Healey assured him again that the outbreak of dengue had been put under control by the Azueto regime. As his Augment access was still less than perfect, he could only trust what she said. She wasn’t so bad, he thought, but with limited Augment access he was still relying on the outdated file information. In a few hours, after a good night’s sleep, he would know better what to think regarding his travel companions and the adventure to which he had committed.
Suddenly, Healey announced there had been a change of plan. They would not wait until the morning. They were to leave immediately, no reasons given. Chagnon marvelled at his own docility. There was a portervan waiting in the hotel parking lot to take them to the hoverfield, from where the unmarked Air Force suborbital would take off.
They left the Marjdan around midnight. There was a skeleton crew at the door. They all saluted dutifully. Damned fools, thought Chagnon. Couldn’t they see that this was a total breach of protocol? He could barely contain himself. The rage was pre-Augment in its intensity.
Absalom came behind, pushing Chagnon’s bags and carrying his own backpack on his broad boar’s back. They all piled into the team-sized portervan. The young woman driver spoke some Korean and made jokes in English with Soong in the front passenger seat about the kimchi restaurants in Vienna, famous for their spartan, yet very popular offerings. It made Chagnon hungry and lonely to hear them talk. He hated to overhear that kind of chit chat.
The suborbital flight passed without a hitch. In less than an hour they were installed in the Gobernador de Jalisco in Cuernavaca, fifteen minutes by portervan from the listening station run by the Air Force on the flanks of Popocatepetl. They received a briefing from a young lieutenant on the situation. The so-called Saint, David Shavelson, originally from Brooklyn, was an interesting man with an extremely dense file. The facts on him went back almost two decades to his early days as a bookseller in Williamsburg. But Chagnon was not big on plowing through files the old-fashioned way. He preferred instant upload, allowing the Augment to take care of the background.
Chagnon insisted on going for a swim in the little pool behind the hyacinths. Absalom was tired and needed a break. The lieutenant was put out, but seemed fine. Healey and Soong had changed into shorts and floppy beach slippers. They slumped in the lounge chairs and looked into the ether, the blue of winter skies in Mexico.
Chapter Seven -- ΩØ∑‡
Planet K-Mars,
Galaxy JC3418,
Virgo Cluster
The noise of the audience’s vibrating, gossipy excitement masked the changing of the set. It was time for the gut-busting fun of Hero of the Cracken, in which the contestant auteurs competed to choose the right cast of characters to match the color-coded genres. The panel member rose from his seat at the side of the stage by spinning around and ejecting onto the platform. The audience’s gasping could be easily heard. The panel member, a bearded corpulent with a mighty laugh, spun the Wheel of the Elect, then stood around until the commercial break and mingled with the band, who were tuning their instruments and joking around. The band's members were all secretly vying to be honored at the next impromptu cast party as the actor with the highest social ranking and possibly spinning out into their own series. It was an intriguing possibility for most of them. They couldn’t care less about the color-coded genres, unless they happened to be included in the cast of characters. This happened about once every several millennia, as measured by the flipping of K-Mars from its eastern hemispheric, solar orientation to the opposite, western orientation. At this time a new game would be chosen from among the dreams of Victor Meezia, the cosmonaut who’d been imprisoned in the isolation tank in a perpetual vegetative state since the inception of the gaming.
There didn’t seem to be an imminent change in planetary orientation. Therefore it was hard for him to imagine what was causing the chaos, as audience members, band members, the contestant auteurs and even the producer of the show all seemed to rush the stage at once and gather around the Wheel. Then he saw what it was. It was Indigo, which was the category of epic folk narrative, the story of the nomadic consciousness that had given rise to the Multiverse and the trinitarian civilizing impulses of faith, hope and charity, the most important of which was faith. Then he saw the producer approaching.
Things were starting to happen. He could feel it. There was momentum in the quivering of the electrified atmosphere as K-Mars emerged from its long winter. The blue light of the giant star, their star, JD22952.666, could be seen in a crescent at the rim of the set.
The producer tapped him with the vibrating, translucent rod. His mission was immediately apparent -- he was to shed his given state and transport himself across the cosmos to his original homeland, that blue-green planet still orbiting star EP29789.333 of quadrant eight of the Eskelion.
Earth. Pesky yet persistent cradle of intelligence, it was where he would carry out a correction of the story line. The timing was predetermined, but it meant shedding himself and going without hesitation. He accepted and lay down. The vibrations set off by the rod blanked out any memories he had of his billions of past lives and the visions he had for the countless futures yet to come. He entered the timeless state of the portals and was swept up by the currents of energy identified by the producer and his team of talent scouts. The Hero of the Cracken would resume once the break was over. The audience of the cognoscenti was returning to its seats after sating itself with sex and several wars during the intermission. It was bloodied but nevertheless hungry for more.
