Eric Vargas's Blog, page 2

The Mere Tide P85

Napoleon Radomil Roszel of Marektable Technics, at that time embroiled in the biopiracy suit that would doom the company, came down from Uralsk and hired the baseball teams to hunt snakes.

Garters specifically.

Why garters?

It was in the paper.

I dont read the news.

Leaked virus. It caused mutations in avian species. Most died because the gene sequences activated were incompatible with the host body.

Like what?

Growing vestigial features mostly. A turtledove grew teeth and claws. The amount of calcium it took to form it left the bird so deprived that its bones were thinner than a minnows. And of course it couldnt fly.

So whats that got to do with a bunch of snakes?

A farmer died of a garter bite that shouldnt have forward fangs. Apparently they developed them.

How much a snake?

A dollar.

Dollar fifty.

Quarter.

Sherman, regular on third, shoved his buddy Brobker forward. Heres one if you can fit him in a bag.

Brobker plunked his gurney sack over Dachni’s head. Nah this is the one.

How many do you need?

Dachni unhooded herself and delivered Brobker a finger jab in his ribs.

As many as you can get, said Roszel. Garters. Coachwhips. Dont bring a viper. Do not bring me a rattler.

They moved through the streets, trusty disciples of the naomh of Ireland dauntless and without reprieve. Investigating under porches, in sheds. Crawlspaces and attics. Fetching snarls out of the dens. Surreptitiously hired to knock down paper wasp nests for ten dollars apiece. They crushed one with a wet mop and were quickly routed and received three dollars for the attempt. Siger found in a spider web a withered piece of origami. Milton brought a garter snake stuck to a glue plate and Miley shaved it off with a razor. They found a bristling sphere of snakes in the woods cording round another in a horror of mating. By noon they had captured four score and four and they had none thought the place so infested. Later Kendyl and Yoma found a doubloon and the question was raised whether all proceeds come by should be held in the common joint or was this a loose confederation permissible of private enterprise. The treasure finders were reticent to share. Siger was bitten by a funnel spider and rushed to Doc Holiday’s and since the happenstance of the poison was not evenly distributed among them neither then should the chance of the coin.

They ordered double scoops of ice cream at Pizzas & Sweets and pondered the day’s meaning but such talk was quickly forgotten for the posting of an A-frame. Andy leaned to see its side.

CC. Fobas Spectacular

June 32nd 2606

Featuring Joe Combas & Co.

Live Music+Dancing

Hanging of The Notorious Reprobates

Marcus Preely & The Utah Double Barrel

Officiated by Sheriff John Patrick Emmett

Tell aff ireworks an tishes scwoops an shootin pegwins an tayed eden elletant ken urned ta ride anell haff a a a ahhh keerasel kinded canes an cunnint mess what pelses.

Anaya watched the fire. A sewnbound folio open along her shins.

Will ye come?

Presently?

Wha?

Thinkest I twere best I stayed away.

Ye aught ta come.

Ill be alright.

Dachni closed the book. No ye wont.

Verily I am contented.

But ye aint.

The pilot smiled benignly and opened her book.

On pilfered beer and Chinaberry the gang got suitably buzzed. Passing around the warm cans, the ancephalic lacrymatory floating ruby shavings of epicardium. She who suspects perfidy in the way all finery is made had climbed up with Yoma the tallest tree of their bivouac to watch the fairground in its becoming. Chattel and caitiff stringing up a neon palisade to fend against fall of night and monitored by horsebacked catchpoles who beat rhythm against man thigh or horse tack. A cinching taut of guy wires. The flare of cloth. Building of hay walls. An irregular hammering into the ground what she thought must have been seeds. Some terrible agriculture, some sow of steel that needed no harrowing and the rows of stalls were like drawers being drawn out of the earth and they riped with a psychedelic cloth.

Late morning a barker mounted a hay stage and through his bullhorn evoked Matraple to partake of the delights he heralded.

They prattled down the crowded thoroughfares, their premiated pockets laden with silver shares solicited by tapestries of mercantilism. Popcorn vendors. Purveyors of games. Dachni had never seen such gaiety before. The vulnerability that accompanied the carelessness. It frightened her. A young woman demonstrated that it could be ascended a knotted rope ladder with the rungs strung through the holes in their middles. Twenty cents per try. She made two dollars off the team and they departed cussing. A horsemaster was offering rides on his dappled mares but no Andy, Dachni declined, she didnt like horses.

Elsewhere in full sight of the carousel a boxing match. Apocalypse Jones versus the Gouted Ukulele. Middleweights alike in their sunwork tawn. They circled another with not quite closed fists bobbing smoothly. Jones feinted right but the Ukulele came down the true way elbow to shoulder and there was an ugly crack and Jones’ legs scrabbled out from under him and he toppled into the roaring wall of gamblers who urged back up get back up and in there find your legs youve got it until Jones regained his legs and stumbled back into the arena. He jabbed left left again under left over right crushing Gout’s bicep. The arm unhinged like a drawbridge’s fall. He swung right again but the up hook came out like some vile hump, the arm rocketed up by the hip so that fist and chin met in a clack of teeth. The flesh on Jones’ face rippled and he went down.

They fought in a moonbounce, a plastic oven, her ankle still hurting, shoving her friends to their rumps and watching them rebound with an ungravitied grace. They stopped to watch a henna artist paint a purfled embroidery of jewels upon the ankle of a raven lassock. A bitter chessmaster was cooing insults at passersby. Questioning their acuity that could be proved only in the game of kings. Small children wielding shortswords of cotton and clowns costumed in colors that anywhere else in the natural world would have warned men away.

Want to see a fish get eaten?

A warden of carnivores made the inquiry and who did not wish to witness the destruction of another? They paid the fare and the vendor plucked an octopus out of a bucket with chopsticks and transplanted it into a minnow tank. The octopus dashed to the cover of a shell and assumed its cream hue. The boys gasped.

Give it a minute to get used to its surroundings, said the warden.

Sure enough the octopus began to stir. Feeling out the extent of this new environment. It watched the schools. A rough bulbous head turning perceptibly. It glided over the carrackwracks and treasure chests with the ends of its tentacles slightly upturned like the shoes of medieval nobility. Under the minnows it propelled suddenly upward and wrapped its arms round a little graeoc of a minnow and torqued it in twain and crammed the ends into its mouth.

The man grinned. Ive got frogs, centipedes, scorpions and tarantulas. This is nature boys. Life feeds on life.

So he said. And two years hence she would remember him watching May Connable purchase the lower torso of a living girl to fuck and later to eat.

The boys slapped down their dimes.

The Mere Tide P84

Early of a late June she was prematurely woked by an ammonia wetness and seeking the pilot for rectification found her leaving out the front. A familiar terror heaved in her gorge but she fought it down and rushed up to the departing pilot and pressed the sheets against her. Sumpins wrong.

Youll grow out of it.

Ets wrong.

Do you think I havent wet a bed in my time too? Be calm. Were not soon to exhaust our supplies of detergent.

Anaya took the sheets and folded them over and again until the yellow stain was hidden like some jaundiced epicardium.

Dachni clasped her hands behind her back and swayed. Where were ye to go?

Swimming.

Ye never saided ye goes.

Im usually back before you wake up.

Ye aught ta say.

Ill say.

They crossed in the faintest aurorean murk to the lake. Warm asphalt, warm loam steaming up brujas or the luces del tesoro that flowed down the dogpaths. The birches recovered of the perversion of May. New foliage. A newer genus of sallowthorn hanging clumps of orange berries. The withered bracken restored. They shed their clothes on cool sands tracked with the petite prints of deer come to drink. They dipped in. A nippy envelopment. Dachni in to her waist shivered up her courage and dropped in. The waters above her. She pushed off wriggling through the sleet of mud motes and kicking up the fallow silt of the lakebottom where stumps clustered like a colony of wooden anemones and insects kept their invested kingdoms against the ravages of fish. She surfaced and in her gasping nearly vacuumed up a strider, delicate filaments dimpling the water as it dandied away. The birch tops wore a washed out color now. A ruddy gray. On a log a turtle. Head uplifted to scent the air.

Hey you!

The turtle had no ears of news from her. Probable turtle pedlar. Turtles in chowder, turtles in stew. It slipped through the porous seal of the water. Dachni dove under and hunted the watery gloom for sign of shell. Spurts of motion in a lethargic underworld. And there. Like a floating helmet. Bowlegs churning eddies that brushed kisses across her cheeks. She nabbed it by the tail. On the shore she turned it end over end.

Hey you who are you?

She turned it like a steering wheel. Dim pig primordial baleful dinosaur peering out at what has inherited the earth. She set the turtle on her head. Anaya!

Anaya oared near.

Ets a turtle hat.

And so it is.

She took it off and leaned to give it a peck on its beak and it stretched out of its cloister and bit the little interspecies rapist on her lip. Gahggh.

Fuck ye to then.

Dachni shored the reptile and built a crowned sand turret on its craggy shell that subsided with the turtle’s indefatigable plodding towards the water. An octagonal stop sign from the mud was dredged from under a bar of rotted tires and the turtle cum surfer was placed upon it and pushed out but it only capsized itself into the waters.

