Jon Frankel's Blog, page 7

a fugue on the current crisis

The traffic in Saigon is a marvel of balletic brinksmanship as 8 million motor bikes behave like schools of fish, swarming over its streets and traffic circles. This is a common place in ‘developing’ countries. I put that in quotes because I no longer know the proper term and also because cities like Saigon suffer most from over, not under, development. But I have never been in a place with such chaotic traffic, it is a moving Mandelbrot set of vehicles with few if any stoplights or walk signs, and people riding motorcycles in the opposite direction of traffic and on the sidewalks, if there is a functioning sidewalk.

But there is nothing menacing in all of this. There is a cheerfulness in this city that is notable. It is prosperous, and while only an idiot could call it clean, the air, and the streets are cleaner than in Manila or Bangkok. Saigon lies on low ground and polluted air doesn’t form into a smog bubble as it does in Athens, Denver or LA but dissipates.

It is an extremely hot city. Online it said the average high temperature in March is 88. It has been 93-100 degrees every day this week. And this is the most benign effect of climate change. Several people from the Mekong Delta have told me that the water there is drying up, because of dams built upriver by China and Cambodia, and this in turn has caused the Delta water to become salty, which is not only killing fish but rice. Vietnam is the second largest rice producer in the world, and most of that is grown in the Delta. When the Himalayan glaciers that feed the worlds largest and most important river systems melt, the situation will get much worse.

Rice came to places like the Mekong Delta late. It was not until the 18th and 19th century that people were able to control deltaic water. Traditional rice economies were based on controlling water above deltas, where the task was diversion, not raising ground above sea level. Before the 18th Century the delta itself was sparsely populated and its economy was based on trade, fishing and piracy. As the Vietnamese marched south they displaced the Cham and Khmer people. This took many hundreds of years. The Vietnamese in the north have been there for many thousands of years. Saigon was founded in 1700.

The southern culture of Vietnam is quite different from the north. It is more Buddhist, less centralized, and its economy has always been based on trading and markets. Buying and selling and consuming are passions of the city. This is true of every port town in Asia, and it goes right back over two thousand years to ancient trade networks that linked the Indian Ocean to the seas of South East Asia and China. Roman coins have been found in Oc Eo, a 2nd century port in the Mekong Delta. Northern Vietnam, and therefore the Vietnamese historically, were not a trading people, the Cham, their rivals and neighbors the south, were. This dialectic of rice farming villages and coastal trading plays out across the region and history; it supplies the pulse and current of change and conflict. To see it up close and hear people express opinions and sentiments that still reflect it is to a bookish autodidact like me like adding water to powder. My brain is suddenly swelling with images and tastes and smells where once pages of footnotes, prefaces and introductions flapped.

I come at a time in history when the globalism that began in places like the Mekong Delta and has become the defining fact of our time is highlighted over and over again by events that overwhelm us, in this case the Covid19 pandemic, a phenomenon that is both flesh and simulacra, a media frenzy and a tragic reality, science fiction materialized in the present as a proto-life form spreads through the global network of airports and cities, borne by droplets of spit, dramatizing profound social dysfunctions, ripping the orderly face off governments and countries to reveal that the lies and corruption of late capitalism aren’t abstractions but deadly, and that its ideology, which thrives on disaster, is incompetent to deal with it. Our leaders, capitalism, have lost the mandate of heaven and many of us stand hoping it and they will collapse, yet terrified of what that collapse actually entails. It is better to reform than unleash the chaos of uncontrolled historical, epical change, but in the heat of its detonation it seems to be too late for that.

Vietnam has very few cases of Covid19, but its economy is dependent on tourism and its service industry is in freefall. The very forces that are spreading this disease are the ones driving many of the world’s economies, including that of the the US. Vietnam is home to our outsourced industries, but like the US it thrives on tourism and consumerism, and if the world doesn’t buy clothes and sneakers and electronics, and people no longer can get on planes and eat in foreign restaurants, posting selfies and pictures of exotic food on Facebook, then we are fucked. I was talking to Tam, a 23 year old man working at my small ‘eco’ hotel. I can’t confirm it but he seems gay, he is well educated, speaks excellent English from talking to thousands of tourists, all of whom must speak English to communicate internationally, and has traveled extensively. We talked about Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia and he showed me on his iPhone (a much better one than mine!) all of the places in Vietnam he has gone. There are as many dots as there are places we bombed during the war. There are 4 of these hotels in the country. They started in rural areas with an eco-friendly ethos and a socially progressive agenda, as stated in their materials. Tam told me that they are firing all of the staff and closing the hotel permanently in April. He has no idea of what to do with his life. He is nevertheless optimistic, because Vietnam, and Saigon, are young places, at the forefront of the world, not its backwater. But the situation is not good here or at home for service workers.

