Eupocalypse Box Set
Page 52
“Amit brought me through some dark times as well. I was just back from the Viet Nam war, and he sat up with me some nights when things got bad.” His voice cracked, but then he straightened. “I would probably not be here today if it were not for Amit Viswanathan. I returned the favor when his children died in a house fire, and I saw his big, loving heart break. That heart healed with a greater love for all humanity and a determination to make a better world. Amit was one of the finest people I have ever known.”
Jessica saw a tear streak down D.D.’s face. She dropped Josh’s hand and took her mother’s. “It’s okay, Mom,” she whispered. Josh, solemn, took the canvas bag with Amit’s ashes in it, released the drawstring, and upended the sack. The heavier parts of the ash hit the water with a sizzling sound; the wind caught the powdery portion and blew it away in a swirling cloud.
“Goodbye, old friend.” The seagulls lamented overhead, disappointed that there was nothing edible in the debris. Amit’s friends on the boat abided in honor of their companion, friend, and mentor. Some wept. All grieved.
Jeremy turned the boat back to shore, tacking across the wind, and tossed Ryan a rope when they reached the low dock. Ryan set a plank between the deck and the beach, and the party filed off, mindful of their Sunday-best clothes. Ryan whisked Jeremy away in a wagon. The rest made their way on foot a little further up the beach, where a canopy of flowers awaited.
Once the group was assembled, musicians struck up the march. Marthita pranced ahead, wearing a fluffy confection of a dress, strewing azalea petals, and joining her sister in standing across from her brother amongst the wedding party. Glowing exuberantly, Gaby walked down the aisle, her black hair glossy and gleaming down her back beneath a wreath of blossoms. Her straight floor-length dress, embroidered with crystals, shimmered in the sun.
As the local minister led the two through their vows, DD noticed that the dress was awfully snug across Gaby’s midsection. The two of them are so perfect together. Who would have imagined this when we all first met each other, scared and running for our lives?
After the ceremony, the guests adjourned to party. Musicians dropped in and out of the band, playing waltzes, bluegrass, rock songs, and mariachi. Each type of song brought a different portion of the crowd to the raked patch of packed sand which served as a dance floor. Except for Alfred; wearing a swirling parti-colored muumuu and cape, he minced and flailed, stomped and twirled, bumped and gyrated non-stop through every number, his long limbs and beard waving indiscriminately around him in a gaily terrifying carousel of pure, uninhibited joy. Jeremy’s sister and father had traveled up the coast, and Gaby’s extended family—both the dark-complected mestizos and Arkansas rednecks—were getting to know their new relatives over wine, mead, fine reposada tequila, and corn whiskey.
The feast was prodigious: a wide assortment of delicacies ranging from seabutter crab puffs to roast turkey and pork, new potatoes and parsley, tarts and nuts, and finished with a gorgeous cake made from expensive sugar and flour. The older children raced around, giggling and playing games, Kittykitty bounding along with them and barking.
“Quite a spread!” said DD after hugging the happy couple. “Things must be going well here.”
“We can’t complain. We just happened to be lucky enough to be where the seabutter was. Now we make our livings feeding people further inland.”
“So cool! And it looks like you’ve got a new addition…?” DD cocked an eyebrow at Gaby’s belly.
She beamed. “I miss having a little one around. I’m due in July.”
“How do the other kids feel about it?”
“Oh, they’re fine with it. All the women in my family have a lot of kids. We usually stop at thirty-five, though.”
“Thirty-five? That’s so young! Why?”
“Well, thirty-six kids is just too many.” Groan.
“If it’s a boy, we’ll call him Amit.” She patted her belly.
“And if it’s a girl—”
“Deirdre!” blurted Jeremy.
“Oh! You guys!” DD was speechless.
Don’t Back Down!
Lou Stonegood loved to read his own writing. He especially loved it when someone humored him and allowed him to read one of his own editorials out loud. When that someone was a beautiful, brilliant, tough and elegant woman like Esther Barrington, and she was wearing nothing but a pair of thigh-high black deerskin boots, Lou felt like he was in heaven.
For her part, Esther knew she was in the presence of greatness. She couldn’t feel more fortunate that this brilliant man hadn’t only taken an interest in her, but had made it his secondary preoccupation in life to keep her satisfied—intellectually, materially, and sexually. Her stomach was full of the treats from yet another victory celebration on the town square. Her thighs were sore, her body tingling and relaxed as she sprawled with her arm across Lou’s chest and listened to him read out loud.
He patted her shoulder and tucked his chin to put his bifocal lenses in the right spot for reading from his copy of the Highfield Register. “We of the Register—”
“I wish you’d give up the editorial ‘we.’ It sounds so pompous.”
“Hush, woman! We of the Register are warmly grateful for the outpouring of support we have seen over the past few days and weeks. Blah, blah, celebrate victory, thanks to supporters, names, names, names, et cetera, et cetera…
“Ah, here we go: the enclave on the hill above us is in the hands of those who refuse to realize that they are a vestige of a time whose time has passed. We, the people, have learned that each of us is just that: a person. We will never again be fooled by the platitudes of collectivism which appeal to the worst in our natures.
