“Where are we going?”
“Home.”
He felt something. The word did not come to him at first, and the feeling was new. He reckoned it came with earth, and humans, and part of it was an energy that was very old that perhaps he was reconnecting with, although it felt like he’d never felt it before. But there it was, in him. Bemusement. She was indeed in a lot of pain, but walking was a relief to her. They walked, and her back seemed to straighten. Only the side of her face was visible to him. She was about a foot shorter, so it was just the line of her forehead and the arch of her one good eye that he studied, but it was enough to reveal good judgement and determination and a sense that, wherever they were going, they were meant for something. That was a comfort to him because he was under contract, and if he performed well it would mean good things when he got back to K-Mars.
Just a few hundred yards up a dusty junction was a general store set above the asphalt on a two-foot high curb of crumbling concrete. A couple of dogs asleep behind the store roused themselves, as the two oddly matched figures passed under the streetlight beyond. The dogs barked for a good half hour after they passed. The trailer, an old camper that had belonged to a couple from Kenmore, Ohio, was a Chateau Class C, a 31-footer. The marine gel coat had settled into a dull patina of decrepitude, and it perched above the road like a bird about to take flight, jutting its nose into the lane of traffic. The couple was buried up the hill about ten paces, as far as she had been able to drag the two with her brother after they had died within days of each other. That had happened about a decade previous in earth years, which were, quaintly, the equivalent of a morning on K-Mars.
He heard her history of collaboration. She spoke of the vicious hatred that sometimes came over the deceased original owners when they thought about how far away they had traveled from the home of their childhood and about the fact that there was no going back on the trail. She informed him that the earth people suffered from a severely linear sense of identity. Although there were wisdom traditions, they had largely died out. The Ohio woman, Kari, had belonged as a child to the Jonah, derived from a school that worshiped a crucified prophet and was constantly hoping for an imminent return. Every time He’d been expected to arrive and had failed to materialize there had been waves of violence directed against her parents and their friends from their perceived oppressors. They had continued to flee into the mountains and the caves that led to the secret interior, leaving their neighbors to hold out alone against the forces of the state. The authorities that still reigned demanded an accommodation with power through what she termed their collective material hypnosis.
The Ohio couple had secretly feared her and her brother. And they in turn had secretly loathed them. She had been called names when they thought they were alone in the camper. They called her a little snake. The visitor sensed that she had taken the name on with pride. She was allied with snakes. He knew snakes, he told her. They were a cosmological presence. He had great respect for them, as they had been among the first intelligent life forms to figure out dark energy travel.
Her brother was a microcephalic. He chewed his tongue and seemed to be either laughing or in pain. Guessing which one he was doing was based on slight alterations that came over his grimacing face. But he had a gift for sound. When he opened his mouth, out came bird songs. She told him where their visitor came from. He had a song ready that approximated her description of the other end of the Multiverse, a vast whistling projection of distance bridged by the sacrifice and attendance of a higher love. It was almost a symphony. Afterwards, he smiled and chewed some more on his tongue.
The visitor fell in love with the camper. He could see that the ghosts of the Ohio people had refused to move on because of their admixture of devotion to their roving home and spite towards the little microcephalic and his wild-haired and crazily configured sister. They made a cozy little group. But then the ghosts of the Ohio couple wanted to show him something.
He moved outside and in the early dawn could see something snap on top of the rocks. He walked over to where he had seen what looked like a flash of something. It was ice, the remains of a hoarfrost that passed immediately into gas and disappeared before his eyes.
“What was here?” he wondered aloud.
“That was where she did it,” said Medusa. “She killed herself with the drugs.”
“So she was unhappy?”
“She felt it was her destiny. She felt that she had been held back by her destiny. I told her it felt wrong to me. He died right afterward. OD’d.”
“He wanted to help her?”
“Always. He made it his main purpose, trying to help someone who refused to be helped. She was stubborn. Ideas about her destiny. No escape from it sort of thing. Odd strength in a way.”
“She’s not anymore. She wants it to be known. She wants us to move on.”
“But we can’t. The motor doesn’t run.”
That night the visitor slept his first Earth sleep. In his dreams there was an old house. It hadn’t been cared for in many years. It sat on the outskirts of a town, on higher ground where the forestland had taken over from the pastures cleared by the first wave of the early settlers. The young girl put out a bucket of scraps for the wild dog and then talked to it, coaxing it to come closer. Day after day she did this. The wild dog was smart. It pricked its ears when it sensed she was being truthful. She told the dog that she needed it. Her mother had lost her mind and did not come down from the hatch in the top floor where she had been sent to get better on her own. Her father had gone into town a few weeks before and had not come back. It was just her and her sister cooking and cleaning in meager, half-hearted spurts between muttered prayers they had learned from the grandparents in the Jonah, collecting the eggs and milking the cow and collecting scraps for the pigs. But the pigs could survive. They rooted in the mud and found nourishment. The wild dog was a friend, an extravagance.
