She slid herself into the water. It was obvious that she was at one with the element, with the moment, in ways that I would never be.
Later that evening we were sitting on the balcony out of habitual remorse, instead of lying in bed or trying to drown out the sound of the gathering night with shots of alcohol and quick swallows of whatever pills we could muster. The general’s assistant appeared through the glass, her head down, trying not to give the appearance of intruding. But it was obvious she knew what she was doing. There was not a hint of uncertainty in her bearing. She slid the glass open with a voice command and stepped out into the night. The odd thing about the moment for me was that I could hear the whine of nocturnal insects suddenly in some kind of strange feedback. I had been oblivious to my surroundings, sunk in the mire of my spiraling fatalism. Her name was Maura Curiel. Her slitted green eyes, small pointed chin and thin lips with a slight twist gave her a serpentine appearance. I remember distinctly her first remark was a question, and it gave me chills of premonition.
“What is the point of bravery, of friendship?” she asked, looking to each of us in turn. None of us answered
“What did you ask, Maura?” I asked her. She repeated the question, took a step and leaned against the rail.
“The future,” I said. I took the bottle and poured myself another glass and drank it down, never mind the burn. The burn was supposed to be there, to remind me of shame, which is what I should have felt instead of some reptilian gloating at my correct perception of Maura's line of questioning. I went inside the room, and she followed me.
“What do I need?” I asked.
“Nothing. We have everything you’ll need.”
“What will happen to them, to my friends?”
“They will be returned to the proper authorities and charged with no criminal intent. We will claim you were killed in an escape.”
“That’s not what I wanted to hear, Maura.”
“But you claim to be a seeker of truth of some kind.”
“How long have you been with the general? How many years?”
“For just a few. Like three.”
“Where were you before?”
“With the Centro de Estudios Neurobiologicos de Burgos.”
“Were you a good student?”
“I was president of the Humanist Society.”
“I see. And you lost faith in humanism, truth, in bravery and friendship.”
“We all lost. Everybody. You too. We had no chance. Never.”
“And the general?”
“He is a mercenary. But he is very clear. To each what they deserve in the battle.”
I needed to see Deven and Gretchen, just to see their faces. Had they changed or were they the same? It was suddenly the contingency upon which everything bore.
“Where are you going?” said Maura, standing and blocking my way. I made to push her but she was quicker than me and had me on the ground in some jiu-jitsu move, choking me. I bucked like a madman, which I was, until I tapped out and she relaxed her grip.
“You can’t go back. Impossible,” she said when I’d finally recovered sense enough.
“What are you, the defender of protocol?” I asked, struggling to get my breath.
“Things work better this way. You’ll come with me. They will be fine.”
“I never loved them enough. Any of them.”
“Are you regretting the past?” She seemed genuinely curious.
“I guess. My mother and father. Florida. The beach. My wife. My daughter. My colleagues. Democravia. Now Deven and Gretchen. What happens to our dreams? Our hopes. Everything seems such a waste. You wouldn’t understand. You’re one of the believers. All in for the cause. You’ve never been torn, have you? Never had to strike a balance. Come down on one side. Be true to something intangible which you can’t explain to anybody.”
“Take a second. Sit down. Here. I have this.” She ripped the foil backing off a tab of some methamphetamine. I was going to refuse it, but suddenly saw more clearly my situation of dependency for what it was, desperate and dangerous. No time for moral ambiguity and the luxuries of self-hatred. I took one and chewed and felt a calm sense of focus pervade and spread. Things moved quickly from that point.
Maura and I went for two days without stopping. We left the casino that night in a quarter moon, which lit up the desert. We were mounted on horse chimerae, the best of the general’s cavalry. They had limited language capabilities, but Maura spoke to them in some Slavic tongue with hints of Yiddish and Romani, which I could not make out. My mount had a slight whinny, which endeared him immediately. They were fierce climbers and never stepped wrong on the steep mountain trails we traversed. The general had Russian breeders working in his laboratory in the casino, said Maura. If they trusted you, the general's chimerae, it didn’t matter if you didn’t speak their language. The falling stars and waning moon pressed the sorrow from my heart and any words to explain or cajole out of my head until the third morning. We watched the sun lighting up the distant ridge, a line stretching to the north and west. When the fog lifted, we put out the two gas fires and fed the chimerae and ourselves on the boiled cornmeal. They lifted their long, brave faces to us and said something neutral and guarded. My sense of alertness kicked in. Maura pointed down in the valley. The glass of the distant tower reflected just the briefest gleam. You could see three vehicles winding silently up the mountain, lifting clouds of dust.
“This is the moment we must leave you. There is no time for goodbye. You are on your own. When David’s people ask you, you must deny everything.”
We packed up our stuff. She instructed me to hike down the ridge as far as I could and not to hide, to shout for the vehicles and claim I was lost. But how could I deny everything? That was clearly impossible. I watched as the two chimerae and their mount disappeared at a gallop up the mountain track and disappeared. I was on my own and in possession of meager faculties. I could see that. Instead of denial I would lay claim to the truth, which was that I did not know anything. Just the barest of facts: the stars, the night sky and the shared hunger, the need of all living creatures to see and taste of fullness before a necessary end. That was all there was. I decided to make my stand there.
