The Matriarch Matrix

by Maxime Trencavel

  Watching him watching her, Zara ascertains she will certainly make sure he gets the message that she is not Mei. She is fully capable of keeping him distant. This one scares so easily. But somehow, he figured out how to get the best of Alexander. By accident? She can take no chance that he gets the best of her.

  With the determination that won many battles, Zara goes on the attack, taking her first defensively offensive swing at him. “Staring at women’s naked feet again?”

  And she continues to glare at him, certainly not amused that he was fixated on her bare feet. Lust at the foot only means lust creeping up higher until it is too late. Or so her life experience has taught her. And she will teach him.

  Physically smaller than her and, he surmises, younger than her too, Peter is petrified, stiff like a statue, and can do no more than stare motionlessly at her, still wearing his beloved banana slugs on her ears. Who is she? The woman who kissed him while he had a gun at her chest? Or the woman who would have put a bullet between Alexander’s eyes?

  Knowing Alexander’s boy will need to quickly adapt to her land, her people, her culture, she flings her second volley. Pulling her headscarf across her face so only her eyes show, she yells, “What’s wrong? Do I look like a terrorist to you? Are you in sheer terror of me? Or what?”

  On the other side of the table from her, Peter’s brain wrestles with Alexander’s advice. “Be open to her.” How? He avoids confrontation and changes the subject. “Not quite the same in here as Mei’s plane, is it?”

  Zara takes the opportunity to scare the naivety out of this silly little boy and replies, “There is no room for luxuries. All the space back there is taken up with defensive systems, including Alexander’s latest state-of-the-art electronic countermeasure system. There are several different chafe systems for evading missiles, as well as the four drones mounted below for misleading the most advanced missiles known from NATO, Russia, and China. And we are heavily armored to be able to take direct 12.7mm hits as well as to absorb shrapnel. Where we are going, we will be lucky if all of this allows us to land safely and not be blown out of the skies.”

  Lifting off from the runway, Alexander’s flying tank pretending to be a private jet takes off. Peter cowers in his seat, pinned there both by this woman with her evil stare, which shrinks his testicles with every minute her laser eyes pierce into him, and from the combat takeoff the pilots made to evade, as Zara described, any MANPAD missiles. Everything is so surreal for Peter. It’s Luxembourg, for God’s sake. Who fires MANPADs in Luxembourg?

  To avoid that stare, Peter gazes down as he reflects upon how he got himself into this situation.

  Suddenly his thoughts are interrupted by Zara yelling at him. “Ahem.” She clicks her fingers and points to her eyes. “My eyes are up here, not down there.” He suddenly realizes he has been staring at her chest.

  As he gazes aside to his beloved slugs on her ears, she remembers she forgot to take them off. And so she does, throwing them on the table at him as she says with great disdain, “Insects.”

  That puts Peter over the edge as he interjects, “They’re not insects! They’re mollusks! And they’re very sensitive creatures, who don’t take criticism very well.”

  Oh, he should have listened to Mei, for Zara gives him the scariest, meanest, angriest face. “I do not care. Bugs. Slugs. God meant for them to live on the land, and not my ears.”

  Very deterred, Alexander’s boy stares out the window to avoid having any more transgressions of that woman’s, of that lioness’s personal being, happen again. And from behind a cloud he sees them. He yells to Jean-Paul, “Look, we’re being attacked by F-35s! Tell the pilot to use that chafe stuff!” And a pair of F-35s come up and take positions behind their jet.

  Looking out the window as well, Jean-Paul verifies they are American. Must be from a German airbase. He taps his MoxPad+, waits and says to Peter, “They are not hostile. They’re our escort.”

  Staring at these jets, Jean-Paul mumbles Alexander’s last words to him: “He’s arranged too many other elements that are now in motion.”

  And for Peter, those F-35s are certainly in motion. He’s never seen a real one before. Only the ones on MoxWorld News and pictures in the article he edited on the world’s most advanced fighters. The F-35 is infamous as the world’s most expensive weapons program at over 1.5 trillion dollars and climbing, and well over budget, of course. That pair behind them must have cost US taxpayers more than three hundred million dollars.