She dove again and lapped to exhaustion and in her flagging the pilot surfaced beneath her insomuch that she found herself recovering on an osseous cuirass like some forlorn wolfkin castawayed from a zoological schooner and set upon an alien sea. Cool matinal winds stirred a matter of sergesewed leaves. She curled under the pilot’s crossed arms and the pilot exhaled out her sides in a boiling of water like the vent of ballasts and they submerged and in the doing the child could see above anabranches of sunveins on a dirgy mane and said if this is not the tree of life this is not the tree of life if this is if this. Chords of destiny elongate upon a liquid warp. Is anything anterior to existence? How far down is the end of the world? A muddy grave. Strong arms pulled her to and a tongue of length and slender and silver parted her lips. Her air escaped in a ticking stampede of bubbles across the plain of her face and cold lips formed a seal around her own and then her lungs were being replenished. The life giving vapor. Cold. She swam her arms around the neck of this soteriological phantom who breathed peace into her. Her small arms made a necklace round her neck. The pilot delivered no breaths but let her own air be freely drawn. Some minutes worth. Dachni felt an object placed upon her breast. Two sharpened points slid up to her chin and curled away. She felt an upwash suck upon her midsection. She felt the weight. Texture of a stone. Hardly the size of an apple but what would move it and why try? In these colder reaches she had warrant to a sorrow. Solace in bliss blind mute and dead. A charming loneliness of the depths. She shut her eyes in a nimbus of calm and the darkness was unchanged. Lo to now. Escape. But fire had found some kindling in her lungs, the coal the lack and yearning the bellows. Dream of summers beyond the fire, the nettle inferno. Her hands clutched the stone. She dredged the mud. Come back. A length came up like a hollow pipe. Another more brittle. A cage. Curved slandered tusks hooked to a column. And a sutured sphere with symmetric sockets divided by a flaring bridge that precipitated suddenly into a smaller cavity. She gripped her flanks. Grand panic bridled. She filled her fists with mud and sealed her eyes. She said come down you will come down. And the pilot did. To deliver fresh air from above. She dug her nails into the broad shoulders of this breath giver and who would have guessed this reward for faith?

The Mere Tide P83

Shiftless summer. Stirring in the long right dawns of the season. The bead lifted on its seat of mercury deep into the red. Steambathing with the pilot in the last of the floodwater. Oaring by backstroke to the lake in water so shallow her shoulders scraped the asphalt. And in the noon or after to keb with friends. Playing baseball or drinking in the woods. Watching Lelly take the gang in turns into the woods. One afternoon by some latent instinct she kissed Andy on the mouth as he was being led away. Lelly shooed her but it was too late. The virus swam in his saliva and by the end of the week the gang would be infected and in forty years that place would be devoid of man. How the savages exploited the stables of sluts.

Or kicking along the road watching a car an hour peel out of the fevery dementia of the horizon and dissemble by planes into the same. Pumping their arms to elicit a horn honk as they sped past leaving to flee out plumes of dust.

Once a photographer. Braked hard to snap pictures of them where they played durak on a plywood cable spool purloined from an abandoned construction site. He arranged them about in attitudes suggestive of poverty. He asked were they locals. The latest happenings. He tendered a twenty and asked them to look sad.

Whats the pictures for photo foe?

The photographer touched the fold of his sweat drenched beret. Im doing a documentary on living conditions in the territories. How many of you all have indoor plumbing?

Lonesome hands rose.

Dachni leaned to Andy.

Whats plummin?

Its like when you got a toilet and shower in your house.

Ah hellis ye can take a dump in a hole, she said adding her hand to those raised.

How many of you have a television or access to the G-net?

All arms but Sherman’s lowered.

How many of your parents drive?

My dad drives a Bazin.

Anaya hassa plane.

Sherman glared at Dachni in hostile surprise.

Im sorry what?

A plane. Or a big flyey winged.

Dachni spread her arms to shape the transport.

The photographer bestowed with glib inclination of the head a cocked smirk.

She does. Ets yeesally at the grad but it can fly over anytime.

You live in town?

Down the road at the cathedal.

The photographer looked towards the smeltry verge where the road cabbled in the heat. Squatting in a church. Id want a picture of that.

It was a testament to the region that they piled into the backseat of his car without security. He drove the few miles to the basilica and they unpiled and Dachni ran up to the gates and pulled them wide.

Holy shit, said the photographer. He removed his hat and wiped his brow of sweat and put it back on.

They wandered the hallways checking rooms. Salivated at the stock of the larder. Oohed then awed at the kitchen. The great cave of an oven whats halfton stone you must roll away. A collective heart attack nearly befell the group in the library but Dachni told the photographer permission needed granting before he could take pictures. He dropped the camera from eye to chest and left his finger hard down on the shutter release. Yeah yeah. They found what she hadnt before. A game room with billiards. An arcade, shuffleboard, darts. A projector mounted to the ceiling. The kids flew off.

We gotta find Anaya.

To hell with her.

To hell with me.

Anaya in their presence now bent so low to clear the lintel it seemed she were genuflecting. She backed Miley flat against the wall insomuch that he needs extend the distance between them by standing on his toes. The pilot splayed the talons of a hand and slid them in a movement knife fast flush along his jawline and lifted him. His extenuations were locked in his mouth.

And who art thou learned judge pronouncing beyond his greenery would so casually consign me to brumstane sovereignty? From whence is his judgeship’s authority derived? Should I behold thee avatar of the judge? Hold thee accountable? Present to thee my claims?

During this speech Dachni hunched over had circled with highsteps, hugging herself as though trying to contain some impulse. Her arms suddenly flew out. He deddent mean nothin!

The pilot burrowed her talons into the back of his jaw and in the upward tilt of his head his teeth unclenched. Sarry! Sarry!

She dropped him. Out the punctures in his jaw two strings of blood coursed to the floor.

Click.

Dachni looked up at the photographer and she leapt and slapped the camera on the lens.

The pilot turned to the cowering children. Sighing deeply to sustain her blouse. Alright.

She made sandwiches and brewed lemonade and they lounged in the empty atrium baths and wondered at doves crossing as a promise before the sun. They stirred shy as horses and moved with a circumspect economy as though not to be noticed. Miley despite his expectations received neither aid nor apology for excess. The photographer unpacked his interview equipment. The pilot weeded grout lines and shook the roots of dust.

You should do a story on Boyce, said Haybox.

Who is Boyce?

Nah Boyce is a town. Burned to the last stick. What I heard the plemena put everyone in a stables and set it on fire.

I could take a detour, said the photographer. My sites barebones right now. My portfolio consists of abandoned warehouses and a travelogue from a Polish biker. He started out in Lodz. Biked to Odessa. Narrowly managed to escape the moonbloods, got caught in an artillery bombardment had to scravage a new bike, gets arrested at the border, spends three weeks in prison, gets released, starts East again, is nearly blown up by a drone strike, captured by the plemena, released, is mugged by gypsies, has a boy slash his tires in the night, gets hit by a car in Altay and contracts meningitis in the hospital. Now he tells me hes getting married to the head nurse. I dont know about you but it sounds a lot more like a catalog of misfortunes and more and more Im thinking either Cisco the disco funky platypus should not be in the header of every post or hes the perfect fit.

Why?

You dont think it has some wross to it?

Whats wross? asked a boy named Hanse.

You know little man. Wrossal. Shelly Sparks at the layman’s dance taught the lay’s the wross.

Shut up, said the pilot. Youre corrupting language.

He laughed. Do you mind if I broadcast this live? He positioned a mic and three cameras mounted on a syncline. Instruments of her capture. Voice and likeness. He checked the framing. Croupiered his hand through the air as though she were already sitting before him. Scoot a little left.

The pilot rained her weeds into a pile. Tis a peculiar feature of this your camera that I and my observers should find ourselves in orbit around what can make no use of its observance. The apathy is akin to gods. Does the camera flinch? Does the employer of so indifferent an implement seek to usurp that godly quality?

Im sorry what?

Gwotta lissen, called Dachni spewing masticated flecks of mustarded turkey and rye, shell tobk yer airs ta cauwaflowers.

How needs you an audience?

Well I…

For your aggrandizement so richly deserved? How much you covet the status of a celebrity. Such a vanity is common but through me? And esteem me a whore?

Ok ok ok ok, I see how you think this is. Thats not my aim at all. Look this is for the solitary propagation of knowledge. Thats it. And to prove it Ill post this anonymously, no one will be credited for it. It wont get me fame by any ways. So just you know keep the mane. Dont overreact.

And what is the proper manner of act of one so impugned?

Anaya quit bein mean. Or ifn yer gonna givem the kill get et overed with.

Dear god please just quit being mean Im a fan of life.

The pilot settled on the bath bench. Speak fool.

The photographer made a cautious adjustment to his cameras so that she was in frame. He froze a moment to measure her reaction but she gave none. He came round and turned the mic on and turned the cameras on. So this is. He spared an over the shoulder glance at the pilot who was signless. This is…

Speak to me. Why do you never speak?

Dachni laughed. Tinks were in cats alleys. Whey ta dade tens gost dey ohnes.

This put the philistine at ease. This is Calcified:Nerves. Welcome friends, to my new viewers today you hit the jackpot. Im here in the east territories interviewing an ultra hyper guest from out of this world. A Ms…

Akiatcha.

Ms. Akiatcha and we are going to talk about life on the whole other slope of the stars. Subscribe your eyeballs let me know what you think and I will be checking periodically in for for questions from the audience. He spoke with great gesticulation. His hands darting in like judo feints. He moved to sit down, careful to stay in frame. Lets roll the boulder Ms. Akiatcha why not start by telling us about you. What were you doing when you came here? Were you a merchant marine or a tourist eating lobster and sipping martinis?

