The Saints of David (The Jonah Trilogy Book 3)

by Anthony Caplan

  “Yeah?”

  “Of course. You love your mother, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you do. It all depends on proximity. We have that warm feeling you get from a baby in your mother’s arms. But guess what? It’s fake. Life is faking you out, and the Saint knows it. There is no such thing as love. You can never get close to someone.”

  “Why not?”

  “Close is an illusion. The closer you get to your object the further away it gets from you. The only thing is people are blind. We grab onto each other thinking it's love. It’s not love. It’s just being blind. Open your eyes. See how far away we are from each other. That’s just life. We can’t come closer because there’s nothing there. It’s an illusion. We don’t even exist, man. That’s why the Perros are so good. Nothing matters to us. Listen to me. A good Perro does not fall for the bullshit. Keep it real.”

  Benque went on chopping up meat. He had said enough. Arthur turned away. He still was not hungry. Nothing had changed. It was true what Benque had said. His mother was far away now, and his memories of her were incoherent and sporadic. His love for Junior had no meaning other than Junior let him talk about things in a way he couldn’t do with anyone else. The augmented didn’t need love because they had that instant communication with the entire freaking world, whereas regular people needed to build up their own networks for survival purposes. Junior was a quiet kid. Sometimes they fell asleep in the same bed and woke up humping each other like, no pun intended, dogs. It was messy but he slept better afterwards. That was as good as it got -- a good night’s sleep and waking up to a guaranteed spot at the table. A nightmare was when the table settings were missing one plate, and Benque pointed to some poor jerk and told them to get going. But still, the memory of that morning’s survivors ate away at him. He wondered what gave them that kind of strength to walk to the mountains, where they said the Saint would protect people like them. What kind of man was the Saint? Was it just desperation? Why had they shared their water with him, a mere Perro who had just bombed their clinic just because the wife of the governor was laid up with a bad back? He couldn't talk about it to anybody, even though he really wanted to level with Junior. What would he say? Junior please tell me you love me; otherwise I’m leaving to go find what I need elsewhere, so that I can feel hunger again and know whether there's such a thing as proximity or whether we are all just meat, human meat to be cut up by some butcher for someone else’s food, some entity in the universe that does not know us except as food.

  That week went by in a flash. They were on alert for counters from the military. They stood out by the monument in several rows waiting for the Commander to show. In the end he only stopped for several minutes. He was on his way to Kazakhstan, they said, for a meeting. Flying out on the Perro’s very own nuclear-powered jet. They had the submarine ready also, said the commander. Everyone cheered. Arthur was pumped. He was sure he would be going on it. They would train off the Miskito Coast and then attack the cables somewhere between Recife and the Ivory Coast. If they could drop their sensors into the cables miles under the surface they would all be rich. They had been trying for several years, but this time they would be successful. The Commander was a genius and had some German engineers on staff, they said. They were all psyched.

  When the marines attacked later that day they repulsed them easily. Arthur and Junior led the counter ambush, getting ahead on the zipbikes through a mountain pass where they liked to free ride in their spare time. The marines were well trained. They retreated in an orderly fashion to their vans and called in their chimeras, the fancy dogs that had been supplied by the Republic. When the dogs jumped in and the vans drove off, bumping slowly down the rutted track to the village of Lentejuelas, Arthur and Junior pumped their fists in the air on the ridge and fired off several rounds of tracers in the direction of the retreat. Then they smoked a fat blunt that Junior had on him and fired off some more tracers into the air, giving away their position. That was a bad mistake. The drone appeared out of nowhere like a giant mosquito. It had the markings of the Repho, the red and black concentric circles and the doubled black lightning crossing the circles diagonally. It flew with almost genteel ease, the mark of a superior algorithm, dividing the atmosphere into quadrants. Junior thought they had time, but Arthur preferred to remain hidden where they were. Junior wasn’t listening. Arthur tried pleading. He tried holding him down, but Junior bolted. His final words were: “I don’t believe it, asshole.”