  In the article he edited, the authors concluded that, between the American F-35 and the Russian T-50, it was a close call, with the slight edge to the latter, in the model that was introduced only last year at a third the cost of its American rival. Now having met the man in person, Peter has to wonder what Alexander’s role has been in all of this. Selling upgrades to each side year after year? Why else would the Americans send him two of their precious weapons to escort them?

  His deep thought is broken by Zara talking into her MoxWrap. She speaks quietly, first with a smile and then a look of consternation. They must be speaking in Kurdish. Peter hears the word dayik used very often early in the conversation and then mama much more later on. She ends the call with pursed lips, tapping her sandal below the table, and gazes out the window.

  Peter decides to try and dive into the deep end of the pool again. He figures as long as this table sits between them, she can’t rip off his manly parts if she gets mad. At least not right away. “Everything all right? That was your mother, wasn’t it? I recognize those types of calls.”

  “Thank you for asking, Mr. Peter. It was my mother. You are perceptive. And it is none of your business, as you Americans would say,” she says, glaring back him.

  He cowers back into his chair. He’d like to call his mama too. He so needs to be comforted by someone female, someone female and nurturing. And the woman glaring at him certainly is not the nurturing type, regardless of what Alexander may think.

  Okay, I’m already in the deep end of the pool, drowning. I might as well ask. You can’t get if you don’t ask, Peter thinks.

  He takes his MoxWrap and says to Zara, “Can I call my mother too? The last she knew, I was in Luxembourg.”

  Whack. Zara slaps his wrist to the table. “What part of secret, confidential, do you not understand? If you compromise our target location, you will get yourself killed. And I do not really care if you live or you die. But I do care if you get me killed too.”

  Peter cowers even deeper into his chair, muttering, “But you talked with your mother.”

  She just glares even more intently at his insolence.

  Looking out the window again, Zara says, “It has been a day and a half since Alexander panicked and shanghaied me against my will because of his fear of a security leak. Yes, he did wait until Ramadan finished, but just. He sent a helicopter to track me down at my mother’s village. As it hovered and set down, blocking my vehicle from going to my treasured Sugar Fest, my family, my panicked mother, screamed in terror, thinking they were being attacked again as they helplessly watched the armed soldiers escort me away.”

  Turning back to meet Peter’s eyes, she says, “We Kurds, we have no friends but the mountains. We have been attacked and attacked and attacked throughout history. And when police or soldiers come to your house and take someone away, they are going to be tortured. And if they are fortunate, they will be killed quickly.”

  She stares at Peter with a face mixed with anger and terror as she puts her hands between her inner thighs, rubbing them. “And if I talk to my mother, it is because she has been in anguish thinking I had been abducted. Been tortured. Been mercilessly raped by dozens and dozens of soldiers for days on end. What would you even know about what it means, in the context of where we are from and where we came from, for a woman to be abducted and what those captors would do to a woman? Death would be better than living with such defilement, debasement, such denigration.”

  Peter realizes that was not the deep end of the po
ol he dived into; he dived headfirst into a pile of cougar poop as high as Mount Ararat. Frightened about what he has heard from Alexander, he mutters, “But my grandfather, my mother, my sister. They’re in danger? Alexander told me whoever these people are, they would stop at nothing. Nothing to stop us. Not even kidnaping me.”

  Tiring of his whimpering, Zara snaps back, “Don’t worry your little head. Alexander dispatched a team to secure them. One who Alexander trusts. Maybe.”

  The air has thickened so much in this little cabin flying at ten thousand meters high. Jean-Paul plays diplomat and asks, “Zara, Peter, can I call your attention to the diagram I have set out on the table here?” He moves it over to their table, partly for them to see, partly as a neutral zone between two militant camps.