The ATVs were quick and silent. They parked in a cloud of dust. The three people walked loosely, and one let out a laugh, just a quick acknowledgement of levity, really, as they saw me and turned. None of them pulled weapons, although they had carbines hung on their backs. They looked like drone droppers. What did I feel? I felt like I wanted to slow the time down. There would be no second chances. As they approached me, I could see their faces clearly and could read nothing there. I remember the unmediated nature of the moment, the way danger and adrenaline are not quite able to blank out how crisp it all feels. To be truly alive is to be largely unconscious. I had crossed a border, and ignorant of the new country, its manners and statutes, was about to begin a pretty quick education.
Chapter Ten -- December 20, 2072
La Torre de David,
Valle de Uapar
They either did not detect, or else outright discounted the multisensor.
It was clean, and the long rows of budding potato plants shimmered in the sun coming through the glass in the morning. Following the testing, I was given a placement in the hydroponic production wing. My job was to find and trap the beetles that managed somehow to wend their way into the facility through the ventilation louvres. They tried to lay eggs on the dark green leaves. It was not bad work. I was good at it. The beetles were easily caught, if hard to find. I liked dropping them into the bucket of soapy water I carried with me down the rows. Outside, the sun’s progress in the sky was measured by the different prismatic effects of rays on the surface of the sterilized, sheet metal racks of the lab. The people worked hard. It seemed possible to create harmony designed to benefit the totality in some more or less abstract way. I wondered what General Maldetodo was thinking as he processed my feed, which seemed devoid of any
interest for the cartels that buttered his bread.
My boss in the wing was an old Democravian hand -- Everett Riggs. It seemed like a karmic phenomenon that I would know him from my years at the University of the Upper West. He was a former undistinguished, yet long-tenured professor of science studies. I remembered how slow and deliberate he had been at faculty meetings, always chiming in after the arguments had been weighed and assimilated. But we both had struggled following the fall of Democravia to the hordes of the Republican Homeland. Everett had arrived in the Uapar Valley during the early days, attracted by word from the old Democravian underground that the idea of an alternative to the neo-progressive monolith of mind-meld had taken hold in a new project. He clearly relished his task of proselytizing, taking it upon himself to explain to me the difference between David’s ideas and the principles upon which Democravia had foundered.
It was after work. We were strolling out the arched entrance of the tower along with thousands of others, the former dispossessed, the armies of David, who numbered by now in the hundreds of thousands, with population growth projected at five percent per annum.
“So what?” I asked. I wanted to maintain my objectivity, didn't want to give in too soon to Everett's enthusiams.
“The poor will always be there,” I added. I waited for Riggs to answer.
“David is harnessing their untold stories. That’s the difference. Democravia never acknowledged the roots of narrative in the class struggle. We know that narrative is the basic unit of production. The Sandelsky Corporation recognized this fact and drove the growth of the Repho. And the oligarchy, with its rigged market structure and pay to play access, continued to skim the cream off the top for years, if not decades, hiding behind the quasi-democratic hybrid institutions like the INN."
"So?"
"And so the people are in the dark about the nature of their slavery. There is no truth. The nature of fascism is to coopt the stories of the oppressed and marginalize the true seekers. But where there is no struggle, there are no voices. Eventually the information algorithms run afoul of their own success. Throughput numbers go down. For a while the elites tighten the screws and hope to squeeze out more ferment that way from the remaining works. But, Ricky, the stories of the illiterate, the uneducated, the voiceless, are the bacteria to the rest of the philla, outweighing the other anthropocentric information families by a six-digit factor. We just never realized that they were there. We weren’t looking for them.”
“No, of course not. We had a top down vision of the structure of knowledge.”
“Absolutely. The resource value of unprocessed story to algorithms of information flow was just not something anyone knew. So once David realized he could access these narratives by offering the poor a voice in a new order, he had the key to the direction of the noosphere and therefore of intelligent evolution.”
“When did he come to that realization?”
“Ah, you’re interested in the meta story, are you? Of course you are. The old professor never dies.”
“Well, I just want to make a personal approach at some time in the future, if I get the chance. Like to know my mark, so to speak.”
“I see. Well honestly, the man is a bit of an enigma. He may have known as early as the The White Noise. That was the name of his Brooklyn bookstore. It was tremendously successful. The VR children, the gamers, used to hang out there and dream of toppling the Sandelsky Corporation from the inside with their fighting skills. He had a specialty in that field, even sponsored a fighter. They came here on training vacations when this was condos for the Repho one-percenters. The tower was a survivalist getaway where the Sandelsky crowd planned to outlast the apocalypse. You know, the one that was supposed to come with the methane flash in the Arctic.”
“Yeah, sure. The 2050s. I was working in the cooperativa. Trying to heal from the implant removal.”