  Not even see you later. Not even goodbye. What didn’t he believe, that Arthur’s concerns were real? That their firearms were useless against the tracking drone? Or that he could ever die? The drone picked him out and turned carefully. The drone's algorithm analyzed the movement patterns, and the biometrics signalled fear, guilt, lower than average intelligence. It did not read Junior’s laugh, his buzz cut or the fact that his knock-knees made him look comical when he ran. Arthur watched with a paralyzed heart, with no pleasure and much dull pain, as the snaking missile found its target, and Junior’s body, along with the rock-strewn ground, fragmented in a sudden lowly arc through the atmosphere. The dull concussion that followed brought him to his senses.

  Arthur climbed slowly from the ridge and rode the zip bike back in the dark to the monument. The statue of Uelas, the runner in Nahuatl headdress, a symbol of the pride of the long ago, dim Revolution, looked down on Arthur with curiosity rather than disappointment. "Where are you going?” it seemed to ask. Arthur wondered also. He looked down at himself with similar wonder. Who was he now? Was every moment a string of unbroken, meaningless happenstance? What if Junior’s meaningless, absurd death had changed him somehow, awakened a part of him that had been dormant, hidden by force of better judgement? What then? How was he to reconcile this new Arthur with the habits and exterior disguises that had characterized his former self? The questions piled up inside his head, but they remained unanswered.

  In the meantime, Benque gave him a revenge mission. Arthur felt that Benque was testing his loyalty. He was charged with going into Lentejuelas and taking the two daughters of the village headman. Bring them back alive if possible, said Benque, looking away from him. The villagers had betrayed the Perros. There was an informant in the village that was supplying the Repho’s aerial wing with information. That very night, before he had had a chance to recover and think from the previous day’s fight, after two hours of sleep and a hit of crystal methamphetamine, Arthur got back on the zipbike and headed for the mountains.

  The night had a bite of cold to it up in the highlands. The stars were as clear as diamonds, and the sliver of moon cast enough light that the bike’s headlamp was totally unnecessary. The planet itself was dead, saying nothing to him as he passed, as if waiting for a greater power to speak up in defense of the vulnerability of flesh. The village had its lights on in the one street. They ran their power off a couple of windmills on the ridge that turned swiftly in the northwestern jet stream, bringing in the cold air from the frozen regions of the continent. Arthur left the zipbike parked behind a corral on the village outskirts. A horse whinnied. He cut through the cemetery to avoid the army outpost. It was said that the dead had no reverence for the living. And why should they? thought Arthur. Their time had passed and soon enough so would his. There was no loyalty among thieves. What were the living but filchers of time from the reserves of the eternal? He picked out the house, the fifth on the left in the middle of the town, referring to Benque’s directions. There were no distinguishing marks, just another run-down peasant shack. Still, it was better than what he had, which was nothing, except the voices in his head that he managed to keep still only by drugs and mental effort. He knocked on the door. When no one answered, he muzzled on the silencer and pulled a couple of rounds into the lock.

  They were all sitting in the dark in the one room off the kitchen watching the news on the old nanoscreen. The newscaster looked like he was sitting in some ancient studio, the set of a soporific dram
atic series. Arthur felt like he had been transported in time back to a more innocent era. The old man stood and shoved the blanket back onto his wife’s legs. An ancient hound also stretched its legs and lowered its head. The hair on its spine stood up. Arthur shot the dog first. A woman screamed and the old man hit the lights. Arthur shot the announcer on the nanoscreen next and screamed louder than the woman to get their attention.

  “That’s better,” he said.

  “Que quieres, negro? No nos mates. Aqui nadie…”

  “Hey.”

  Before the old man could finish what he was intending to say, Arthur backhanded the pistol across his face. Then he regretted it. The old man was just a poor Mexican living in a village at the end of the world thousands of miles from anywhere. How could he hate him? What was the hate he held in his heart? For whom? All the old questions came pouring out of his mind. Arthur had to sit down for a second.