He shot his cockless gun hands at her and Dachni thought he would be killed on the spot. The pilot was a passable dissembler but she could conceal the spectrum of emotions only after their provocation and she showed now a sickish disbelief which she was a dark moment in recovering from. Her tendrils sleeked back, her ears darting like the tails of tomcats.

I was an anesthesiologist.

Wow so you anesthesiezized on the Nghorro?

No. I was aboard strictly as a passenger.

Gotcha. So anesthesiologist. Thats a Aienee word. Can you tell me a little about what you did? I mean Im not current with the lingos you know? Im out in the country most of the time. I cant keep up.

I provide pain management.

Right wow. How long have you been doing that?

Since I was young.

So you butter folk up or hose em down right? Before operations I mean.

Something cousin to that.

Are Aianee years more or less like human years?

No.

Whats the difference?

Our standard year is 187 days.

So you guys have crazy fast seasons.

A single season. Theres nearly no tilt to our world.

Winter?

Itd be more akin to summer but theres no word for it.

Why not?

Because we only have a single season. Do you have a season for breathing?

Thats a little woof. Right out there.

So how long do you guys typically live?

The earliest temporal measurements were calculated by breath. An eshga is a breath equal to about four seconds. Noshga is two hundred and twenty breaths. Yi-noshga is a hundred and eighty noshgii which equals a single day. Our days are very long.

So what is life like back on the homeworld? Whats a typical day like.

Obviously the typical day would vary greatly among the populace. Among profession and class. A riuk is a slave. From birth to death they labor. A shalki is of the trades usually. A shosti is analogous to an upper middle class. Managers. The dagestat administers the worlds. The priyagestat guides the general direction of the species.

And which class are you hailing from? He wobbled from the rump as he said this.

A shalki by birth. Shosti by merit.

So you can move up and down the rungs of society.

You may.

Howd you climb the ladder?

I was a loyalist in a militia army that helped overthrow an insurrection against the priyagestat that had taken over my home region.

Damn so you were in a war too. Did you get shot?

No.

Did you kill anyone?

Yes.

Must have been terrible.

The pilot sighed serpently into her tendrils.

Alright I dont need to be a xenolinguist to know what that means. Lets check what some of the viewers are asking. Lets see. Se$ert_Destroyer wants to know how you like it on earth.

Anareta of my hate.

Can you translate that?

No.

Ok. Sorry destroyer guess thats the best youre getting. Followup is there anything you do like about it?

No.

Not even me?

Im still not settled on whether or not to let you leave this rowhouse alive.

That bothers me but I am going to press on. So you know your people are pretty reticent about where you all come from and what your lives are like. Can you dispel some of the more fantastic rumors about yourselves?

Like what?

Well youre not born out of a neutron star right?

Thats not even possible.

Yeah because of you know the the the density of the stars is too great for matter to cohere but are you guys from like you know traditional stars? You know blue stars? Or dwarf stars?

The pilot gawped.

Prolly blue stars, chimed Dachni.

The pilot glared at her. Were going to talk later.

Why?

The photographer leaned to his camera. Thats a friend of ours offscreen. A homo luminosus. Well talk to her later.

Mark you your sure shall.

Riggght and back to Ms. Grouchy. Can you give us a scoop on your homeworld? Whats the most intriguing thing about it?

The flora.

World of flowers.

Carnivorous.

Right. Did you guys cultivate them like in agriculture?

Agriculture is more akin to husbandry for us.

So howd you do it?

An example would be we would take say uu’glopoya and feed them the armor plates of ohyagatta. Since they cant digest the plates properly they excrete a resinous sugar we use for spice.

You mean you spice your eggs with plant poop?

The pilot glared at him.

Hey Arius29 wants to know how do you guys shower.

In water?

Ha guess she was expecting some exotic response. Ok. From Angular_Jill: Is it true the Nghorro is really a colony ship meant to terraform the earth.

If twas we would have torpedoed the earth ere settling. Not crashed in the Merefa.

Disconcerting but alright.

Heres from 88FareCaT: Whats your favorite food?

Whiskey.

The photographer laughed and looked at the camera. Someone has a problem. Alright alright alright last question for now. PrianBatrick asks if the dagestai is going to stop freebooting and give support to the army.

Our position is as you can understand precarious and somewhat arbitrary. We could have crashed anywhere. As it happens we fell nearest the ICG whom have been gracious and accommodating hosts. As far as I know the dagestai does not maintain any ideological bend other than an illdefined immediatism and general propagation of truth and is content to stay neutral in human affairs. A distaste for hypocrisy prevents us from condemning the practice of slavery in the colonies as our riuks fulfill the same function. While I would not assume to be able to understand the historical complexities that have given rise to the latterday geopolitical tensions the reality of the situation dictates that any attack on the ICG must by virtue of proximity be interpreted as an attack on the priyagestat which we would then be duty bound to retaliate.

The photographer checked his feed. He follows up. Are there any priyagestat on earth?

Priyagestai is what the individual would be called. And no. But a dagestai is understood to be their representative. Any assault on such a person is understood to be a direct action against the edicts of the priyagestat and must be dealt with accordingly.

So what youre saying is if the Russians bomb us you guys are in the war by default.

By law.

Well so youve given us a ton of stuff to work out synapses over lets take a break and…

How long have been out of the capital?

Me?

Is there another you elsewhere?

Um. Yeah I left two months ago been working East.

Were you born or grown?

Born.

I see.

You see?

Yes. What more do I need to know of you? But go on.

The photographer checked the feed again. Yeah…yeah…um. Right lets call that the wrap.

When the cameras were off the pilot threw a pebble at him. Listen fool. Do you really want to do this?

Interviews?

Be a journalist.

Yeah. Yeah Im Im Im psyched for that. I wanna talk to people see the world.

Good. Get in your car and drive to the Del Marva recruiting station in Uralsk. Talk to Gunnery Sergeant Koirala. Hes been notified. He expects you. You will be inducted as a military journalist with a signing bonus of fourteen thousand dollars. To be assigned as the army sees fit.

The photographer placed his fingers on his chest. Im not really an army guy.

You have your options. Go now or you will be drafted into the infantry and sent to Saratov.

You cant do that.

And but I have. Therefore go and make thy fortune.

The photographer did go and was enlisted. In his seventy eighth year he committed suicide after the loss of his grandchildren in a plane crash and a diagnosis of cancer. He willed his estate to a cousin, wrote a final renowned essay condemning the Martian practice of coding political bias in vat grown humans, had a final dinner at a Louisiana steak house, and in his hotel some hours later put a gun against his heart. His body was shipped home. The motorcade required the shutdown of the I16 expressway. By a stipulation in his will the service was held on a Tuesday.

The Mere Tide P82

After a while Miley brought out beers snuck out of his dad’s shop amid little gasps of disbelief at daring from the youngerkin. He pulled a can out of the plastic ring and flung it at Haybox.

Hey, he said. He ripped the tab off in a gaseous hiss and downed the well of foam. There was a clamor for sips. He let Lelly take a draught and then he took it back to drink again. Miley was distributing his beers and the kids awaited with barely constrained anxiety this validation of friendship. He tossed a beer to Andy with a wink.

Be sure to share it.

Andy smiled. Bashful lad. He opened the beer and watched the foam rise. He sipped and nodded. He offered the beer to Dachni.

Do you want to try?

Dachni lifted a leg and reached into her backpocket for the pintbottle Anaya had given her earlier.

What is that?

A stinking ruddy mescal distilled in the gutted sewn up torso of Seabrook. Him hung by meat hook through the cranium and the crushed heart of the agave poured in with the sugar and the blood. Little clumps of coagulate floated as motes in what appeared to be a milky tadpole at the end of a yellow cord which none but Dachni recognized as a shriveled eye. She unscrewed the bottle and took a nip. Smoky sourness rimed with an iron rot.

Ess guhh, she wheezed. She offered Andy a drink but this devil’s concoct dissuaded him from alcohol altogether and he forfeited his beer.

Ill draw on that, said Haybox reaching over his doll.

Dachni passed the pintbottle to Andy who passed it through a relay of hands that none dared lift the bottle to the mouth so that it reached Haybox completely unsampled. The whiff he took watered his eyes. He very near recoiled but there was backing out now. He tilted the bottle and the bloody froth raced up. His face contorted. He gagged.

Jesus Christ, he cried spewing the stuff into the flames. They danced and some said they heard the fire laugh but when the sound left it was Dachni cackling.

Ettel wake ye brains.

What is the shit called?

Anaya called it sangre basura.

Haybox was rubbing his throat. God, he said. I think I saw my grandma.

The afternoon faded into a vesperal azure braceleted by cirrus and the grounds became altogether haunted by the out melt of shadows from the soil between the glassy tinsel like demons leaning from the fathoms to whisper. No apotropaic here and it is the fire itself that casts them with rampant indifference. Beyond the light the creek brimmed at its banks and branches birled in the rips. Out of the west thunder rolled but the wind carried only the heady odor of honeysuckle and no water and it leeched a sticky sweat out of the fay bodies forgathered to the firelight like the vague tose of a succubus disembodied and adrift. Haybox pitched his empty beer into the flames and like a man condemned led Lelly to the watery shoad, his latex aglet snug upon him. The little gallied youngsters huddled together sharing candy bars with trembling hands. A puppy panting rose out of the bracken.

Do you believe in ghosts?

Dachni had been gazing up at the spumy sprent of stars upon which the planets pinwheeled upon annealed heavens. What rebus do they say? Propounding unample synedoche for the everything. She looked at Andy.