This crisis will pass, at least temporarily when the scorching temperatures of summer arrive, but it will return in the fall (in the northern hemisphere) and until there is a vaccine it will be a fact of life. Can the world economy survive until summer? Undoubtedly. But my little town in Upstate New York relies totally on university students and tourism. It is a service economy with a very high cost of living. It is estimated that the county will lose 4 million dollars a week. How long will it take to recover that? Restaurants are afraid of closing but can’t stay open, and restaurant workers have no benefits and nothing to live on if laid off. The right thing to do is to shut it all down and prevent the spread. But to do so the government would have to pay people not to work. In Communist Vietnam the government is not going to do this. It is sink or swim. Places like Vietnam are in a better condition to weather this out than poorer countries without resources or the US, which is on the brink of civil war anyway. The global pandemic is ripping the illusions apart and what it reveals is something as ugly and nihilistic as many of us have imagined, and yet we go on fighting about the one thing we could do easily: pay people to stay home, provide free health care, and thereby avert becoming like Wuhan. But if we successfully stop this thing I know what will happen. A significant number of people on every facet of our crystalline conflict will claim that it was all a hoax, media hype and we will go on with our march into a future where climate disaster, economic collapse, refugee crises and epidemic disease plunge us into a hell of internecine conflict for which this is a dress rehearsal.

GEORGE COOPER REX

PHAEDRA’S PLAY, ADAPTED FROM UBU ROI, AND PERFORMED BY CHILDREN ON THE KBI DEADBEAT PRISON SHIP, CONSTELLATIONS END, AS IT NEARS MARS.

A room in George Cooper’s mansion

George Cooper: Frak

Imogen Smiley: You stinking old ass crack

George Cooper the First,

Put down the bottle or your liver will burst

And your guts pile up on your feet I fear.

George Cooper: Mind I don’t smash your face.

Remember, I’m the King of Beer.

Chorus: You know he’ll smash your face

‘Cause he’s George Cooper the First

Billionaire with an iron fist

Smiley: You’re a fucking disgrace

A blowhard and a coward.

Don’t you know there are bigger pigs

Lining up at the trough?

Cooper: None bigger than me

I am CEO of the Cooper Belt Company

I sit on twenty boards of director

And I’m the chief dissector

At the museum of midwestern sociopaths.

Beware my murderous wrath.

Chorus: Beware his murderous wrath!

George Cooper is a sociopath

Smiley: You don’t mind playing second fiddle?

Don’t mind wallowing in the middle

Of a mediocre pack while Bezos and Musk

Branson and Milner leave you in the dust?

Cooper: What can I do about it?

Am I not rich enough

With my castle full of stuff?

Smiley: If you cut off their heads

You could rule in their stead.

Cooper: Those other Kings are chumps:

They might have all the cash

But their castles are dumps.

Smiley: You will always be the King of Beer

If you don’t learn to think big my dear.

Not just Mars but the entire solar system

Lies within your grasp if you but murder them.

Cooper: If I ruled them all I could wear a crown

Of Plutonian gravel and ice and I’d own

Every rock between Mercury and Alpha centauri!

Smiley: Now you’re thinking straight.

Seizing the crown is your fate.

Cooper: But what if I should fail?

I’m but two feet tall.

Who am I to take down giants?

Smiley: It’s simple political science!

Burn your enemies where they stand

And seize all the land of the solar system.

Cooper: You just want your ass on a throne.

I see right through you Imogen Smiley.

How about instead you sit on my bone?

Smiley: Try it George Cooper and I’ll break your head.

Exeunt Cooper

Frak, scrat and boogers,

Off to prowl his harem of cougars.

That cheap little bastard

Won’t pay to fuck young girls.

But I got the last word

And am ready to stand

On the shoulders of my dwarf,

My malignant, small-minded zoomorph,

For I will be Queen of the Universe.

A banquet hall in Cooper’s Castle, a feast laid out on the table

Cooper: eating a whole chicken No matter how much skin I gnaw,

How many bones I throw in my maw,

I don’t grow any taller, I’m sawed off at the knees,

Platters of liver, intestines and cheese

Do no good, they laugh behind my back, say

That my dear mother was cursed by Gypsies

And I performed in a circus of fleas.

Enter Imogen Smiley

My fat old cow and Queen

Where are the guests?

Smiley: How should I know? They’re late.

Cooper: By the rod in my hand I’m hungry.

Smiley: That’s not your dick it’s a chicken.

Cooper: I know the difference between a cock and a hen!

You really look ugly tonight. You have dressed

To impress? You’ve outdone yourself, dear

In Honor of Your King of Beer.

Smiley: Dream on diminutive shit

I’m dressed for Jeff Bezos whose mighty bark

Sails into my harbor tonight come dark.

