in the role of mentor and counselor for the younger gang members. Benque stopped chopping up the cuts of steak and turned to Arthur.
“You wanna know what I think about the Saint?”
“Yeah.”<
br />
“He’s a dangerous man. He’s a healer. The worst kind. He’s pulling the wool over their eyes. All the people that worship his shit. I’m waiting for the shoe to drop. Hear he preaches some kind of love for each other, some kind of human progress, know what I mean? Dangerous.”
“That’s dangerous?”
“Sure is, my friend. Look, what does love depend on?”
“I don’t know. Good looks?”
“Close. Love depends on proximity. You gotta get up close to someone to love them.”
The Saints of David (The Jonah Trilogy Book 3) Page 7