No.

Not in magic or anything?

No.

I heard witches used to live in these woods.

This news elicited gasps from the younger listeners and with an eye to them Andy went on.

They said they used to steal babies to make their stews. Or they could put people where theyd never been.

Whos they?

People around town.

There arent any witches, said Miley imbibing his beer. Not anymore anyways.

A moth strayed over the flames and the combustion of its wings caused it stall and plummet into the pit.

Whats their say?

Miley got out a pocketknife and began to whittle a stick of basswood. Yeahh, my pops told me about it. They say about fifteen years ago this runaway named Noelle started squatting in a cabin on the outskirts of town. She was bigger than most men is what he told me. No one knew where she came from. Some say she was from…well nevermind where.

The kids were all leaned in. Where? Where?

Miley stripped the bark and set his blade to the wood and began to shave along the grain. Well I cant vouch that its true but the rumor is she escaped a psychiatric hospital up in the mountains. At first it was alright. Sheriff Emmett explained how business was going to be. She couldnt go into town without an escort. Only come in on these days. There were strange things happened. Some cats disappeared. People started to find these little sackcloth dolls lying about. Trash cans were knocked over and rummaged through but most people thought those were tanuki because Bethel brought them over about that time. But what really tipped it was a winter when Ally Yates started having complications with her baby. She was bleeding all the time. Sweating blood. None of the doctors could explain it. Everyone expected her to die but one night a couple of lodgers at the inn saw this thing in rags and wearing a deer skull sneak into her house. Like a giant antlered possum that could walk on two legs. No one knew what happened or what was said but the next morning Ally was cured. Some of the guys asked her what the thing was but she said she hadnt talked or seen anything. And she did seem fine. Or at least until after the baby was born. Ally and the midwife never said anything to anyone and no one would have known except that one of the gravediggers peeked into the coffin and he said it was like a boated polyp with eyes staring out of a hairy mouth. Ally went crazy that week. She started raving about the midwife from hell and her potion. No one ever figured out what she was talking about because the time she went crazy was the same time she threw herself off the roof. Emmett called the midwife in for questioning but she swore she never gave her anything.

At the same time this was happening Jeneba, who ran the Duckett before Gavin, started leaving out real late at night and wouldnt come back until just before dawn. It wasnt often and the only reason people even noticed was because she left the road and every time it was a full moon. After her first trip she has all these new drinks to serve. Real popular stuff. Pretty soon people were coming out of the desert and Certificate Springs to give it a try. There was even a delivery out to that bomber hostel. Everyone thought she had some secret still way in a cave somewhere but she didnt know the first thing about whiskey making and as it would turn out she didnt even have a name for the brews. She just had them in these color coded kegs. One night this traveler stops in and after a couple drinks he looks down and finds a tooth in his glass. Pretty crazy. At first he thought it was a joke and then he thought it was someone else’s teeth and then he felt his teeth and they were falling out and his tongue was dissolving. They mopped up what was left of him that night and buried him in a crock pot.

A few days before that Mr. Ebert was replacing the treads on his porch stairs and he found all this crazy scrawling on the undersides. The wood was old but the writing was new. Nobody knew the language they were written in but others had found scribbling like it. AJ found some writing on the inside of his wedding ring. Leslie Powst found them instead of instructions on her prescription typed out doctor neat. Ebert called up this language center in Uralsk and asked if he could get a translation done on the boards and they said bring them up. He went but he never got there. They called it bad luck. Marauders or something like that. Maybe the plemena. They found his car stalled in the middle of the road in the middle of nowhere. The door was open, the key was in the ignition, but there wasnt any Ebert.

Did they find him?

Only a pair of glasses in the trunk. A missing person report was filed two days after he was supposed to arrive and thats when Sheriff Emmett took a posse up north and found the car. They towed it back and gave it a lookover but those glasses were all anyone found. At this point there was a dead patron, a suicide, a missing man presumed dead and a bushel of cats gone missing. There wasnt anyone in town not talking about it and only one person who hadnt offered their opinion on the subject and that was Noelle. He got all his guys together. The problem was a couple other guys got to the idea first. When they drove to the cabin their truck was parked out front and smoke was pouring out the windows.

The truck windows or the cabin windows?

The cabin windows. There was a fire in the cellar. Emmett had his guys go fetch water from the creek-the same creek were camping by-and went inside alone. The police reports got lost when the station got mortared but my dad said he read them. He said all inside was just blood. There were six guys who stormed the place and they were scattered about evenly between the rooms. They had guns for all the good it did them. He said there was a leg wrapped around a ceiling fan. A head in the microwave oven. He tried getting down in the cellar but the fire was pretty bad, at least according to the report. I bet he didnt have the stones to go down there. They let the place burn down and dredged the ashes the next morning. They got the six poor sods out first and tried to match them up more or less right but they didnt find Noelle. They borrowed a clawbucket from Certificate and dug out the cellar and what they found was like a laboratory where experiments get done. Most of the stuff was burnt up but they found two things. A series of metal vats filled with a syrupy muck. The second thing was a seventh body. The lower half had been protected from the flames but the problem was it belonged to a man. Some of the documents survived too and they got sent up to be translated. Turns out they were in Norwegian and they described experiments with mind control agents but that was about it. No one ever figured out if the body down there was really Noelle and Jeneba who might have known fled. They found her car in an abandoned lot the same as Mr. Ebert’s missing just like him to this day. Personally I doubt any of those three are dead. I bet theyre all in cahoots and set up in another town far away. But there was a lot of people in town who drank that stuff and maybe they come back to check on their work. Maybe its not done yet.

Miley grinned at his huddling audience of quakebutts. All was in silence. He looked down at the hag he had carved in his crop.

Suddenly a little boy remembered to go home and now.

Its a story Will, it isnt true.

But Miley attested at length on his honor the veracity of the tale to the final syllable.

Will began to cry. Im not scared. I just want to go to sleep.

Ok, said Miley. See you tomorrow.

Will rose and searched for the escort that would see him home. A friend relented and they set off towards the distant specks of townlight in the south. The rest fell into more genial conversation that any noise of the wood would stitch a caesura in.

Dachni rose. She drained the pintbottle and pitched it into the fire. A turquoise shock of flames belched out of its bowels.

Reckin ets time ta keck en.

And then there were six, said Miley.

Dachni swayed. She was very drunk. Whmm?

Youre not scared, said Andy.

Dachni shook her head. Dunk. Eckhup. Drunk. She lurched into her friend and he toppled to let her pass into the darkness. She crossed her arms across her chest to point a finger left and right. Hich hays a lake?

Miley hiked his thumb over his shoulder. Its about an hour that away.

Erm.

Where do you live?

Dachni pointed vaguely along the trail. Ta church.

The cathedral?

Ayge.

I thought that place was abandoned.

Dachni made a fanning motion with her palm as though to erase his words. Ivves there. Caine eden wheskey an tawk on faid.

Are you alright?

Is ight.

Do you want me to walk you home?

Neghh.

Do you want a light?

Fording the thick infest of fern she found the muddy trail sealed over by the creek flood and she turned north in a throw of arms and plodded on. The hasp that kept shut the locker of the cosmos fell behind the arch of a cirrus brow and the horizon crept flat towards her. The perplexion passed and the moonlight kissed all again and the wind howled through a break in the collage of goitered willows where bats also meant their paths. Feverfew speckled the bank half drowned in the braiding creek. The water deepened the farther she went and when she reached the lake she had to wade almost to the road. She went up the steps and the gate sliced the water as she pulled it wide.

The nave in darkness and quiet. Anaya? Anaya? Anaya? Her voice pulling in diminishing reports down the arches. Two toads copulated in silence squatted in the narthex. Shoo. Yall caint be in here. She went to her room but the pilot wasnt there. She checked other liable haunts of the alien but they were vacant of anyone and she went back to her room for the nagant and went out. She looked upcountry at an ocean. Rippling cradle for an eighth moon. She started out until she could feel the asphalt with her toes and turned back towards town.

At the turnoff she found the pilot’s truck. The motor churning electric and the headlights whiting the water. She clambered in. No pilot here. She smacked the dashboard until the AI answered.

Where is she?

I do not currently know the driver’s whereabouts.

Shoo.

She climbed onto the hood and slung her rifle. A turtle stirred the reflection of the moon and she looked to see were it swirling into some galactic suck where all would drain but it remained apathetic to the cataracted meropia befelled its terraceous twin. Deep suborning dark. To venture or no. She awned her mouth. Anaya! The holt returned no answer. Anaya!

Dachni!

Hey! Where are ye?

Woods! Give me a second.

Anaya trudged out of the trees. Dachni ran up and headbutted her in the thigh.

Ye wasnt home.

I was supposed to pick you up remember?

Oh. It was a forgot.

Its alright.

The pilot picked her up and bumped their heads together. And was a good time had by all?

Were niced.

Good. The pilot kissed her. Come on. Lets go home.

The Mere Tide P81

His name was Andrew Mansell. A broadshouldered lugger with big hands, a flat nose that had already been broken. They walked out to a weedy field nearly flooded and mostly of mud. Along the way he explained the rudiments of the game omitting the sordid history that had led to its decline.

You can be on our team. Were the Jackal Cats and theyre the Blue Bears.

Ta hell is a jackal cat. And when did ye ever seen a fuckin bear kiss blue?