Cooper: I think I’ll drink this magnum of wine

And finish the l’homard de nerval.

Smiley: Put down the lobster and the Pommard

Cote de Beaune

Cooper: By my bone I will not

I’d rather cut your eyes out.

Enter Captain Jakes and his child soldiers

Smiley: Captain Jakes! Welcome.

Captain Jakes: Where is our great King of Beer?

Cooper: I’m right here!

Am I not tall enough to see?

Captain Jakes: It is your glory, Sire, that blinds.

Cooper: As I thought.

Jakes: A mighty feast you have prepared

for me and my child soldiers. You haven’t spared

the rib of a pig nor the snout of a cow.

Cooper: The snout on the menu is my Queen’s.

Smiley: You’ll see that the table is replete

With dishes fit for billionaires.

Bezos’ favorite, musk gland of marmoset;

Branson’s Croatian cheese of donkey’s milk;

Milner’s Martian oyster borscht; and Elon’s

Cherished bat shit chillies, flown in from China

In a Deadbeat’s vagina.

Cooper: Where the hell did you get

All the money to pay for it?

Smiley: Ignore this little asshole.

Gentlemen we have policy to discuss.

Cooper: I’ll give you policy, suck my pus.

My shit on a dish to pass,

Buttered bums and Martian sap,

Used condoms in a whore’s lap.

He throws shit at them

All: OH! OW! EW!

Jakes: Shit and onions this stuff’s vile.

Smiley: Please don’t go.

The l’hommard de nerval is delicious.

Jakes: Lobster on a leash sounds pretty good.

Cooper: Try my boudin noir first.

All: No no, not that diseased little member.

Remember September!

Smiley: What happened last fall

Won’t happen again. First

I promise your child soldiers

Stock in SpaceX, Vulcan and Virgin Galactic.

Cooper: I’ll make you CEO of SpaceX.

Isn’t that fantastic?

Jakes: But Musk is alive and he’ll never yield.

Cooper: He will if you help me murder him.

Jakes: He is my enemy. Our pact is sealed.

Smiley: All I require is a little blood

on the contract. That closes our deal.

Jakes cuts his finger with a bowie knife and scribbles his signature on a parchment

Cooper: hugging Jakes I love you Captain Jakes!

Jakes: Phew, old man, King of Beer,

Don’t you ever bathe? You stink.

Cooper: Once or twice a year.

Smiley: Never. He pisses in the sink

And shits in the shower.

Cooper: Frak, by my bone I’ll lock you in the tower

And make you grunt

You dried up old cunt.

Cooper’s corporate headquarters.

Messenger: Branson and Milner, Bezos and Musk

Are buying up stock in Cooper Belt Companies.

Cooper: Frak! All is lost! Now is the dusk

Of our day come and all of our ministries

Of finance have collapsed.

We are done for. Bring me my chaps!

Servant: You are going out riding?

Cooper: I mean the assless kind with a thong.

Bring me my harem of middle aged ladies

A consort of MILFs while I go in hiding.

Tell the gang it wasn’t my fault

Blame it on Imogen, say I was caught

Up in her snares a victim of blackmail.

Smiley: Is that a cock between your legs or a tail?

I ask you George Cooper the First

Are you not determined to be George the Worst,

Ruler of Beer and space? Lord of all Mars,

Master of the maestro of electrical cars?

Later. Same office. Captain Jakes and men, Smiley and Cooper

Cooper: We’ll take him at the board meeting.

I’ll poison the muffins and watch them writhe

On the floor with wild hemorrhagic bleeding

Blood pumping out of their earholes and noses

Blood pouring from the mouth and eyes.

Smiley: One whiff of your halitosis

Would kill the maestro of electrical cars.

Jakes: Let Musk’s skull taste my scimitar.

Its razor sharp edge was forged on Mars!

I will cleave him in two from navel to chops.

Cooper: Maybe I’ll betray you before he lops

Him into twin cyclops

For hedges on a leveraged buy out of stocks.

Smiley: Try it little man and I will crush your rocks.

Corporate boardroom of SpaceX

Elon Musk: Welcome Mr. Cooper to your first meeting of the board.

I think you will see that while I’m a rival I sit on a horde

Big enough to go around and none will fester with envy.

Space is a massive, infinite construct of the human mind.

The more we explore the more we find.

Mrs. Musk: My Lord don’t welcome this snake

It’s a terrible mistake he’s a miserable shit, a fake!

He will kill you I’m sure and take over the business

You built from scratch with dreams of success and ruthlessness.

Now is not the time to let down your guard.

Think of our child, little Bard.

Musk: I would trust my Lord Cooper with little Bard’s life

Between us I assure you there is no strife.

Enter Jakes with child soldiers

Musk: What is this? The children are armed.