  He sat on the floor in front of the sofa facing the old man's entire lineage. The two girls cried and couldn’t look at him. He was getting nowhere with them. Of course, the fact was that the drone had killed Junior. Someone had to pay for his death. But he didn’t believe in it anymore. If nothing existed then he could choose to do nothing. The thought was compelling.

  But he couldn’t put his gun down. It stuck to his hand. It was inseparable from him now. His mind only functioned in that way. He was a trained killer, and even though it made no sense, he would continue to kill and destroy because that was all he had ever done.

  He stood and demanded the girls. The man shook his head, and the girls cowered deeper in the comfort of the sofa, the older women covering them with their rumpled bodies and folds of quilted blankets as if to hide them from life. But there was no going back. Arthur told the man he would kill all of them. He was losing his patience. One of the girls peered at him.

  “I’ll go, papa,” she said. “I’ll go with him,” she added for his benefit. She stood and wiped her face with her hands. Arthur complied immediately with this outcome. This was just what he was hoping for. Out of the stinking cauldron had come a sacrificial victim.

  She led the way to the door he had burst open. It was still open. She turned again to see her family as she went around the interior corner with Arthur. They were silent. She waited for Arthur at the door. Arthur waved her out first and closed the door, pulling it shut on the shattered frame. Outside in the silent night of the village street, he listened intently, all his senses tensed, expecting a fight, a hail of fire. But there was only stillness. The street was silent, just dogs, the village dogs, barking off in the distance. He took her by the wrist and pulled her around the corner. They walked behind the house along a path down the mountain out of town. The path went around the cemetery.

  Her name was Carolina. Her voice was fluted, like a little girl or a bird. She was sixteen. He couldn’t think. Was there something he should say? He had a vague sense that there was, that she was expecting him to say something. But he couldn’t think of what else to ask her. She reached out and touched his face, his hair. Then her hand fell to his hand and pushed the gun down and stepped towards him. Her breath was warm. She kissed him, her hand still on his hand. He stepped away.

  She said. “No te corras, negro.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Why not? You don’t like your skin? I like it.”

  Her other hand rose up imperceptibly, almost to the buttons of her shirt and slipped loose the top one.

  “No. Not like that. We’ll sit,” said Arthur.

  He directed her so that she sat with the moon in her eyes. He sat facing her and waited. The light reflecting off her eyes registered like a fire from the end of time, an infinite spark. Their spirits rose and joined together slowly like fibers. Then their bodies came together, but neither of them was conscious of it. In the dawn, his back was wet with the dew. When he opened his eyes to find her still there, sitting upright, examining his body, fully dressed, she stared and smiled. He sat up and shook his head. He felt entirely drained of emotion, no hate, no lust or desire for anything. She pointed the gun at him.

  “Póngase los pantalones.”

  “My name is Arthur.”

  “Whatever.”

  He did as instructed, pulling on his thin, rumpled sweatpants, conscious of their poor condition. He thought with some relief that there was no way to carry out Benque’s orders. That life was forever behind him. The dead of Lentejuelas looked on approvingly. He looked around at the tombstones, the mausoleums and the one cracked Durango pine at the southeastern corner where the blackbirds gathered. He thought it was approvingly that they looked on because the world needed to be rebuilt in the image of life, despite the knowledge, in his mind anyway, that the dead were the true winners of this round. Her tears were tears of joy. Or were they his tears? Arthur had no way of knowing with any certainty. She had the gun hand.