It was the second game of the day. The Cats were 0-1 and the quarter toss dictated the Bears would bat first. They made Dachni first baseman. Andy was the short stop and a lanky boy who pitched for both teams stood like a sage in a sink of mud that swallowed him to the knees. He waited till the hitter stepped to the plate and then he threw a ball that crashed him.

Thats for being a asshole!

And the pitcher was promptly ejected from the game and a new boy elected to the diamond.

Dachni yelled to Andy for a clarification on the rules. They doan beat ye with the bat is they?

No, he called back. Theyre just mad at each other.

The struck boy was consoled to first and Dachni stood nervously by while he glowered and frote the snot leak from his nose.

A replacement pitcher was sought while another, a lobber of curves filled in and he struck out the next two players unwinding like a ballerina top from so far back he whirled. He tried a curve ball on the fourth batter and the crack of the bat and the hot woodsmoke saw the ball whip out to left. The runner took off towards second but not before Dachni clouted him in the ear. And quit hitting me. It seemed the right thing to do. The pitcher exhumed the ball out of the mud where it had lodged like an asteroid and beamed it to her. She caught it and it stung her hands. A holler rose for her to step on base but the runner was barreling down the line and his was not a path to be barred. She stepped clear and punched him in the shoulder with the ball and he was out.

The Cats came in from the field to a trench of a dugout flooded with a brackish water. Behind them girly spectators cheered friends and beaus from the bleachers and bewared any soiling of their dresses. Can you bat?

Ye mean swing the bat?

Yeah.

Gived a hurt to a dog with a broom.

Thats not exactly what I mean.

He helped her with the grip and the girls oooooooohed and he blushed and rolled his eyes.

The first up to bat popped a caught flyball and sulked back to the dugout. Dachni came up to the plate next. The first pitch flew past and rebounded off the crib mattress the catcher hid behind.

Strike.

Dachni grimaced. The next pitch spouted straight off the barrel of the bat but the catcher tripped before he could catch it. Dachni took off but the opposing team yelled her back.

Hit the ball, she whined.

Its out of bounds, called Andy.

Well shit, she said. Nobody said was bounds.

The third pitch she didnt even see.

Out, said the catcher.

Give another try.

You only get three strikes.

Jess another try.

Andy jogged up and relieved her of the bat. Its alright, he said. Youll bat next inning.

Two innings later. When the replacement pitcher was no longer in the diamond but an ace of renown whom through curses she had come to know as Haybox and who had in those innings suffered none as far as third base. There were two on now. He kept a cunning look about himself and he never watched the batter for any sign. At the windup he would hike his knee almost to his shoulder and hold it there like a statue and then he would lunge forward and do a hop skip with his arm lashing out to the side and the ball would hone in at an angle so that it just cut into the strike zone and in all of this he would never quite look at the batter.

Get her Hayes!

And he wound up. Dachni had dredged a trough behind herself and before he head even released she stepped back. When she swung the ball skidded over the barrel and a thunder was stifled in the dugout.

Come on Hay!

The catcher threw the ball back to Haybox. The pitcher caught it and wiped it on a trouserleg. Now he looked at her. And what he saw transcended all considerations of the game. For the brittle scarecrow of scars he measured seemed medieval in its cerebration, some horror apathetic to the peculiar and his orchil sagathy. That should have been relegated to the vile harlequinade of the ringmaster’s freakshow or the aberrations as asylums curate or that priests exorcise or that witch’s are rightfully wary in summoning but that had been loosed among children and given a bat.

He wound up. His arms bracketing his ribs and his knee to his cheek, his right foot turned almost backward. When he uncoiled it was like a top festooned with ribbons, his limbs unfurling elongate and when he released his forehead was almost touching his shins and his right leg cocked up like a mizzen. The ball slipped from his fingers with a liquid inviscid curled towards. Dachni had stepped back. She had watched his hands to tell how would the ball mend its path. She swung. Wedded in the act was the woodburn groom, the stinging bride. A veering right fielder that seemed to vacate the field of all sound save the echo of the crack. Her hands stung.

All at once a choral roar erupted. The runners on first and second took off. Andy took her by the shoulders and pointed to first. Run you gotta run.

She sloughed through the mud. The right fieldman had gone in search of the ball. She stopped at first and her team cried and made huge waving gestures for her to continue to second. She was exhausted by the time she got there but the calls for her to hustle the hell up did not cease and she slogged on to third. By then the fielder had found the ball and was sprinting back. Dachni rounded third. She saw with a feeling of dread and she came to running on the balls of her feet like a crazed swan. The fielder threw. The ball flew over the sink and the catcher threw down his mitt and leapt and the ball slapped hard against his downcurling fingers and he slapped his hand against the backside of the facedown runner already a halfsecond at his cleats.

In the end it was a tie. She rode back in a suit of mud feeling spent and good. Her palms stinging and blushed. And was back again the next day. The day after. Twice she hit what would have been homeruns but was still outed because she couldnt round the bases fast enough. But her teammates considered her something of a maimed prodigy and save for the first day she never struck out.

Once after an afternoon of victories the team captains conspired to the creek behind town, a secluded hatchery of shenanigans inherited through the generations. The boys went to beg their mothers’ leave, Dachni the pilot’s. She limped up entreatingly. Her arms crossed over her chest.

Arent you making friends.

Uhhuh.

Did you win?

Teams goin down to the creek. And aye won three.

You have the knack.

Well does ye say?

How long will you be out?

Dont know. Saided ay ta make fires. So affer night prolly.

How will you get back?

Welllllll, intoned the child as she swiveled about. Could ye come back? Or linger lee?

I could. What time are the others planning to go in?

Dachni swam her shrugging shoulders back. Dont know.

Lets say eleven.

How about middy. Hey how bout ye come?

The pilot smiled. Unfettered and afternight access to a platoon of preadolescences? No, the evil remains and I wouldnt trust my inclination’s check. Rather you be the instrument of my corruption’s spread. But no blood. This war needs its fodder.

A headcount was conducted in the field and those allowed marched off through a carpet of flowers. Only two other girls had finagled permission to attend and these the wiliest of the bunch. A tomboy who kept her bob capped and spoke with a vulnerable gruffness. The other a flamboyant tyke whom kept a cluster of boys around her at any given time. Earthy smell to her reminiscent of the hyacinth reek.

Shes gonna be a whore, observed Dachni.

Andy sputtered out the juice they were sharing. They were walking somewhat behind the main group.

What?

Ye know. Shes gonna sell her pussy.

Andy turned rose red. I dont know anything about that kind of stuff.

Well theys yer first look.

Andy wiped his mouth and regarded the girl for signs of dawning whoredom. She was leaning into Haybox and drawing circles in his ribs with a delicate finger and with her other hand she was feeling the wrist of a second boychik also her senior.

Hes thirteen, said Andy. Fourteen almost. Lelly’s hardly eleven. Im twelve. How old are you?

Dont know.

How can you not know?

Nobody ever said. Its no manner anyhows.

Whens your birthday?

Dont got one.

That sucks.

They entered the woods and clambered down to the trail and crossed the swollen banks of the creek on a log and went a little farther to where a rusted husk of a chopped lorry kept watch over a bowergrounds. Carbonized sticks lay on the ground like black asterisks surrounded by concrete blocks burnt on their firesides and colored petals of bottleglass were littered about and more than one unshoed footarch that day would cut be cut on their edges. They children arrayed themselves around the pit and Miley who held seniority arranged a pyramid of branches and squirted lighter fluid over them and struck a match and let it fall. The flames whipped up like a tonsure and the woodsap crackled and smoked. He was also the son of the town butcher and his backpack was stuffed with bratwursts and burger that soon were skewered and dangled over the flames. Buns were distributed and the sizzling meat loaded into their clefts and they chewed and babbled.

The Mere Tide P80

The turnoff was hardly a mile distant. The pilot wheeled port and soon they were past the town marker with its brief hagiography. The houses moments later come into view squatted in blanched rainwashed resplendency. The streets not quite flooded. A porter in outsized rubber galoshes was unloading crates from his boxtrailer into the front of a convenience store sandbagged at the door. Other businesses above sea level were open. A few pedestrians avoiding the little traffic and the granular waves they shored. Some to notice others to not. The Deputy of Affordable Housing was oaring a rubber raft through an alley. A newspaper boy bicycling, his front basket full of wonders, leaving silical scrolls half out the mailboxes like rolled tongues. The pilot slowed to a stop.

How much?

Three dollars, he said wiping his brow. Three dollars.

The pilot deposited a silver eagle into his breastpocket and boy sorted through his basket for an unsubscribed scroll and synced it to the server of the Archipelago Register and handed it through the window. The pilot drove on, arm chickened out, somewhat cognizant of storefronts open or closed and full of wares. Past Holiday’s clinic where he looked up from his sweeping to inform a patient that his hours were from ten to four.

…its 2:58…

Past the library and around the school to the Matraple Tot Lot. They parked and the child scooted after the pilot as she got out.