Jakes: Have you any prayers to say?

Musk: Promise me Cooper, that my wife and child will not be harmed!

Cooper: Take them away!

Jakes smites Elon Musk on the top of the head and cleaves him in half

Cooper: Now it’s on to Branson and the others.

Kill the child and send his wife to my harem of mothers

I like to fuck. SpaceX is now a wholly owned division

Of the Cooper Belt Company. That is my decision.

All:  SpaceX is now a wholly owned division

That is George Cooper the First’s wise decision!

Gas Giant

She was tired of living in anger a constant fury alternating with helpless despair, depression blacker and bottomless. In New York she had been consumed by hatred too but there she had an enemy, there was a concrete threat, she could rage, drunk, but also laugh and dance. Liberation was possible but here what? There was no one to direct it at except the actual universe and then those who ripped her away from the entrapping comfort of life, atmosphere gravity who had thrown her out into raw unfiltered existence, in a massive construct run by automata and faceless implied humans. There was no dancing or booze and no love or hatred, the enemy was reality and she was left with an existence predicated on all she had lost. She was like a gas giant of hatred with no solid core. Gas, ice, liquid. Raging heat, pressure, geysers and storms but no substance no top or bottom, and other lives were as abject as hers was

PHONE POEM 1

I cannot help but be captured by beauty, voices pure in harmony

Counter tenor clean above the lower wind of rapture valleys

Green under skies as azure as the lakes in glacial basins isolate

Of light calling to my calling cry the ice in mirrored sheets

Between flat rocks breaks into white and jade veins

I am replete and helpless without thought against

The beating of the rain at night the riding wind aware

I cannot stop to bleed to be but must listen

To the hissing and subsiding distant caressing sky my planet

And my star entangled home the polyphonic touches

The torches of street lamps illuminate the way

Tunnel of jeweled branches blinking under fog

Morning warms the pale shades quicken crickets now

Car horns distant honk dogs barking a blue jay

Calls to its gang to gather and I do not feel the chains

I only hear the high notes diving and the bass undulate

THE HISTORIE OF KUIPER BELT INDUSTRIES: GEORGE COOPER

In the early twenty-first century the billionaires Musk, Branson and Bezos were celebrity space entrepreneurs. But it was a man virtually unknown at the time, George Cooper the First, called by his heirs The First, who took an old, rust belt, Oil Age, analogic behemoth and transubstantiated it into Kuiper Belt Industries, a company whose logo has since been planted on every rock from the Sun to Proxima Centauri B.

When George Cooper the First was born in 1960 the Cooper Belt Corporation was a conservatively diversified company that still manufactured drive belts. Wherever there were belts and gears the belts likely came from Cooper factories located in Ohio, Indiana and Michigan. The Cooper Belt Corporation had its start in the early 19th century when a Scots Irish immigrant, Donald Cooper, opened a barrel business in New York. He got into shipping but was bankrupted by Cornelius Vanderbilt. He moved to Ohio and bought a factory that made drive belts for mills. The son expanded the business, speculated in oil and opened plants across the midwest producing not just belts but gears, chains, motors and other parts for automobiles and appliances. The Cooper Belt Corporation grew mighty and its trunk supported several branches of the family, but the Coopers, handing the reins down son-to-son, retained close control and it was never publicly traded. George the First’s grandfather Kaerl Cooper profited from the Second World War while his father, Kaerl Junior (just Junior in the family, often with a sneer, as at that point there was competition between dilletantes for chief imbecile), a gentle man with no head for business, but a love of baseball, art and symphonic music, relied on his managers to keep things going. He endowed and built a home in Cleveland for the Cooper Collection of Modern Art, and was annually guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra in Severance Hall.

In 1954 Gordon Teal, working for the newly formed Texas Instruments Corporation, created the first commercial silicon transistor. Teal came to Dayton, Ohio in May of that year to present his paper: Some Recent Developments in Silicon and Germanium Materials and Devices to the Institute of Radio Engineers’ National Conference on Airborne Electronics. By the end of the year TI had produced the first transistor radio. A young Cooper Belt Corporation financial adviser, Imogen Smiley, MIT graduate in engineering and ham radio enthusiast, attended the Dayton conference and left convinced that consumer electronics and communications would define the second half of the twentieth century as industrial manufacturing had defined the first half. But she could not persuade the old men who controlled the company to make the move and instead invested her own money in TI and other semi-conductor manufacturers. In 1965 she married a charming alcoholic gambler and con man named Nelson Kavanagh and had a daughter, Imogen 2. She had an affair with Junior and became pregnant. When he demanded she have an abortion she promised she would but had the baby in secret, naming her Io Smiley. This was George the First’s half sister but he was not to meet her or know of her existence. Imogen sent her to be raised by relatives in Virginia. All she kept of her was a vial of blood, labeled and stored in a cryovac facility. That blood founded the line of Iocle and Sara Istar.