Blue then black, followed by red, yellow and orange. When it came time for green it seemed that it all had ended. There were waves upon waves and great oceans, the cities of galaxies penetrated throughout by the roar of unintelligible nothingness. Night and day followed ceaselessly in rounds that grew larger, then faster, slower, and smaller and then shrunk to a painful point. He asked to be relieved of his duty, but there was no answer. Despite the deafening silence, he felt that somewhere his desires for deliverance had registered and been weighed in the balance. He gave up hope of rescue and only wanted to forget. Then he forgot. At some point he remembered that he’d forgotten. But it went on regardless of where he was in the seemingly eternal cycle of remembering and forgetting. He’d forgotten more than he’d ever known. But he also knew that it would end someday, and it was important to remember, to keep going, to pay attention.
Night followed day, and vast cities of stars came to an end, while the green light appeared again, grew larger and became a sun. He was pulled into it, sinking into the exploding core of fire and pure, molten matter. The dreams of the poets merged and became winged demons, the sparks of the universal essence. They flung themselves into the dark black of the night coat of the great, invisible queen that ruled everywhere in the name of the Lord of the herds, the multitudes, stars and seas, Lord of the living and the dead, Lord of time, space and light, Lord of lords, municipalities, castles, wars and insects, plagues and inquisitions. Revolutions and great beauty flowed out of His power everywhere, like rivers, tears and faces that bowed down for fear of vastness and great love, for it was a burden. Sometimes it was easier to invoke the mercy of the queen who reigned in His name, performing great wonders for her devotees, who saw her face in the planets and the stars and moons.
He emerged from the deep rock, leaning into the light. The foliage parted as he waved it aside. It had a strange crackle, and the air was heavy, much heavier than he had expected. His body had a heft. It was unfamiliar and a bit uncomfortable. For a second he panicked. The wind hit him, and he realized he was naked. He understood in a second the way the atmosphere worked. It was, of course, a distant memory. He carried it still in his veins, in the network of his neurons.
As he walked, he felt his muscles tightening and vertebrae straightening under the strain, like a ship fitting out as it sailed its maiden voyage. He made his way in ever surer steps, his feet picking a way as if they had always been impervious to the flinty outcroppings, down the slope and out on the dusty
road between places.
The road sign said COAHUILA 28 KMS, and he immediately understood that this was the name of the place he would go and seek out the storyline and effect the necessary steps to avoid the flatness, the death of their narrative.
An old, battered truck drove by and stopped ahead. Out stepped a young woman on the roadside. Out the other side jumped a young man. They approached him. They both had clothing made of what seemed natural fibers in strips of colors. Their skin was darker than his, bronzed by contact with the fierce solar radiation of this region.
“You’re as naked and innocent as a baby. Look at you,” said the young woman.
When he failed to respond she walked around him, examining the front and back for possible tricks. The young man did the same. They were amazed the most by his shoulder blades, unusually protuberant as if they had once been designed for flight. They wanted to touch him, but something held them back.
“Do you speak English? Spanish? Latin?” asked the young man.
He just nodded in the affirmative with his eyes looking straight into the young man’s face.
“I speak,” he thought to himself, because of course he did, given the advanced language processing of his trillions of years of evolution. But the words failed to be produced. Apparently, he’d not been provided with the instructions on the physical need to open his mouth. Somehow, incredibly, this information was not part of the package that came with the newly installed software.
They got him in the truck and seated him between them. He marvelled at the way they seemed to anticipate the bumps in the road, swaying naturally, attuned to the passage. He felt that he was being ripped apart. Sharp, electric pains shot up and down his untested back and legs like knives.
When they finally reached a stained mud house and a corral out front with a pair of hungry, long suffering, half wild, mottled horses twisting and bucking their heads inside it, he failed to move. The young man and woman pulled him out and lifted him carefully to his feet. The ground here was the same, and he was able, with careful steps, to follow inside the house, where they pulled up a chair for him by the earth stove that was burning a dull red fire in its interior and giving out smudges of smoke produced by intermittent down drafts. A large, calico cat rubbed itself against his hairless calf. He picked the cat up and placed it against its chest and looked into its eyes. There was a wealth of information that the cat wished to share. The cat told him much of the way interactions among people were largely to be ignored. They would fight and die as soon as eat, said the cat. But soon enough they would remember to eat and produce food with the work of their hands. There didn’t seem to be any other way they knew how to produce food. Somehow the fighting and dying was implicated in the food production, in ways that seemed to exasperate the cat. He decided he liked the animal for its forthrightness and honesty and also for the wealth of concentrated light in its eyes. He thought with a fright that perhaps it wouldn’t be long before he would understand the cat’s exasperation.
They brought him clothes, the young man and the woman. They argued over their choices, but the young woman seemed less concerned with the clothes and more concerned about what the neighbors would think. It was possible, the visitor saw, that there was some anomaly here that would not redound in his favor in the short or the long term. He tried to think what it was. He was sure it was buried somewhere in the genetic packaging. He wandered over to the dusty glass window. It wouldn’t open. The young man’s older brothers, a motley trio of guys with slouching postures, had gathered on the back patio of the house, where they were in the process of butchering a sheep. The visitor stood in his new clothes, which were way too small for him. He was freakishly large. He watched through the closed window. Large blue flies buzzed around the window. The sheep craned its head with the misshapen, sawed-off horns, brayed and looked wide-eyed with fear.