“Yet, we must remember that the worst in our natures remains coiled, ready to strike, like the proverbial snake in the grass—or that other snake who lured humanity into corruption so long ago.”
“Ugh. You didn’t!”
“Not all of us are atheists, my sweet. Where was I? Oh, yes: the critical element in rebuilding our world in a decentralized, antifragile, peaceful, and equal way is to incorporate new technologies that enable us to interact peer-to-peer in a true world wide web. The new era of Biocomputing devices, powered by shewanella-based electricity and wired with the same type of circuitry which makes up our own brains, will offer the opportunity to leapfrog the thousand years of dreary decay and dark ages that might have been needed to allow networks once again to reach critical mass and break free from command and control.
“From this era forward, remembering that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, let humanity’s relations be governed by the principle of ongoing, enthusiastic consent.”
“I’ll show you ongoing, enthusiastic consent!” Esther knocked the paper aside and swung her lush thigh over Lou’s torso.
Lou put his hands up and threw his head back on the pillow. “Mercy, woman!” he cried. “I’m an old man. I may not be as good as I once was.”
Esther relented and sprawled beside him. “At least you’re as good once, as you ever were. There’s always later.”
“It never goes away.”
THE END
Dear Reader:
Thank you again for buying the exclusive box set. If you’ve made it this far, I know you’re wondering where I could possibly intend to go with these characters and events in the third book, but if I could trouble you for just a few minutes to pop over to the book’s Amazon page and leave a review, I would be eternally grateful.
—PDW
II. Science Fiction— Caution: contains real science.
The boundaries between science fiction and fantasy have blurred and merged over recent decades, but there is a perennial appetite for science fiction which is, well, science-y. Everything that happens during the Eupocalypse is based on real events and real technologies, which are being used right now, this very moment, all over the world. In addition, this second books dips into the “dismal science” of economics and some rather disturbing anthropological
sociology. Below, in completely random order, are links to articles about some of them:
Shewanella-based microbial fuel cells:
https://vdocuments.site/a-mediator-less-microbial-fuel-cell-using-a-metal-reducing-bacterium-shewanella.html , and
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bit.25624/abstract;jsessionid=52415C268FC9BB3185227E679964E944.f01t03
Lipid production by Hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40026718_Analysis_of_Lipid_Export_in_Hydrocarbonoclastic_Bacteria_of_the_Genus_Alcanivorax_Identification_of_Lipid_Export-Negative_Mutants_of_Alcanivorax_borkumensis_SK2_and_Alcanivorax_jadensis_T9
Female Genital Mutilation in the modern Horn of Africa:
https://www.dovepress.com/attitude-toward-female-genital-mutilation-among-somali-and-harari-peop-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-IJWH
https://www.unicef.org/esaro/5440_Ethiopia_FGM_abandonment.htm
The Afar:
http://www.orvillejenkins.com/profiles/afar.html
http://afar-infocenter.com/
Basic voluntarist/anarchist thought:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/11/lew-rockwell/fatal-flaw-politics/
https://fee.org/articles/how-communism-almost-ruined-the-first-thanksgiving/
The entrepreneur as hero:
https://fee.org/articles/the-entrepreneur-on-the-heroic-journey/
Prehistoric, pre-plastic computer: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/decoding-antikythera-mechanism-first-computer-180953979/
Lastly, a chance to make a difference. The Eupocalypse is fiction, but some things contained in the story are sadly all too real. Many of the beta readers of this book’s drafts were appalled and shocked to learn about the practice of female genital mutilation. Below is a link to the AHA foundation, where you can get more information and find out what you can do to help:
https://www.theahafoundation.org/
Catallaxis
Book 3 of the Eupocalypse Series
Peri Dwyer Worrell
For Amanda
And Ben
Catallaxis
Peri Dwyer Worrell
Copyright© 2019 Peri Dwyer Worrell
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations included in critical articles and reviews. For information, please contact the author.
Table of Contents
Catallaxis
I.Deep Blue
II.VTOL
III.Feeling for Stones
IV.A Time for Every Purpose
V.It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion
VI.The Highfield Register, September 8, Year Three
VII.It Never Happened Before
VIII.Walking the Planck
IX.Just a Cotton Pickin’ Minute
X.Slipping the Leash
XI.Update Loading
XII.Snatched from the Jaws of Victory
XIII.Pedal to the Metal
XIV.Extra! Extra!
XV.Land of Oz
XVI.Renovation
XVII.Take a Memo
XVIII.The Head of a Pin
XIX.Slow and Furious
XX.Indiscretion
XXI.Quantum Phineas
XXII.Retirement Village
XXIII.The Register, September 9, Year Three
XXIV.Marching to Mars
XXV.Clausewitz Fog
XXVI.Past Due
XXVII.Lonely at the Bottom
XXVIII.Bridge It
XXIX.Octopus’s Garden
XXX.Lone Star
XXXI.Recognition
XXXII.High Cs
XXXIII.Skull Crumble
XXXIV.Snuffed Out
XXXV.Flotsam
XXXVI.The Register, September 20, Year Three
XXXVII.One Day at a Time
XXXVIII. Opposite of Irish
XXXIX.Sometimes the Sun
XL.The Spoils
XLI.Let It Be
Science Fiction—Caution: Contains Real Science.