George the First grew up in the family home outside of Cleveland, a 40,000 square foot rambling mansion with turrets and widow walks on 50 acres of landscaped property. Here in his languid and lonely childhood of pet giraffes and chauffeured limousines he became obsessed with outer space. He saw 2001: A Space Odyssey on a private screen and, accompanied by his adoring father, went to Florida to watch every Gemini and Apollo mission launch. He built models of the Saturn 5 rocket. An indifferent student, he was nevertheless fascinated by physics and engineering. In 1982 he graduated near the middle of his class from Harvard and went to work for Imogen Smiley. Unlike his father’s advisors he was eager to get into the game, even if it seemed too late.  They bought a small company in California producing parts under contract to NASA for the aerospace industry. They grew close, and had a brief affair, despite the 30-year age difference and her prior affair with his father. Things became more complicated when George and Imogen 2 fell in love and secretly married, afraid of her mother’s reaction. Imogen was not pleased but realized this would cement the union between their families and that her daughter and son-in-law would produce the heir to Cooper Belt Corporation. She did not forget Io Smiley.

In his late fifties the First found himself in a crowded field of men whose names were household words. Cooper was a mouse among dinosaurs and like the mouse, he bided his time. Space tourism didn’t interest him. Industrial production was too risky given the costs. The most tantalizing prize of all, colonizing Mars, was to his eyes pointless and best done by others. But he would certainly be happy to outfit anyone fool enough to try.

He had become cynical. Mars had betrayed him. As a boy the romance of adventure and the myth of the cosmos drove his obsession. The planets were like people in his mind, spheres with personalities and attitudes. He named the hills where he played after the Tharsas volcanoes of Mars. When it became evident he wouldn’t be an astronaut he fantasized that he would build the first rocket to send people there, that the glory of conquest would be George Cooper’s. Over the decades, as satellites and probes returned actual data about the red planet, his hopes had to yield to the reality that Mars as it existed was inimical to human life. Its surface was not only cold but bombarded by radiation and covered in toxic perchlorate dust. Robotic exploitation of resources was cheaper and less risky. The science was rapidly evolving. He knew robotic beetles and cockroaches would one day scurry over the Valles Marineris. He bought controlling interests in a number of robotics firms.

Mars’ toxicity turned out to be a virtue. It would not matter what humanity did to this planet. There would be no limits, no authority. He could see what the future held. It was both exhilarating and depressing. Humans would set about the task of destroying Mars with the usual gusto. Consortiums would divvy up the planet, possession the only law. Convict labor would serve on prison factory ships in orbit about Mars, manufacturing mining robots. Within a hundred years the Martian surface would be studded with smokestacks belching frozen smoke as smelters turned out ingots of steel, aluminum, titanium and composite.

It would all depend on infrastructure. Cooper and Smiley decided to build it throughout the solar system, not just between Mars and Earth. They spun their aerospace company off of the stodgy Cooper Belt Corporation and called it Kuiper Belt Industries. To finance it he had a simple idea: create and feed a market for luxury goods produced not just in space but in its most remote reaches. The Kuiper Belt and the OOrt Cloud were home to primitive matter and the fact that it would take at least 20 years to deliver goods from that sector to the earth meant the wealthy would pay anything for it. First he would place satellites around every planet and create a solar sytem-wide communications and navigation network. In 2050 he launched yearly flights to the Kuiper Belt eventually becoming monthly. The ships would land on Trans Neptunian Objects, vacuum up material, and return to earth. The round trip time for the first vehicles was 20 years, 9 out, 9 back, with 2 years for collecting material. In the OOrt it can be years between objects. Each of these ships left behind rovers and helicopters operated by robots with evolving software.

In 2070, the year before his death, the first of these craft began to reach earth. By then the other space entrepreneurs were paying KBI for use of its infrastructure: satellites, orbiting labs, refueling stations, resupply depots. The research division was given broad latitude to speculate with future horizons of hundreds of years. They designed the Mars Elevator, and conceived of artificial moons and orbiting facilities as giant single-celled organisms. They produced prototype fusion propulsion systems that cut travel time for spacecraft, and sent out to habitable exoplanets the first gram-sized nano explorers, propelled by lasar arrays focused on solar sails, at 50% light speed. It was a tumultuous time in Earth history and as his space empire rose the earth fell into chaos. Hundreds of millions of people slaughtered each other while billions fled floods and tornadoes of fire. When he died at the age of 111, the earth was burning but KBI owned the solar system, and anyone wanting to get out, to explore, produce, export, import or live there in the future would pay his eponymous heir a cut.