The explosion behind her sent her jumping, her bare feet upturned and pale soles flashing as she ran down the road, away from the house where the shot had come from. It was too late for the wild dog. Her sister was an expert marksman, splitting the dog's skull in a spurting bloody crack at the top of its head. Later in life she went out west and worked for the police department in Petaluma, where she’d become involved in quelling the riots of the 2020s, the years when the Federation had first been taken over by the Republican Homeland.
She, Kari, had never loved anybody after the wild dog. Despite its injury it survived. The bullet had in fact only grazed it. It had crawled along the road and died in a dry ditch overgrown with invasive bittersweet roots. Years later she had dug out the bones and put them in a suitcase when she left for Cold Spring Harbor and the RV park where she’d been promised a job through the site for augmented wannabees, people hoping for an end to jumping from job to job, gig to gig, the moonlighting and scraping by. Cold Spring Harbor was just a fork in the road by a dried up canal, but the Repho had hired a whole bunch of people to run tests, brain scans and the like, and the whole town was hooked up to the first Augment. She had not been happy with it. It dulled her libido. The cracked dog skull sat on a ledge above her cot while they lived there. Until she and the man, Tucker, the one she’d met that made love to her with a sense of gentleness, had fled south, without the wild dog’s skeletal remains. Those were tossed in the dry canal bed with a prayer. In the Chateau, they drove across the fortified border, hoping for better days. When they found the ugliest woman, Medusa, then a young, deformed Mexican girl, and her brother, the two were happy to come to work cleaning and cooking for the gringo couple, who were both pre-diabetic by then and certainly already feeble minded as a result of the botched Augment, their diet of cake and dried fruits, the fentanyl and the long journey into the sun.
Love making between the two gringos became even more difficult and rare. The man had found her attractive. Once you got used to her deformities there was something sensual about the way she moved, her accommodation to
pain, her selfless need to please. It was attractive to any man, including Tucker apparently, an older gentleman, originally from upstate Michigan, whose fear of death got in the way of his thinking. Kari had became jealous of Medusa and called her names. It was true. She’d plotted ways of getting rid of her, but they had become too dependent on one another. The Chateau’s engine and auxiliary systems had begun to break down. Like the invasive bittersweet, they were trapped by the way they took care of each other, the little web of kindnesses and gratitudes and indebtedness -- the moral confusion of their life. The Chateau was a seedbed of disaster, with hothouse flowers of great beauty and vitality, hatred and dependency blossoming on the wilting stem of love.
It was tiring. He held up the story to the light, like the risen Jesus, and let it spread its secret meaning on the waves of thought that underlay even the deepest energy patterns. Indeed, it was still at that “time” a mystery where the one began and the other ended. Presumably the producer of the show had some idea.
When he woke up in the camper, nobody was around. It was clear he’d slept for a long spell. He couldn’t see or hear anybody, not even Kari and Tucker, the ghosts from Ohio. They seemed to have finally cleared up their lingering desire for connection to a story among the living.
He needed to get the camper back on the road. He looked at the engine. With a glance he renovated old wires and cleared rusted gaps. With a touch he lubricated and strengthened tired fittings. When the brother and sister reappeared shortly after, they were amazed at what he had accomplished. The engine was turning over smoothly and purring like a satisfied feline. They thought that a skill like this for mechanical work could be put to use. Nobody knew how to drive, but they let the visitor give it a try.
He eased the camper back away from the cliff and swung it around and then shifted gears and gave it gas as if he’d been driving it all his life. Then they were on the road. The little brother whistled a song he had prepared for such a moment. It was a song of the open road, of liberation and a step into the unknown. He wasn’t really her little brother. She’d taken him in, an abandoned, sixteen-month old pin-headed baby, when the state home for runaways and orphans in Torreon had shut down. And this is where she directed the visitor to head. She was almost positive that between the many garages in Torreon specializing in vintage fossil fuel vehicles for collectors, mainly in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the circus of anatomical and biological treasures, El Circo Hermanos Crucigrama de Chimalhuacan, they could find a niche for themselves.
As they travelled along that road, it seemed disaster had struck. The weak central government under the presidency of Panzon Azueto, a puppet of the Repho, had determined to put an end to another of the myriad uprisings that always seemed to beset the country. The army was on the loose in a scorched earth campaign of terror. The Chateau was adrift in a sea of troubles. That first night they stopped along the road. A human tide of refugees appeared around the bend, at first a trickle of walkers and then a widening, a mass of people growing longer. They were fleeing to the mountains, they said, where the Saint would save them from the army and its sadistic robots, the devils of the Repho. They truly believed the Saint would save them, like a mother hen. There was no sense or thought put into the formation of the collective flight, just a wave formed by the lay of the land and some distant, initial impulse, perhaps tied to the action of the moon or the gravitational pull of distant stars. The only organizing principle was the need for movement and the need to accumulate all the life in its path, make a clean sweep of the countryside as it rolled by. The motley crew of the Chateau avoided it by ignoring the rabble's entreaties to come along and hear the stories, better than breaking bread. The woman was determined to get to a town where she believed they would be better off.
The next day, when they arrived in the village of Renacingo, all the people had gone off in the march of revivalism and panic except for a troubled bunch of adolescents, a criminal gang dedicated to anti-social activities. They saw the Chateau pull up and park in the central square and roused themselves for action. But they took a step back at the sight of the giant visitor, then the ugly one, and finally the little microcephalic brother, all of whom descended in a slow line from the Chateau.