  The history teacher in Jean-Paul points and explains, “Hidden since near the end of the last ice age, this unassuming mound, host to but a few grazing goats, gave up its secrets when a German archeologist uncovered what is now considered to be the world’s confirmed oldest religious site, which we know as Göbekli Tepe in Turkish, or Potbelly Hill.”

  Jean-Paul points to ovals drawn on the diagram. “There, his team found more than isolated pillars. They uncovered four large ovaloid areas with as many as twelve pillars around two massive central T-shaped pillars up to five point five meters high, or eighteen feet, and a weight of fifteen metric tons. Ones vaguely similar to the black monolith you, Peter, and Alexander remembered from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Professor Schmidt’s team found fifty of these monolithic pillars of various sizes in the areas they had excavated. And hence, thinking like you, with your fantasies of a Space Odyssey type object, Alexander thinks our object might be a monolithic pillar somewhere at this site.”

  Zara fixates on the diagram with amazement. She has heard of this site, living only hours by truck from here with her mother, but she has never had the time to learn more. She thinks proudly, Once again, more evidence the Kurds started civilization.

  On the other side of the table, Peter, having edited a number of articles about this temple for his favorite alien nation journals, points. “These pillars here, they’re aligned with an astronomical point. As you go to from older to newer enclosures, the alignment changes, reflecting the change over time in that astronomical point.”

  Zara stares at him, a different kind of stare. Maybe Alexander is right—there is more to Sasha’s boy than meets the eye.

  “Good, Peter,” says a pleased Jean-Paul. “Think about the oral tradition from your family. The bright star, the tail of the bird. If you can believe this is the star Deneb in the constellation of Cygnus, the diving swan, then your alignment hypothesis links the traditions to Göbekli Tepe.”

  Bing, it finally dawns upon Peter. The MoxWorld logo. The constellation Cygnus.

  “And Jean-Paul, what about the phrase, ‘the long-tailed star came from the sky,’ from the oral tradition? What do you think that was? A falling star?” asks Peter.

  “Unsure,” answers the good priest. “But I believe it was a comet or small asteroid that came down at the end of the Younger Dryas Period, otherwise known as the last ice age, around 10,000 BCE. As you edited in the paper that got you fired from your last job, you were probably right that some event around 9500 to 10,000 BCE caused the Caspian and Black Seas to rise. My research suggests that, although rapidly melting glaciers might have been the cause, it is possible a more cataclysmic event happened in the Black Sea that washed away the civilizations all around its shores. Those pyramids in Crimea, they were likely well away from the current Black Sea shoreline. Something massive washed up and buried them in sand and mud.”

  “Aliens. It’s aliens,” Peter affirms, at the risk of Zara’s ire. And of course, she glares at him with piercing dark eyes. Her pupils certainly are not dilated, but are as small as twelve-point lowercase Os, or so assesses the editor in Peter.

  He frets at what that means, but courageously being true to himself, he needs to say his piece. “Aliens landed with the long-tailed star, which was their spaceship descending through the atmosphere. The oral tradition said, ‘Only the giants of the reindeers prospered, because of power from this star.’ The giants were descendants of the aliens. They had extraordinary powers and advanced technologies. They built all these monolithic buildings, which we cannot fathom how our prehistoric ancestors could have built. Your Crimean pyramids, the temples at Göbekli Tepe.”

  Jean-Paul smiles serenely and simply replies, “Peter, a well-reasoned hypothesis. But we have no proof, only the archeological evidence and what we know from the oral traditions.”

  Undeterred, Peter the superb researching editor taps his MoxWrap a few times and says, “Jean-Paul, is it not true that Genesis said, ‘The Nephilim were also in earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them’? And who were these Nephilim? Passages earlier in Genesis say they were sons of God who saw the beautiful daughters of men, and they took them. It says, ‘whomsoever they choose,’ which to me sounds like these daughters were abducted and forced to bear children.”

  Zara pulls back in her chair and flinches. She puts one hand between her legs while the other touches the scarring on her cheek as she turns to look out the window and exhales.