George Cooper the Second was born in 1991 and was a very old man when Iago Vesuvius hired him to build the Monozone Inc. Genetic Seed Bank in Antarctica, a subterranean library of genetic material and plant seeds, licensed and patented as well as wild seed stock, ostensibly to preserve the genome of all domestic food crops and their wild progenitors. The Monozone Inc. complex included greenhouses and research facilities. But it also was home to all of the licensed genetic sequences developed for humans by Monozone Inc. over the decades. Iago Vesuvius was a renaissance man of the Late Oil Age, with a combined MD/PhD in biophysics and immunology from Stanford, a JD from Harvard Law and an MBA from the Wharton School. As the Director of Monozone Genetic Research and Development he successfully marketed synthetic genetic consumer products and the wrote the licensing agreements that allowed Monozone Inc. and other biotech giants to retain ownership and assert intellectual property rights over consumers who leased their synthetic genetic enhancements. Most of these packages were for cosmetic purposes, but included also enhanced intellectual and athletic ability and they carried options for heritability or single generation use. George the First and Second both purchased these packages for themselves and their children, who grew tall, with blue, almond shaped eyes, high cheekbones, and a tanned complexion, long powerful muscles, perfect pitch, and immunity to cancer and a host of other degenerative diseases, including a reversal of the aging process itself. The research and marketing were controversial, both among the wealthy few who chafed under the leasing agreements imposed upon them and the average people who were left out. Vesuvius’ plan ultimately was to use the Monozone Inc. Antarctic labs to perfect cloning technology, an operation banned by law and international convention. In 2148, at the age of 79, he cloned himself, naming the child after his grandfather, Emmanuel.

George Cooper the Second was aggressively building robotic infrastructure throughout the solar system, but unlike the First he was anxious to make the move to space. Life on Earth had become untenable. People yearned for escape and there were many ready to sell them their dreams. The Coopers would be there to supply the wherewithal. He did not have the field to himself, and industrial espionage was a real threat. Cooper 2 used the Monozone construction contract (which had State support) to build a secret R&D plant deep beneath the Antarctic ice to develop Martian colonization technologies. He became obsessed with deep drilling, and envisioned tunnels going down many kilometers, as any serious colonization required. He studied the properties of brines. And he built everything from domes to boring equipment, modular greenhouses and ways to generate energy, oxygen and detoxify soils, as well as developing human resource strategies that would allow survival without murder and suicide. The halls and hangar-sized facilities buzzed with robotic and human industry.

His son, George Cooper the Third, left Antarctica to build the first large scale human settlements on the Moon, Mars and Vesta. He went out with the crews, surveyed Mars himself from a light aircraft, operated a drone explorer on Vesta and actually walked on the moon. His grandfather was right. Mars was quickly overrun with wildcat mining operations, funded by promises of ‘diamonds lying around in the dirt.’ It wasn’t just polluted on the surface. The underground pods smelled like unwashed feet. He didn’t really care. It wasn’t his business what the idiots did with it. Cooper projects swarmed the solar system from the OOrt Cloud to Mercury. The Third George Cooper was famous for saying, to whomever would listen, Calculations show that just a gram of dust and gas in a cosmic cloud could contain as many as 10,000 trillion nanodiamonds.

from Recovered Poems, 5

5.

with what swirling

of litter and leaves

is the news received

when bells

and slate-clad steeples

speak at clouds

and hammering

fall winds rap

a rug of cold

transparent skin

teeth exposed

chrysanthemums

gripped by the stem

to break russet

and gold

seeing you asleep

freezes me to think

I am one long speak

and no words to come after

ALBA

Alba

When you arise from my old bed

The sun arouses the slumbering rose

And I remain frozen in longing repose.

You look back with a nod of the head.

The morn has me bereft.

Better you had never left.

 

I DON’T

I DON’T

I don’t give a flying fuck

But I‘ll give a flying fuck to you

Usually don’t but I will

And I’ll give a shit to you

Because I care I do

But prefer the flying fuck who

Wants a shit to give?

It doesn’t suck

This flying fuck

I give it cause I care

I could also give a fuck

A fuck that doesn’t fly

Or a flying shit now that’s

A thing to give I don’t know why

A thing that flies, like shit

We should not give perhaps

The problem is receiving it

A question here arises

Am I who give these things

A bird? A bird is flipped—

A sort of flying fuck

But birds themselves don’t

Fuck in air, the sky above

Is not for love but is a splendid

Place for shit to fly

I won’t lie the shit I give

The fuck I fly

These are the measure

Of my love and so I sigh

I give a fuck, I give a shit

I give a flying fuck for you

 

from Recovered Poems: 13

RECOVERED POEMS

13.