In the playground were more children than she could remember congregated. Long haired, daint, straight of bangs or pony tailed, dirty, swarthy, pachephalic or ventripotent, freckled, mobile incubators of flu or pox, hued noon hues, emitting a grand melee of pealing, crying, laughing, a chorus, a sustained heterotone, the yackety-yack tessitura of a thousand peripheral worlds and somewhat unreal, concord of jubilee half-notes mispronounced by fear or ecstasy, the sudden outbursts of reproval, stymied embarrassments, thin braveries behind tears or regressed into lallation over the unceasing shoe clap raising red dust shimmering through the laurence in a cloister of pure ubiety where all are reprieved of past and future rung round the ambitus of adolescence marveling so rotten with remorse and jealousy. He clutched an anxious blond and curly his mathom talisman and snuffled and turned to run. Accruing hurts that will torment them in age if age they reach. Awing at the outsized parlousness of their feats. Rejoice but know thy judgment comes in guise of pebble or twig or crumb. They sadden quickly. They mope, they triumph. The ding of a bat can arouse spirits. Some shirtless in unknowing lewdity. Incipient romances bloom, their incondite conflict of interests forming but not yet manifest, revealing their selves before they learn to hide those selves in their selves, the unhidden selves too unformed to be properly hidden. The crazed sequence of causality guides their run and whirring geometries of arbitrary games that require the dizzying zigzag by rules are dictated. None here adheres to panmnesia though all mildly suspect or suspect without reservation a malevolent panpsychism without the bounds of this haven where their caretakers hold vigil.

Dachni looked at the pilot.

Yer saided of a sometin.

No.

Hess ye does.

The pilot leaned against the hood. Theres war in all of them. You can see it. How many will end in the lupanar? How many in the service? How many will be guilty of the crime of lugulary? They will instill the red dust with fear. They will put fear in red dust.

Mebbe bestis not ta go.

Try. For many this will be the only occasion for innocence theyll ever have.

Prolly not.

Probably not. Thats the crime I suppose. Go on.

Wheres your be?

Yonder bench.

Dachni looked to a bench where two mothers sat with their lactivorous spawn fastened to their breasts.

Ok.

Dachni stepped through the short chainlink gate to the realm sprawl of playground equipment and it was no small feat for her to understand her seeing. She looked back. The pilot was at the bench and the breasts were covered now. Dachni hobbled to the longest line that was to a slide. Several wide eyed waiters with grape smears over their mouths regarded her wordlessly.

Hidy.

Some helloed back. Others averted their gaze. Dachni wasnt sure what was expected of her so she kept silently beside and watched the line dwindle ahead as each child ascended the ladder. When it was her turn she had to go slowly favoring her good foot and arms to boost herself up each rung. Sitting under the hood feeling dumb, the metal hot through her shorts.

Hurry up.

She pushed off. A cool breeze rushed over her but when she opened her eyes it was not stone racing up to meet her. She slid down twice more because a trio of friends did and then she followed them to the monkey bars. They swung rung to rung as though theyd never left the trees but when the child tried she could scarcely keep her grip and it was only the terror of the fall that got her across. She hugged the sidepole and slid down. One of the boys pointed at her in disbelief.

What happened to you?

Dachni looked down at the withered cicatrix. Slightly raised or depressed. Strange white darkening of sprite white flesh. She didnt answer. Someone else inquired as to the erroneous blank of her eyes and she went away. She squatted by the carousel but nobody invited her to ride. The cheery faces flashing past. Bright teeth clean. She ran her tongue over her plaqued dentition. She sat on an empty seesaw chair and waited for someone to come but no one did. She pushed off a few times and after a while she sought out the three again. And found them at the tree swing. They were as tall or taller then her but she reckoned them much younger. They dismounted and waltzed dizzy and giggling.

Is ye cared to play?

They look at her where she stood just beyond valance and shrugged and ran off towards the sandpit. Dachni tried keeping pace but to run was agony and she stopped after a few steps. The three called out to her but she sulked away to the swingsets where she moped about until a vacancy presented itself and she narrowly beat another boy to the seat. He stood by impatient and glum. She observed how other kids made themselves go and she tucked her legs in and kicked out and soon she was rising. She shut her eyes tight and kicked and tucked, cherishing the momentary weightlessness at the extents of her amplitude. She was at this for almost a half hour, blind, mitigating the hot sun on her skin with the wind, saved from yielding her seat for the intermittent abandonment of seats by others until a boy tattled to his sow that she was hogging the swingset.

Aint ye a fuckin cocksuck, she hissed as she slid by.

She wandered back to the seesaws, apparently the most unpopular of equipment, and while she sat there she felt something tugging at her head. She looked down at a shy blonde of about five chewing on the end of her braids. Dachni thought this abnormal but then what experience had she of the customs of canton or shire.

Hidy.

The little girl chewed lost and bug eyed.

Is ye wanna take the other seat?

The girl shook her head. She was searching the playground for someone and the someone was jogging hither.

Allie quit eating her hair.

Ets aright, said Dachni.

He was a boy and he pulled the girl and she pouted the braids out of her mouth like a farewell.

Sorry about that, he said. She chews everybody.

Said it werentint no mind. Hey ye doan care on the other side uhs ye?

Im playing baseball.

Fuck is that?

The Mere Tide P79

They rendezvoused at the entrance Dachni now besocked and besneakered, the swelling in her mended foot shrunk at last to its daint dimensions. Even so the skin showed a ruddy magenta at the rims and its range of motion was much diminished.

In postnoon whiteness the church grounds had transformed into a steaming glade out which larkspur protruded like imperial tears frozen and lilies not yet matured to the size of dishes floated like green areolas. Reeds young or cropped like spouts rowed the water betwixt the unblossomed stems of laceleaf and columbine carnation and begonia hyssop and mallow. Winds galed their prepubescent fragrance to and back but otherwise all this peccant lushness was pavidly tranquil as if out of dread of the basilica as though its lithic buttresses might disturbed articulate and slike its unholy bulk across the terrain with fanged portals, dragging behind its egg sac until after many snags on the muricate earth it tears and miscarries a hell premature.

A few natable troggins floated in from nearby markets. Cans. An empty bassinet. Fruit crates. Winter jackets. Who did not foresee winter again? Dachni sat on the pontoon boards and touched ripples in the water with her sneaker toes, repelling the fish struggling through this brephic underwater jungle becoming gulping earthworms.

Theyre gonda drown it dries.

Aye.

Can ye take back?

The pilot said what had not occurred could not be recalled but in memory and was she remembering these fish would bake in the humid garden that would be and she rolled her trousers and stepped down from the pontoon into the water.

The child reached out after her. Hey.

The pilot glanced back, sat on the edge of the pontoon and the child mounted her shoulders, clinging to her caftan while the pilot groped the waters. The fish scabrous under their mucous sheens, thin tail spines enwebbed. When the pilot had caught all she started towards the woods ladling water over the fish every few steps. Dachni covered her eyes to pause her going but the pilot navigated without impairment. They crossed the road. Dachni closed her eyes. The scratching of the talons muted against pavement. How the water changed the sound. In the woods the birches wore new bark white as paper and their leaves admitted an immaculate laminate upon the waters. She listened to her wade through bracken. Pushing away windfelled branches, floating logs, isles of bark. Assured ford of seamless waters.

Why aint water has seams.

Samurai learning shodō were forbidden ink until such a time as their fingers equaled their thoughts. Art guides the fingers. We know where things should be.

Sparrow notes rained down from behind the leaves into the babeldom drone of locusts but the great acedia within had been reduced to murmuring. On the lake pier the pilot released her catches in a fishburst of riffled streams. Floating at the center of the lake was a drowned deer.

There are stories of revenge and stories of forgiveness and somewhere along the journey it becomes evident what order the story belongs. For we are buffered all about by forces so irresistible as to subvert the nature of most any, turns devils saints and drag the beata down from heaven to wallow in the toilets of the pit.

Will they be ok?

Until next we fish.

Anaya?

Yes?

Her arms tightened. Will ye have a sorry?

Of course.

Giva kiss.

The pilot lifted her from her shoulders and turned her and bestowed the kiss requested and the child threw her arms around her and pecked at her neck.

Kiss kiss kiss, the child intoned.

And in soft antiphone. Kiss kiss kiss.

On the pontoon the pilot wrung her trousers and the water vanished through the spaces between the boards. They walked to the carport and slid into the truck cab. The pilot turned the engine.

Get us on the road.

The AI backed them out.

Wheres ta go?

Out of here a while.

But where?

How about a park?

In Harter?

Why not?

Its far ways. Whys wrong with Materpull?

You know whats wrong with Matraple.

Said ye cared of it.

People might still be a little raw.

Let em be.

The pilot smiled. Alright.

The Mere Tide P78

A sad silted drizzle tintypegrayed the windshield and the steady brooming of the wipers brought into clarity again a grayer morn and the forward traffic and a moon like a scoria coin. Futile lustration cannot wash away the oppidan dregs into storm drains of the same. A coordinate of void inseminated by a stellar grande mort developed to this paradigm of lithic taxonomies perambulated by orders of spalpeens and coxcombs and loons and other pilgrims under gamp or wishing to be. Cellular conurbation, mitochondria of power plant and lubric fabs so delicately analogous reproducing its own furnishings and means of spread within itself.

Deddent mean ta do it.

But you did.

Dachni braced her fists against her temples. Giver pollygie swen backed.

She wont be there.

Dachni looked up. Went way where?

Home.

Whyd they home?

They needed to go back. They couldnt have tolerated the city much longer.

Teller come back.

Youll see her again.

Dachni yanked at the pilot’s arm. Teller come back now.

Anaya put the truck into autodrive and pulled Dachni close. Has she departed forever? A month, two at the most, shell visit at the basilica or youll visit her summer grounds. Do you believe that?

Is it true?

Tis. In the interim youll have phone calls. In any case a separation is in order. She wasnt angry. In fact almost conciliatory and defensive of you against condemnations but that is a mistake because she will be angry and needs to be so. Had she forgiven you ere her anger it would have festered and poisoned you both. Asides were scarcely longer for the city ourselves.