  Chapter Six -- December 17, 2072

  Marjdan HotelSuites,

  Split

  The routine was not good enough, but he felt that repeating himself over and over again was useless. Absalom would never understand. What he wanted was to be transported beyond this world, to see the rim of the sunrise against the crescent of the planet Jupiter. He needed a vacation, and all he got were more meetings with vice-presidents and heads of committees. Yes, of course he was concerned that divergence rates were climbing faster than average parallel processing speeds. But what did they expect him to say? Find the bottleneck. Get over the impasse. Surpass. What did they not get? The universe was a complex system. That’s why they had the best engineers in the various sub-sectors. If they were not good enough, then replace them with better, with robots, with effective mathematical tools. It was not possible that the Augment's calculus had reached the outward bounds. It was not a mystery any longer. He felt sometimes that he was calling it in, to use an old term, from the old days of telecommuters and human scale.

  “Sir, you will want your hot tub before the blood transfusion,” said Absalom.

  “I guess,” said Chagnon, not even trying to keep the unhappiness out of his voice.

  “And then you have a meeting at GMT thirteen hundred with Defpark Soong and his handler Jane Healey.”

  “Who and what is that about?”

  “The team that’s addressing the problems in Mexico. We have a large earth drain that’s causing a dip in performance.”

  “I know that, Absalom. Just tell them to go ahead with whatever they think is best. I’m sure it will do the trick.”

  "That's not enough. They will insist.”

  “Oh, Absalom.”

  “I understand, sir. You will feel better after the hot tub and the blood transfusion.”

  "No, I won’t.”

  “So, sir. Is this the end of the line? Are you calling it quits?”

  The INN heads had raised the possibility of an early retirement. It included a year-round pass to the lunar colony and the various state cottages scattered around the islands of what had once been the Mediterranean coasts of France and Spain, and unqualified physical and mental upgrades until the termination point. But that wasn’t enough either. Not after what he’d built. After all he’d built. The world Augment system was largely his and he would be damned if he would be fobbed off with a termination package. And here was Absalom dangling the prospect before him like a shiny toy, like a bauble. Well, it would be for him, perhaps. But not for Samael Chagnon. Absalom had failed to understand fully the sanctity of power. In doing so he had reflected a light on a major failing, his inability to sacrifice his own good for the good of others. For this reason he could not forgive the beast. The trick, as always, was to hide your true hand. He would be compassionately concerned that the chimera was falling short of his potential. As he stripped for the hot tub, Absalom was there, dangling the fresh robe from his talented snout. He took it and walked the few steps to the tub, steaming by the glass window overlooking the city. As he slipped into the water, he turned and looked Absalom in
the eye.

  “No. I’ve got a few good years left to give, Absalom. It would be nice to see you continue to grow in worldly experience, though. Perhaps a year of travel. We could find a temporary replacement. Don’t you feel that would be good for you?”

  “I don’t feel the need, sir. I’m quite comfortable with my position.”

  The chimerae were an interesting phenomenon. He understood their anxiety, halfway between the human and the wild. It gave them a handle, something on which humans could always draw, an invisible leash tieing them perpetually in service to their masters despite all the gains they had made in mental capacity. But he went in for the kill.

  “I think it would be good for both of us. Get out of our comfort zones, Absalom.”

  Absalom’s piggy eyes looked shocked, running wild with adrenaline and fear. It had gotten the best of him. He snuffled.

  “I, I don’t know what to say, sir. If you’re not happy with me.”

  “I am happy with you. Just that change is inevitable, kiddo. We need to get out ahead of it. I won’t always be here, you know. Just thinking ahead. That’s my job.”

  “That’s right, sir. The big picture.”

  “Look at all of that out there, Absalom. What do you see?”

  “I see a modern city, sir. All the bustle and hustle of the world. It’s a wondrous sight. The animals and the humankind living in harmony.”

  “But what you don’t see, Absalom, is all the venom, all the harnessed hate and evil just underneath the surface. That’s what I see.”

  “Well, you are the master, sir. I’m just a chimera. Strictly service industry grade.” He snuffled comically, feeling better about himself. They weren’t so very different than humans. The capacity for speech gave them an avenue for self-realization. If they could only hear themselves, though, all the piddling noise that passed for wit.

  “Don’t you feel a need to be with your own kind, Ab?”