10/6/93

a hoarse mentholated laugh

at the radio and I am gone

through the rain and headlights

driving with my claws and feet

eyes and head awake to sieve out

|shadow man from what

my nerves hallucinate

I feel this shingled universe give way

and slide into reverse

nervous buzzing in the pit

and shortened breath

beat against the windshield

the pitted parking lot

and stinking dumpster

children loiter blinking smoke

their pitiless eyes humming

home is where I’m going

never been

slips of silk

vanish when I touch them

work in progress

A jagged, liver-colored scar cleaved Yrmela’s cheek from her ear to the corner of her mouth. It was the worst of the scars and Sybil Cane was saving it up for something big, something special, and she could think of no other occasion that would be more appropriate. It was like laying away a bottle of wine when it is too young to drink. When do you open it? At the moment it is mature? At it’s peak?

She could tell by the way Yrmela winced every time she mentioned Phaedra that she was angry, more angry than she had ever seen her. That Yrmela despised the Admiral did not prevent her from being possessive, because possessiveness, clinging, jealousy were the emotions of weak sad creatures. Yrmela could not help but be dependent in spirit as well as circumstance. Alas, mused Sybil Cane, the poor girl could fuck me up. The simplest thing would be to vent her but she couldn’t bring herself to do that yet. It was unnecessary. She would placate Yrmela as she always had, one scar at a time.

She examined the scar through a magnifying glass. The healthy skin cells were like a jigsaw puzzle of identical pieces. Cutting across it was a swath of thick, irregular tissue. She switched to the screen and a microscopic scan and got to work numbing it. “You don’t feel anything, do you?” she asked. Yrmela shook her head. “You gotta say it. Recorder is running. Do you feel anything?”

“No.”

“Good. You don’t always numb up easily. Let’s have a look here. Hmm. At this level of magnification it’s a fireworks show.” She got to a molecular view, then removed the scar tissue cell by cell. She irrigated the wound and debrided it with a cryostick until it was clean.  Then she packed it with freshly cloned cells and applied a Bondaid. “There. What was that, a half hour of your life? Tomorrow, we’ll take off the Bondaid and put the RenewGel on. You’ll have a brand new face practically. Now run along and take the rest of the day. Go for a walk. Watch a game show.”

Yrmela touched the Bondaid and smiled. “Thank you, Sire. I am most grateful.” Tears came into her eyes.

Embarrassed for her, Sybil Cane said icily, “Now go on. Have a good day. Good bye.”

Her office was stark and made her feel alone. She spent so many hours here drinking, sucking at the sore that would not heal, the ulcer of her exile. There was the desk and her chair. She had sat at that desk in that chair for a third of her life. There was no end in sight. Retirement for her would not be an Adirondack chair in rural New Hampshire as it had been for her Sire and Grand Sire.

There was Yrmela’s desk, with its edged stack of papers in the middle. By day she could laugh at her but in the long hours of night the desk was a rebuke. How was she different than a common prisoner, a murderer? She could come and go freely, true. She could dine in the elite cafeterias, attend lectures and cocktail parties. But in the end she was not free. She who had been bred for icy mountain air served as a donkey to the Constellations End. She looked at the table with the coffee maker and toaster and thought she might as well make coffee and toast for that mousy little cunt Yrmela. Yrmela! Talk about rebukes. Her teary grateful eyes screamed fuck you. The weak hammered down the powerful with resentment, guilt and sorrow. Why don’t I hang myself from the coat tree?she wondered. She would be free then, retired. Retired to nothing, annihilated without reason, become as all was and would be. This minor, temporary wiggle in oblivion that was her only possession, her life, deprived for 40 more years of progeny, and even then cloning was in doubt, it wasn’t done in space. But she could do it of course, everything she needed lay at hand except for the authority. She lacked authority. Well not in everything. She had the auctoritee to thwart the mechanical disposal of humans into deep space if it served her purpose. And she had the power to vent them. She probably vented a thousand a year. Not personally. On her medical order. It was her job to judge fitness to work and prospect of survival.

So the baby would go to Vesuvius, but where would 57607 go? It drove her nuts not knowing what 57607 was worth, what family she come from, whose bastard she was. Had she attended garden parties and Birth Night Celebrations? Attended the opera in the white and blue pinafore dress and sailor cap? What her conservative Sire forced her to wear in Boston, lobster afterwards on gaudy gold plates. God how Cane hated it, even as a child all she wanted to do was bust out and do something exciting. She insisted on medical school—a shame on her family—but to hell with them. If she could be a doctor she could travel. She imagined Africa, Asia, Europe. She would live in New York in a glass tower and work for Monozone Inc. And that did happen. She attended Albert Einstein in the Bronx and lived in a Manhattan high rise over the East River wall. She bought a shiny black hovercraft with a red stripe and flew it to school each day, stepping out in pearls and pumps, parking with the surgeons. And after graduation, she worked for Monozone.