“They must think we just got here from another planet,” said the ugly woman.
The visitor smiled.
The youths surrounded them warily. The woman announced in a rich confident voice, the voice of a beautiful woman, that they were looking for a market where they could buy food and also that they could use a hotel room with a proper bath.
“There’s nothing here anymore. All the people have left. You better give us all your money,” said the apparent leader of the gang, a boy with an unlit cigarette hanging from his lower lip and no chin. He pulled a knife with one hand and a semi-automatic .38 caliber handgun in the other. The visitor reached out to take the weapons away before they could be put to use. As he twisted the hand with the gun in it, he stepped back and pulled the boy over his hips, flipping him on the ground like a sack of beans. Another boy, meaner than the first, rushed him with a knife held low. The visitor stepped aside like a bullfighter and tried to pull the knife. He got stabbed in the hand. Ignoring the sharp pain, he shot his bloody hand around the second youth’s neck and lifted him so that they could see each other eye to eye. The knife clattered on the sandy flagstones of the square. He looked in the young man's eyes and saw beneath the layers of hatred to a never-ceasing round of pain and exile that had given rise to this particular mistake. There was a canniness and a stubbornness. But nothing else he could work with. So he set the boy down and looked at him sternly. All his companions had fled. The boy looked around at the three strangers that now surrounded him.
“I’m so fucked up, personally,” he said.
They got back on the Chateau with the boy. He was still shaking with the force of his newly won self-knowledge. They shared what little food they had as the visitor started the engines.
“Where are we going?” asked the youth.
“The road is life,” sang the little brother, inspired to spread his joy, half wild with hunger as they all were by then. But it didn’t matter. They weren’t really worried about anything. The visitor did a very slow three-point turn and headed out the other way from where they had come. He was looking for something.
“What you looking for?” asked the youth.
“What are you looking for?” echoed the microcephalic little brother, with a laugh.
The woman looked at the visitor approvingly. He hunched over the wheel and scanned the horizon, searching for the entrance to the interior, the heart of the planet.
Chapter Eight -- December 17, 2072
Restaurant Si Senior,
Split
They sat at a long table in the nearly deserted restaurant on a Sunday mid-morning. Antwine Boyland and Jesus Rosenbaum both wore cowboy hats, and Jesus had a three-day stubble, a black growth that still smelled of rancid Tubid food and the cologne that was given away free by Vault, the charter company that had once been represented by the Atreid Group. Antwine also looked worn down by the trans-Atlantic journey, but he was small-boned and had a less drawn and tired face than Jesus. He was more of a cherub, unperturbed in his outlook. Jesus, like his namesake, was passionate about things. He functioned as the awkward face of their generation, constantly questioning and dissatisfied with the answers he received. Ludmilla could see that what she had once taken as charming, a refreshing lack of filter, would one day be a point of pity. On the other hand, Antwine, so quiet and placid, dull even, now with his recently filled-out chest, torso and hips and the way he had of turning his head from side to side, looking quizzically around as he talked and chewed the filet a la parrilla confidently and methodically with his underslung jaw and absorbed everything with his slowly focusing eyes, was becoming a solidly placed man, difficult to perturb even in the face of the setbacks he had received already in his life and would continue to receive.
&nbs
p; Antwine had worked for five years now with the same company. He was listed as one of the founders. He and the other two partners, Estonian Kurds, were in the process of selling it off to the venerable Sandelsky Corporation, which was interested in stripping the assets and rebranding the original optical replacement fiber operation as a tax write-off. Antwine had not come off well between the devalued shares and his junior partner status vis a vis the two Estonian Kurds, the brothers Youganof. He announced all this between bites and stabs at the underdone meat dish. Anyone else would have been a little bitter, but Antwine was philosophical about it. Ludmilla couldn’t help getting a little impatient with his lack of invective, but she curbed her tongue.
The waitress, a bleached, unsmiling blonde, asked if everything was all right.
“No,” said Jesus, “we are about to be annihilated.”
“I know,” said the waitress, with a thick CUA accent. “The meteor.”
It seemed everyone had heard of the approach of the meteor, dubbed the Sarah Palin for its erratic, yet potentially catastrophic path and for the time it had come close in 2020 during the last electoral cycle of the old United States. Ludmilla thought of Samael Chagnon with a pang of guilt. He’d wanted utmost secrecy about the Oort cloud and its meteoric threats, but somehow word had leaked out. Leaks were signs of Augment vulnerability. And an Augment vulnerability was a tear in the fabric of civilization. How many times in college and later at the Magnum Berkeley doctoral program had they heard that same dire warning and glazed their thought processes at the very unspeakable nature of such a thing.
“They are events expressing some sort of power expressing events outside ourselves. What you mean is rather narrow. Human events go on in our own bodies. You're not responsible for it, so in the same way you have hiccups you have no intention of doing it...You spend all your life blaming your parents…”
The Saints of David (The Jonah Trilogy Book 3) Page 11