“Yeah. Me too. Vancouver. Drove for Alles, the portervan company. I don’t know. Some days I think I’m still healing. But the tower was never finished. They ran out of funding, and the Repho elite had other priorities besides Mexican escapes. It was just sitting vacant when David had his Jonah moment. The Jonah was his pet project. They were also preparing for the imminent end, and they had this proprietary communication network that David was interested in taking over as a platform for his vision. Well, some say he became a full-blown Jonah. Others will dispute that. But he came back down incognito with some of the Jonah membership and started squatting. They got a solar array going on the roof and the first hydroponics gardens up there as well. People started flooding in, attracted by the free housing, the electricity, communal food, child-care, you name it. Once they got a critical mass it just snowballed. And David would give free public lectures. He doesn’t do that as much anymore. Theosophy crossed with Jungian theories of the Shadow, crossed with the Gospel of Matthew. They started calling him the Saint. He's no saint, believe me.”
We parted ways. Riggs was heading for his home in the outer districts of the valley in the Orinoco hills. It was a comfortable, solid home, and Riggs was a good man, had made himself into a contributing member of this little state that had Maldetodo and his allies so worried.
His wife was Yavapais. Many of the Yavapais had migrated to the Valley after the flooding of their lands by a large Repho-backed copper mining operation that had gone wrong. She was unable to work. Her malformed limbs were the result of exposure to tailing dregs in the womb, so she spent her time painting and caring for her two girls. Riggs was apologetic, yet proud of the efforts she made on their behalf.
I said goodbye to him as he turned resolutely and stepped away into the throngs of bicycles and solar-powered portergons carrying their loads of commuters along the broad palisades. These carried traffic out the four cardinal directions and along several diagonal arteries.
Everything had the look of artisanal craftsmanship. The streets were laid with a surprisingly resilient surface -- a compound of sugar cane fiber and petroleum. There were constant maintenance teams in trucks. After the rains, men and women hanging off the back of the trucks raked and levelled the compound into the potholes, letting the wheels of the portergons and trolleys and the feet of the multitudes do the work of smoothing. People swarmed everywhere in a throng of frenetic activity. There was no seeming order, no intelligence of traffic sensors aligning or directing the movements of the crowd, only a chaotic, Darwinian current. Of course there were accidents, casualties, as some types inevitably took advantage of their native canniness to get ahead. There was cutting; there was cheating; there was ugliness. But there was also a great beauty, as if a new being, a universal being was again arising from the ashes of the Augment, trading in the passive acceptance of a sterile order for newly-minted imagination.
Vendors walked the large park, Plaza Raimundo Lulio in front of the tower, hawking food -- fried doughs and cheeses, banana leaf wraps and barbecued meats skewered with home-made wooden spits. Others sold printed broadsheets of news and opinion turned out by various factional presses in a multitude of languages. I liked El Heraldo del Nuevo Augurio, which had David’s latest sermons verbatim in both Spanish and English, along with decently informed reportage on the world outside the valley. Before making the walk to my room, I bought a torta and a copy and sat on a bench to eat and read. In front of me was the tower, its sixty-odd stories rising into the sub-tropical evening, over the young saplings of acacia trees that formed the boundary of the park.
Words of our Leader Saint David Shavelson Upon the Proclamation of A New Civic Code
“Our hearts go out to all the incoming folk who provide us with the hope and inspiration for the new order which we are forging in the name of humanity. Rest assured that your inheritance will be like an anchor in heaven, which is imperishable. Therefore your joy will be your new identity card as you go about your days and nights in this our city of love, our tower, the New Evangelium, the cathedral on high that will shine its light on civilization for time immemorial.
As we are set upon by the jackals of the old order, who cannot bear to see the sons and daughters of David grow strong, we must remain rooted in our vision, our hope and love for one another. For you have tasted of this joy, the coming day of sharing the harvest of collaboration and the heart work, the work of opening ourselves to one another. For a child of the new order carries joy in their eyes, in their hands and their words, always ready to sacrifice and serve the brethren.
There are those among us who are unable to open their hearts to fraternal life, the life of the new spirit and order, which we bring in the New Evangelium as sons and daughters of the signature of love. These people are sad, too attached to riches and personal gain to make the sincere commitment to this shining path ahead of us. It is your duty, brothers and sisters, to find these people and help them, lift their sadness when you see something is not right. Share the joy, your anchor in the inheritance that we build in this fertile earth of compassion and heartfelt amazement. This is truly possible with the help and support of all of us. It takes all of us to stand up for the faith in the future, the lifeblood of this our fair and wondrous tower.”
It went on in this vein for several hundred more words. There were announcements of meetings, of communes coming up on different floors of the tower and outlying neighborhoods as well. There was a major piece on the interrogation of several chimerae who had been captured undercover in the very park where I sat, agents of the Repho. The report seemed to suggest that the Azueto administration had placed mere human spies in the midst of the city also, but that these suspects were already identified and made the target of investigations. It was all very exciting, and I felt at once an urge to get further involved in building the infrastructure of David's civilizing project as well as guilt that I myself was one of these spies mentioned, albeit an unwilling one.
The Saints of David (The Jonah Trilogy Book 3) Page 17