Her family all but disowned her. Her Consort Sire was the Junior Senator from New Hampshire. He was most disappointed. As if he ever did anything but snore in the UN! She wasn’t going to follow her Sire into the Navy either. But about that she had been wrong. The Older Sybil Cane made it quite clear. No military, no financial support. She entered the Navy after graduation as a Ship’s Surgeon, and was promoted steadily in her first few years until she attained the exalted, and overrated rank of Admiral. The navy has an army of admirals! It’s like being an Executive Producer on a film. Very impressive. She marched around in her big hat during ceremonies but the rest of the time she sat below deck treating gonorrhea and e coli infections, drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning, emergency appendectomies. Anything can happen at sea. She had even heard of one case of rabies, when unbeknownst to the crew a rabid raccoon crawled aboard one afternoon and fled below deck, eventually hiding in the galley, where it lay for a week behind sacks of potatoes and onions, until it was disturbed by the cook, whom it charged and bit on the face as he wrestled it to the ground. Someone had the presence of mind to shoot the raccoon, but they had no vaccine on board, never anticipating the need. Eventually everyone got the disease and they hunted each other to death.

She did see the world, through a fucking porthole. In the intense, moldy boredom of a floating circus they call a ship she found her way to illegal ass. At that time she preferred the fellas to the gals. She’d eaten enough pussy at Exeter for a lifetime. She was just discovering the pleasure of a good fuck with a good old fashioned dick. Boom boom boom. Grind away. They were young men, they lacked skill but their enthusiasm was enough, she could always masturbate while the piledrive did its thing, deep thrusting and hard rubbing. Her asshole would catch fire. “Harder!” she liked to scream and the sailors complied. God what an idiot. She had been warned. The first time because a sailor was stupid enough to share details of their adventures with his bunkmates, and even showed around a picture he had taken without her knowledge (that didn’t matter, she would have taken it herself, she had high bossy tits and was proud of them, she knew all she had to do was let one nipple swing into a sailor’s face and he was done, men, simple men!) while the men wanked. It was not awful the thought of all those strapping sea worthy boys spewing spunk to her image. But her direct CO felt differently and hauled her onto the carpet, put her in a headlock and whispered in her ear, if you need to fuck wait till we get to port like everyone else. Understand? The next person fucking you will be me! The commander of the carrier group was the Ruler Renee, and she didn’t put up with violations of protocol. Right, as if everyone didn’t know that the Ruler Renee was screwing her young Lieutenants. Oh how those women sighed in the lounge. They weren’t shy! After one year at sea she knew more about the Ruler’s genital architecture than if she’d been her patient. Cane just had the regrettable bias towards the lingam, something the harridans of the Navy couldn’t deal with. She had to ween herself off dick. Balls below deck were blue. She found that females, boring, were harder to seduce but easier to maintain. Then, a few months later, Admiral Mazda Cyaxares arrived in pomp, gilded helicopter, red carpet, turkey and Beaujolais. The feast beneath their belts, light dancing commenced and the rum kegs were opened. Opportunities to celebrate in an unrestricted matter were rare and she was young. She danced with her girls, one after the other, and drank too much. A lesson hard to learn, one wasted on her now that no one cared how drunk she got. She could drink herself to death and they’d be happy. They’d be happy if she did anything but live. So live she would do! She would smash her fist into their order. All they could do was vent her, and this far from Earth, at this distance she’d be dead immediately, frozen solid. The worst was in Earth’s orbit where it is sometimes 50 degrees Fahrenheit! They did not tell you that. It could take 5 minutes to suffocate. You wouldn’t even be cold.

But it was the floating around forever that upset people. Space mummies. Just like the movies. They used to fall to Earth, burn up in the atmosphere. People were so disturbed by that, by the pictures of Earth’s orbit litered with vented bodies. Now they wait. You won’t be vented in orbit anywhere. There was enough junk circling the planets. But they had many ways to kill you at sea, all worse. Drowning was too good. Unless it was in acid. She had heard that acid had been banned but the latest news was that Everest had brought it back. News. All news was old by the time they got it. That was one of the things about new prisoners, they were up to date on Earth business.

If 57607 did grow up in a Ruler family she’d be a pain to crack. They’d have trained her hard not to break ranks. Of course she had been caught. She was there, someone knew about her. The thing to do was make her complicit, suture her into things. Put her in charge, give her some goosebumps. She will reveal herself. Should she fix the place up a little, make it more attractive? If they watched tv together, would they sit in chairs? She very much wanted to spend the night with 57607 watching tv in bed. But it would be near impossible to bring her back to her room undetected. She considered removing the picture that concealed the peephole but decided against it. All in good time.