They slit its throat. The brothers argued as they hosed the blood away down a drain in the corner of the cement patio. They whispered as they worked. They were in favor of terminating their brother's visitor in like fashion, as he seemed to have a weird, otherworldly provenance, which gave them carte blanche over his future. The young man, the owner of the house, stood listening with a bottle in his hand. He believed his more cautious brothers were correct in their assessment of the possible dangers posed by his weird guest, given they could tell nothing about where he came from, what language he spoke, what kind of antecedents legally and fiscally he possessed, nor his motivations or desires. He was like a ticking time bomb, primed to expose and explode the fractured world. But morally the young man was different than his brothers. He was more inclined to show hospitality, get the visitor drunk and find out what made him tick. The brothers turned and watched the visitor watch them out the window. They grumbled openly, but the younger brother, the owner of the property and of the truck, called him and waved, urging him to come out and join them. The visitor turned and walked away from the window, reappearing moments later by the back corner of the patio as if he’d levitated there. It was freakish, but the young man extended the bottle and a glass. He invited the visitor to try the pulque, a specialty of the area. The visitor drank and was glad. He extended his arms and smiled. The brothers laughed in a measured way, rationing their good feeling, and looked at each other with lidded eyes.
It was the first food he’d had since arriving in his new body. He felt shot through with light, happiness and a deep understanding of the vicissitudes that accompanied these people throughout their days. Soon there were children and more neighbors on the back patio, and the music of large guitars filled the air. There were large bellied men and slow moving men and women in less than formal dress. The night came, and the visitor had not stopped smiling or dancing with anyone who asked him. He had learned to move his feet and sway his torso in time with the music and thought he was catching on there in a big way. The ladies, in particular, loved him. But name-calling and vicious smears broke out as they vied to be his dance partner. The men, sitting in fold out chairs of cheap fabrication, did not like what they were seeing. Specifically, he had an effeminate way of moving despite his large size, and his smile seemed pasted on. They would have trusted him more if his smile disappeared or if he lost some of the sensitivity of his dance. But the visitor seemed unrepentant, even if he did not realize there was an acute danger of ending up like the castrated ram. It had been slaughtered to keep it from going through more of the feed and for stews and barbecue meats in the days of dry winter in September, which was when the village held its festival week in honor of the patroness, Our Lady of the Zacatecas.
A fight broke out late at night, when the guitars had embarked on the last verses of the classic, “Gremio de los zapateros.”
“Hijo mío, si la vida se fuera tan pronto,
si la miseria fuera de oro,
si los ciegos vieran bien y para tanto
Seríamos hijo mío, los zapateros…”
Thus sang the large-bellied men, but their singing was interrupted by the sounds of gunfire and grunting. Then, in the silence of the night, cursing and screams punctuated the once promising air. The visitor sank down on the ground, feeling behind him first and then letting go. The hard concrete hit his haunches with the absurdity of this violence, this dance of atoms that had been set to boil through his arrival. With this knowledge came the desire that the illusion of solidity would save him from what had to be fluid and in the end deathly and painful because it was alive, as was he, on a planet in the throes of life, in the youngest stages of universal consciousness. He tucked his head between his knees and thought of the colors of his passage, of his brothers the ants, that labored beneath the cement and crawled and carried on with strength and purity. Then he felt the tap on his back.
She was the ugliest woman in the world.
“Come with me,” she said.
Also, her mouth didn’t move, which meant she was, like him, a visitor. One of her eyes was blank and oozing a kind of rheum. The other emanate
d kindness. He struggled to his feet and followed her through the scenes of carnage in the house and outside. Her back was twisted like a spindle, as if she’d been bent several times in different perspectives upon a rack. By following behind her, he gained a kind of invisibility, as people turned their eyes away from the both of them. They walked down the road together. He asked her if it was painful.
“What?” she asked, seeking clarity.
“Your life?” he asked, hesitantly, not wanting to insult her. She craned her already quite angular and multi-faceted face towards his.
“You know that everything painful is transitory and vice-versa, right? Everything is painful because that’s how everything is. Don’t get stuck in the problem of pain. The problem is how to be unstuck. Better to walk towards the pain. What I see with my one good eye is light.”
“But we just walked away from a lot of pain. Is that what we’re supposed to do?” He was genuinely concerned with getting this point straightened out because he truly wanted to get back home to K-Mars. He missed his life there, although much of it was a blank now.
“To not act is to act. To not speak is to speak. By walking away we removed ourselves from the energy source that was dispensing the hate. We now walk towards the light.”
The Saints of David (The Jonah Trilogy Book 3) Page 10