Catallaxis
I.
Deep Blue
The barely-taut sails above Meala swallowed the steady breeze bearing her and her crew relentlessly east by east-northeast. From the wooden deck of the gently bobbing ship, she scanned the distance for attackers. Approaching the shore of Yemen, they had almost crossed the Red Sea. The voyage had been a long one. Now becalmed in the middle of the crossing, the crew of seasoned fighting women had plenty of free time.
Each woman spent the interlude between their five-times-daily prayers to Isis, doing what she did best or loved most. Some gambled, some slept; some honed their knives, or ceaselessly disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled their guns. Others sang, playing old Afar, Habesha, and Somali melodies on the krar, accompanied by new words that praised Isis and her victory over the old Zar-Wak Allah.
And a few of the women, like Abiba, quietly cared for the things under their charge. Abiba’s scarred face and scalp, misshapen nose, and stooped posture prevented her from taking great pleasure in others’ company. Her deceased husband had pounded shrieks of received brutality from her like she was a drum, and her shredded voice was not musical. She was most commonly seen looking down—partly out of reflexive, conditioned subservience, and partly to avoid seeing or caring about the other women’s pity.
But she escaped her emotions and found refuge in thought. Since late infancy, her thoughts had expressed themselves in pure mathematics. Those thoughts were as deep and complex as the web of life itself, and as deep as the sea they sailed over.
Abiba gazed into the tank where her precious ctenophores were growing. Like trilobites or cuttlefish, the multi-armed and segmented creatures moved around the tank with an eerie purpose. As they moved, transient images of circuit-board tracings flashed deep within their translucent bodies. Across the whole population of the animals, these flashes created patterns that sometimes spiraled or radiated like fireworks; other times, forming golden-ratio cascades within the volume of the tank.
The symbolic mathematical formulae that formed seemed self-evident to Abiba, and might also have made sense to academic mathematicians and theoretical physicists—had any been present. But none were, for what university scholar or scientist would care to visit a ship sailing from one of the poorest desert regions of eastern Africa? And even if there had been such a scholar—perhaps an adventurous PhD en route from the Djibouti US army base to a safari somewhere—he or she would almost certainly have been killed when the machine sickness unleashed its chaos.
Well, not chaos. Disorder and destruction, but not chaos. For it was chaos that bubbled within the ctenophores now, quantum chaos that mimicked order, just as the mind convincingly mimicked purpose.
Abiba laughed. “Purpose!” she rasped. “Just a handle to push and pull people by. Like Bilqis pushed that wretched fool Meala to do her bidding. Maybe we were right to cut out the flesh of desire for all those centuries, for all the good desire did Meala. Look at her. Look at her!”
Abiba gently covered her ctenophore tank and camshafted her twisted body up the ladder to the deck to do just that.
She looked at her captain, her commander, who faced the approaching shore: her back erect, her radiant, pure coffee skin glowing from the salt mist. Meala wore canvas pants and cloth wraps secured with sewn leather straps, which also served to holster her traditional gile knife and an Ares-16 carbine tucked beneath them.
Despite her cynicism, Abiba spared a moment for a breath of simple aesthetic admiration. Then she let it out with a snort, recalling how easily Meala had been manipulated into this mission by the memory of her lost love.
Love! Li, after all, had died a violent death in the desert. Thus, Meala could always remember him through the haze of adolescent infatuation, a rosy glow surrounding her first memory of him. After she fished him from the sea, half
-drowned, he’d regained consciousness in her arms, blinking at the receding storm clouds.
If he’d lived, just give them a few years together, and he’d be calling her foul names and demanding she keep the brats quiet!
Abiba had unconsciously put her hand on the ever-throbbing ridge of scar that ran along her skull, but now, she laid it tentatively on Meala’s forearm.
Meala trained her serene gaze on Abiba with a peaceful smile. She was one of the few people who looked on Abiba without a flinch. Even though the older woman tried to be indifferent, she did care. With the side of her mouth that was capable of motion, she felt herself smile in return.
“Is this our next conquest?” Abiba nodded at the dark stripe of land barely visible above the sea’s horizon. They spoke Awar, the language they’d carried from their Danakil homeland.
“Yes, Abiba. The maps show this stretch is full of small bays. We have only to sail along the coast until we find a harbor deep enough for us to anchor.”
Abiba squinted at the young leader and slipped her hand into the crook of her elbow. “What aren’t you saying?”
Meala raised an eyebrow, acknowledging the sage’s perceptiveness of her concern for her team. “Sheik Abdullah sailed from here. I don’t know where he went, and I don’t know if there are others like him. I remember him well—as the worst type of fanatic. It would enrage the untrue imams and their deluded believers to encounter faithful women like us, who serve the true order of existence!”