Why not?

Reasons the same. But she understands why you did it and that will go a long ways in mitigation.

Were accident.

Was rage. But I explained why.

The truck halted for a light. The traffic flowed through the intersection bracketed by pedestrians on the crosswalk. A row of shavers had set up on the sidewalk under umbrellas to shear beards or grizzle for legal tender. Shaping them into the styles of the day. Dabbing the pared sycosis with alcohol wipes. The lights flashed green. They turned. The pilot stared straight ahead.

What Im about to tell you, you shouldnt hear. Youd have found out on your own. Youre not stupid. I hate it when you think yourself stupid. You would have learned but the schedule of these lessons says their mastery proper aught be ere graduating infancy when we are not yet able to reckon the fullness of our mistakes and quick forgotten. Its supposed to be a wordless learning. But your teachers abdicated and youve lost too much. That Im sure of. You cant read people. You dont look at them. Youre clueless when it comes to others and your loyalty evaporates in merest suspicion. For you there is no intermediate between the wheen of doubt and its confirmation. And then break cup and spill remorse. The unrueing artificer who crafted you omitted sight and set you out telling nothing. So Ill do it. You need a guidance our authors would disallow. For all their labor is for the maintenance of a mystery which is also their worship. Crack that, to let slip a flicker of the shine is to violate the very essence of the sacred. But there is a word unknown to me that depaints the concord of feeling I bear towards you that impels me not to abide your tread without warning. Here is the truth few speak: It is only through each other we emancipate ourselves. And only through knowing and who knows you? Your secret name. Who but I? I know of all paths they seldom change and even less so abruptly yet here I wrench a bend in the road that maybe a turnoff will present itself or some distant landmark siren you off the road. And maybe it will be I save you from nothing. It remains up to you and though I uncover to you your own fate and so allow the election of some opposite course yet it may be the chords to that reckoning are too perdurable for your severing. But the bend is their understanding, that you had nothing else, that you have been friendless, homeless, bereft of nation and bereaved and hounded as a lame hyena halfjawed but proud that battled lions so to protect the leopard watching afar from a bough. To say you wanted to be the hero.

Two days later she was returned to the basilica but not before a final humiliation. On the morning of her departure she went on her customary walk and perchance happened upon a new face. A bum snuck onto the intercity bus and having no means of returning to his slum had taken up residence beside the bakery. When she came out with her confections he begged her alms and Dachni hawked a stained sugary loogey into the weathered altar of his palm. When she turned Laurence stood looking on in his sack jacket and he took out a pocket’s banknotes and let them to the beggar.

May that year saw two extremes in the weather. The first was almost a drought. The last of the floodwaters steamed off and the winds out of the west wheezed off the topsoil and left the pounson to roach under an oven sun. Half a month of long bloodslaked dusks and the dust like a glebous spume that no battening could keep out and noon after noon the heat roused her where she sprawled in polluted sudor among her drenched bedsheets like a victim of homicide. Rising groggy and vertiginous and her dusty hair matted to her ghostly cheeks and opening her little colored porthole to take in the choking breeze. And scarfed and goggled broomed into being whole snaking dunes in the nave. The fifteenth day began a fortnight of rain that flooded the basilica again and the dunes washed away and then it was June.

In the shower the roommates maintained a wary deference one to the other. The child tolerantly welcoming of the wash, her soaping up and shampooing with a raspberry formula. The long sufferance necessary to comb straight her panicky snarls.

Nature nevermore be your divan nor hairdresser. Adorning (as she does) tiewigs with last season’s death

Or present’s dying

Aye shes a petulant messer

Never giving whats new

And often foul breath

Anaya setup a barber’s chair on the altar and fitted it with a booster seat and dusted it down with a bench brush. From the chancel steps Dachni watched and poked any fish that swam too near and studied anxiously the cart of barbicided supplies adjacent the chair for who knew what surgery was their purpose. The pilot whistled and she rose and toed the great black fiend lurking in the murk.

Seen ye afore.

Come on.

Dachni climbed into the chair and kicked to settle.

Anaya fluffed a checkered cape over her and buttoned the collar snugly behind her neck. And what can I do for you today miss?

Yer what notioned the crazy out.

The pilot grinned. Trim and a shave then?

Dachni withered dejectedly. Doan fuck up the hair. Theys harly much pretty left.

I promise.

The pilot misted her hair damp with a perfumed water and combed straight the last of her tangles to length. Her hair reached below her elbow. By my measure another year it would be as long as you are tall.

Never figgered it so lawn.

The pilot twirled shears out of a jar by an eye ring. Shoulder length say? Maybe a little longer?

Ok.

The pilot viced her hair and the curt snip of the shears severed the strands in the blade meet. She felt the soporific that was the blunt of the steel’s gentle alight upon her crinion. Her eyes fluttered and she purred off into a tingling doze.

Wake thee.

Mm.

The pilot held up a mirror. What do you think?

Dachni turned her head. A side of her head accommodated now a dozen cornrows and the excess in the front flowed down in as many free braids.

Thats pretty neat.

How about that shave now?

Of what?

The pilot rubbed her cheeks and the child mimicked her to understanding.

Aint haired there.

Everyone should have a shave.

Anaya wrapped her face in a steaming towel and lapped the razor upon the strop and when the blade was honed she whipped away the towel and lathered her face with a shaving brush of minx hair.

Mm.

She pulled her face around, peeling off the foam with the razor.

Mmmm.

In her room she donned a blue, silvering with age, t-shirt with the sewer dripping logo Vecto Toad steampressed across the chest and denim shorts with frayed weft threads hanging out the shorn leggings like a curtain. The pilot in curious wed of royal and industrial garb, pumpkin colored trousers kept to waist by a fat cashmere belt with cam buckle and a formfitting undershirt under a turquoise caftan vaguely Islamic in its primitive embellishments of sterling swirls, windthrown stars and vining medallions flowing out the cypress shieldless torse supported by stag and kaig, that lethal beast of Aienagias, and up the lapels and towards the hinds like a dynastic lineage yet to be bred.

Where are your socks?

Dachni wiggled her toes. Wherer yose?

The Mere Tide P77

In the hall all were glad to be away but not all were ready to turn in and the mother fussed her girls for whence did they conceive themselves to be going? Dachni told of the lobby bar where she had not yet gone to draw her daily ration of three drafts and post supper spirit. The mother disapproved but the uncles interceded and then the brothers also wanted to patronize the establishment and where in better safety could it be done than here and at last the mother relented to a curfew of ten not to be exceeded.

The riuk mounted the bar on his knees and bowed so low to the approaching children that he overbalanced and the girls dashed forward to push him back up with their fingertips. The brothers slid atiptoe into their stools and the girls climbed into theirs and there reclined in the rainshade of a halant for the riuk was not risen and on a dare Holnifa tickled the ends of his betentacled head and squealed in delight at their lively reactions. The riuk straightened.

Serrve you I how?

Takes suh beers. What kindsa could key like?

The Kazakhs had not had beer before. The riuk set before them a tray lagers, ales, pilsners, bocks to taste. They sipped from each and an oud bruin which because her brothers liked for the sourness Holnifa liked too. Dachni sipped a measure.

Bwahh.

It is not bad.

Sterrible but ye git yer want.

Holnifa, nose upturned in pseudo aristocratic deign veered it left, right, and higher with each curt enunciation. I will do.

In their drinking the brothers fell into exaggerations that as the empty steins accumulated grew into lies that morphed into outright impossibilities. Hunting feats. Foes vanquished. Steeds broken. They bemoaned the poor selection of theirage girls residing in the desert and the girls took their beers and went wandering.

They exited the foyer into a corridor hung with crystal chandeliers at intervals and compartmentalized by french doors of clearest glass and volute handles. The walls bracketed by cavetto friezes in which some alien scripture were inscribed. Along a back gallery pophigatic through which the efficiency lights above made doorways on the parquet with its carved moil of figures so that they seemed portals to a nether where the dead were freezed in the expiration of their mortality. Holnifa who had not even heard rumors of these gray blights upbeared their weals rectangular edifices as though in a sweven mad threatening were it woke and she could see the city topdown she might have divined the subtle bobeche formed for to steer away the sewage. Her mechanical fingers palpating the contorted braille of thousands relieved in the wall. All these beings of age. Then is Maeri-geltin her fingerpad falling into his outheld palm as though she herself were the answering deity entreated to displace the monster’s chaw out his entrails.

They let themselves into an unlit room even floored to their relief.

Fines a light.

Holnifa winged out her arm and a coverlet of her wrist slid back and a clear bead rose from a hollow and filled the room with light.

Whoad.

Very cool.

They were in a locutory. A leather covered triclinium surrounded a rectangular pit in the noir belge overlaid with a cleaned gridiron. A baby grand. They slapped chaos out of the keys then examined the urn atop it. A pictographic tale told but not the two dimensional mode of Egypt, no they knew depth. Here is the hero ahome and here the drafters of the yage. And he is mustered to a boat with arms and in the journey fights a monster of the river and bests it and then the soldier is in another land warring. A spear wounds him in a siege. He falls sick. He fights sick upon plains. In his penultimate scene the soldier has turned his musket against himself. And then he is home. Bookshelves lined the walls. Holnifa pulled down Madness, Lust, and the Passion of the Sacrament by Ebbener M. Galeotti. She asked for a read but Dachni studied her fingernails and asked why and Holnifa guessed correctly at her reluctance. She replaced the book and let herself be led to and laid upon one of the klinai. Dachni held her close. The arm was dead cold.