  On a roll, Peter taps a couple more times on his MoxWrap. “Furthermore, the Book of Enoch further clarifies how these Nephilim forced these daughters of man to bear them giant children. I quote, ‘It happened after the sons of men had multiplied in those days, that daughters were born to them, elegant and beautiful. And when the angels, the sons of heaven, beheld them, they became enamored of them, saying to each other, ‘Come, let us select for ourselves wives from the progeny of men, and let us beget children.’’”

  Peter goes on to annotate the verses on how the Nephilim taught the women they abducted how to paint their eyebrows, how to do sorcery with potions, and committed upon them acts of defilement. He quotes again, “‘Impiety increased; fornication multiplied; and they transgressed and corrupted all their ways. They have gone together to the daughters of men; have lain with them; have become polluted; and have discovered crimes to them. The women likewise have brought forth giants.’”

  Chest out, proud of his thesis, Peter concludes, “These Nephilim were the aliens who came down in that long-tailed star and raped our beautiful women they found on Earth, and their alien-human hybrid children are the Reindeer Giants of my oral tradition!”

  “Enough of this. Enough of this nonsense!” Zara screams at Peter. “You…you know nothing of life, only that from your books, written by the profane. You know nothing of the suffering of others,” she says with some tears forming.

  She murmurs under her tears, “You know nothing of rape.” She hides her face in her shoulder next to the window and cries.

  Jean-Paul, the former Father Sobiros, gets up to put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. Zara counters him, throwing his hand away and yelling, “Don’t touch me. Don’t you ever touch me like that.”

  Turning back to Peter with her glare from her piercing dark eyes, she warns, “And you. Keep your words from touching me.” She huddles over a little at the table, grimacing with hands below her navel as she takes deep breaths.

  Forever the broker of peace, if possible, Jean-Paul softly intervenes. “Zara, he didn’t mean anything. He is naïve. We knew that when we found him. And it may very well be that his naiveté is part of why his inner makeup is so valuable to our mission.”

  Mr. Naïve himself puts his hands out palm down on the table between them and offers, “I’m so, so sorry. I just get carried away sometimes, especially talking about extraterrestrials.”

  With lips pursed, she stares at him with anger. Just huge, dark, and overwhelming anger. In a deep, even voice, she asks, “Your sister, has she been raped? Your mother, has she been raped? Have you been raped?”

  In sheer terror, Peter shakes his head no in the tiniest way his frozen neck and facial muscles will
allow. He certainly will not tell her about his little sister. Not now.

  And the torment within her wells up and out with great duress. “My sisters, they were abducted by those infidels who profane the words of the Prophet, calling themselves righteous under their so-called Caliphate. They perverted the words of the Qur’an and deemed it was their right to take women they had captured. And multiple men savagely violated and brutalized my most loved ones for days on end, over and over again. With no mercy as they bled from their genitals, they tortured and mutilated them when they could not perform their deviant acts anymore. With cattle prods, they burned their most sensitive body parts. And they kept raping them as they passed my sisters around for months on end as if they were their chattel. No better than animals.”

  Clearing a tear, she glances at Jean-Paul and back at Peter. She subtly shakes her head as what she feared about this mission has already happened. In her game to shut down Peter to drive him away, she has opened herself up to much, much worse. The scabs over her deepest wounds came off as Alexander’s boy countered her with his idiotic debates. Has she become that weak in the last three years? Any fighter knows when you overextend a punch, you open yourself for a counterpunch. And whether he knew it or not, Peter reached her in her most sensitive spots.

  She decides to let it bleed out as she quietly says, “One of my sisters, she killed herself. She would rather have been dead than to continue living as their object of defilement. In my world, in my culture, a woman who is defiled has no place in life. Even if she were to have returned home, she feared she would live her life in a state of shame, even with my assurances, her mother’s assurances that she had nothing to be ashamed of. Her family would have lost honor. In some families, the male members would kill her. It’s called honor killing. And the police and courts overlook these murders as, in their male-oriented hearts, they believe the woman deserved it. And what is a woman to do? She kills herself to end the shame. End the dishonor.”