Int et sposed ta stay warm?

Sposed to.

Dachni fretted the arm try to see what it would do under various abuses. Shaking, flicking, flapping. Nothing. The index finger concealed a laser. Emerald beam. Her middle digit uncapped to reveal a butane lighter. Her ring an omnitool, her pinkey a series of cables male and female. Along the ulnar diamonds were embedded and Dachni thought them illusions but they were real.

Caint ye make it warm?

Мен қалайша білмеймін.

Figger it later. Ok?

Ok.

Қалайсың?

Жақсырақ.

Is yer gitten treated well?

Holnifa told her things in the village had settled. That she was no longer odded against her mother, that several children had come forth to befriend her and that she had kept their home until the diminished horde moved north.

Is ye wished to a sister?

Say what is sister?

Never mind. Апай. Апай.

Менің қарындасым бар еді.

Never told ye wassed. Howd she die?

Ол болды…

не?

Holnifa said she didnt want to say.

Was it fuckin awful?

Holnifa said it was.

Is ye missed her?

Иә.

Ets ok.

Is not.

Retort this? And cheapen loss with a platitude. Dachni declined. Loss unrectifiable. No catechism can allieve nor rite right for theirs is the orbit of a weeping cavity a child once had occupied. And she saw the powerlessness of god and cupped her friend’s trochanter outcrops and curling her fingers upwards fanned them down under her waistband and ran her tongue along the delicate lobe of an ear and admonish the wincing object of her comfort to stillness but she was shrimping away from the invasion of the breach and facing her molester was gripped firmly by the nape and her lips received the mashing press of lips and she struggled moaning and pulling up her knees between them pushed and Dachni clattered on the tessera.

Dachy!

Dachni leapt to her feet and swung a fist that ferried left the solicitous face of her friend in a blood spat. Holnifa cupped her gushing mouth. The bruise already creeping across her flushed cheeks and a front tooth and cuspid sputtered out. Dachni’s fists trembled at her side but then Holnifa began to cry. The child reached out but Holnifa ran her fleetly way Dachni could not match even were it not for her peroneals’ quail at every other step. When she reached the foyer Holnifa was already joined to her brothers on the staircase but it was not their confused concern that flew her but the terror in her friend.

Some hours later a riuk opened the closet door and gave a cursory lookabout at the custodial clutter of cleaning supplies and metal shelving and washsink and moved on. At another many houred interval Juraiska opened the door and closed it and rolled away the mop bucket behind which a sossed Dachni cowered in chemical stink.

He set her on a bar stool and gave her a nonalcoholic beer to sip. Manservants were porting body bags to a van docked to the embassy and the black tarp bulged for the bodies within, even the barest terror legible in the contours of the faces like things alive in their ingesting. And they were some alive. The bags rustling perceptibly. The porters heaved the bagged dead into the van one atop the other and when the last body had been stacked a shalki slammed shut the doors, first those of the transport and then the embassy. The van started and then gravel hammered at the doors as the wheels found their traction and then the roar pulled away into a concord like itself distant and distinct.

On her second beer the pilot came down. Dachni hobbled to her carrying arms and was lifted up and her hair brushed back.

Lets go for a ride.

The Mere Tide P76

On her last night at the Aiegietti a banquet was held in which several persons of national state and emissary attended. Also some of business. All in the grand hall at a newer table wider by half than what it had replaced so that the pilot shared the table head with Dachni and Mai-kin. There were no musicians, no entertainments. The food catered, the champagne store bought and the tinted curtains drawn to perfectly frame the dusking sun.

Two kings, declared Seabrook raising his glass, diametrically balanced that maintains our carious state cuius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos.

The glasses rose not without some hesitation.

Chinaberry, muliebral and of prominence in real estate, professed confusion. Whos the second king?

Seabrook looked at the empty chairs at the opposite head of the table. Matthias of course.

Another tradesman, Bejeck, was leaning on an elbow scrutinizing the table intensely. The toast lingered in the air. His alone, with the cups of the aienee, were not raised.

Up with your glass, said Seabrook.

Seabrook the posh.

Of the guests several hailed from the army and these allowed themselves to chuckle derisively.

Theres an honorific you can pin on your chest.

The general who had commented had a star on each shoulder, a tassel thrown over the right, and he had turned up his trouserleg to keep the blood gold braid from touching the floor on which he sat.

Hes an endless amusement for an investment broker, said Seabrook with an eyeroll. But what in god’s name are you about? Tell me.

Im studying the seating, said Bejeck. The layout, the balance of the table. He spread his hands and wobbled them up and down as though they were scales weighing. Bad company, good food, better champagne but the dagestai is drinking a beer.

Does she drink champagne? wondered a colonel. He leaned to address the pilot. Or is it he? Theres been some confusion regarding that. Care to enlighten us?

I was born male, said the pilot. And later castrated against my will.

Feigned sympathy that showed more hostility than commiseration flashed on the faces and was almost immediately forgotten.

I guess uh you werent always dagestai then.

No.

Tough luck on that account. Howd you make rank?

I was in the maegatchka, the army, as a forward observer. When my iagiit, roughly two regiments, command staff was decimated I assumed command and took the stronghold of Hastigatti, from which my surname, Hasti is derived.

Must have been a tough fight if the UE thought you needed to have a name for it.

We clawed down the walls. Out of forty-seven thousand assaulters nineteen survived.

Goddamn. You never heard of a pyrrhic victory?

What about the enemy? How many casualties did you inflict?

All of them.

Well, said the general, heres to you hammering out your name.

The glasses some, rose, tilted, dropped down to the table.

Goes to show, began a colonel, that anyone with the proper aptitude can rise in the ranks. The military is the great equalizer.

Her nameplate read Rosier. She looked at the pilot for confirmation. Isnt that right.

Please, begged Bejeck. Theres no equality. A man goes in is ruled like a dog, beaten like a dog and lucky if he gets put down like a dog. God forbid he outlast his use then the boot gets right in his ass and out on the streets you go.

Where youll be ready to loan to him at 34%.

Bejeck jabbed a finger at the colonel. Im up front about my practices. Im not the guy who installs recruiters at every corner and has them spin fairy tales about the noble life.

Im more interested, said Chinaberry, about what exactly it is you were trying to figure out.

About the table seating?

Yeah, tell us.

Yeah. I was saying I was studying the seating. Im here, Im a financial entrepreneur. I have you good men of uniform to my right, the ambassador to goddamn Bulgaria, Chairman Pelson, Im across from other hooligans of my ilky-

A bald hooligan apparently.

And with a waistline that would make a bear jealous.

-and then I look north. What am I seeing? Children on the dagestai’s right, Mister Mai-kin on her left, another shosti, and then an android. I dont know what you do.

The agent looked gloomily down the table. I work in agriculture.

Seabrook perked. Same as me. Are you with Lield and Hassely?

No.

Pershing Growth?

Government.

Ah.

Oh, said Bejeck nodding. Agriculture. So Im seeing this and wondering. What does this mean? I mean theres two four six seven people between me and the kids. Kazakhs right?

The Kazakhs were wary of this company in their funeral dress. The mother admitted slowly their ethnicity.

Bejeck smiled. Im trying to understand this.

Seabrook popped a crab rangoon into his mouth and washed it down with his champagne. Why does it have to mean anything?

Because it does, Bejeck said chuckling. Or put it this way. It doesnt have to mean something but it does. Im curious.

Major General Egeux finished his glass and refilled it. I think the meaning is obvious.

That the dagestai did not invite us.

Exactly.

Thats what Im thinking. Ive never met you before. Never sought a meeting but two days ago I get an invitation. Now if you didnt invite us then why are we here?

The champagne is poisoned, said Juraiska flatly.

The generals gagged. Chinaberry smiled nervously. Some food was spit out but Bejeck laughed.

I like that. Playing it off. But I cant get over it. Why are we here? I mean whats the scam? You have high ranking officers, leaders of industry and finance, government officials, Kazakhs. A Kazakh with a top of the line augment. Whats the job? What are we doing in Kazakhstan? I mean come on what is it were doing here? We might as well skip the foreplay and rip right into the business.

Theres nothing, said the pilot.

Getting the feel first. Alright. Alright. I can work with that.

Seabrook recovering cleared his throat nervously though the nervousness quickly left as he thusly spoke: I suppose since the reason of our convening is temporarily denied us it might better serve the time to come together and figure what can be done now that we are here. As Mr. Bejeck astutely observed I think none of you here would disagree with me when I said the members of this table carry significant influence in every area of this country’s life.

The eagle perched on my lapel means I ferry coffee from a pot to a general, said Rosier.

Laughter rippled through the officers.

No no really no false modesty. If memory serves both you and your colleague, Colonel Lourdes, are cyber security experts. I believe both of you have published articles. Miss. Lourdes I believe yours concerned virtual ecosystems which frankly I found quite compelling and I dont know how anyone could read your arguments and come away with any other impression that this regime is focused far more on maintaining its virtual dominion as you put it then with managing the actual city which supports it. I found particularly compelling your insight that the way the homo sapiens population levels are maintained seem more of an afterthought meant to placate us rather than promote us as equal partners. I also fear, me personally, although you didnt put it quite so explicitly but I couldnt help draw the conclusion that the regime would be all too happy to have a war with Russia as a means to tilt the balance of power even more in Matthias’ favor. You Mr. Rosier your article…Im sorry the title escapes me. Really a wonderful title.

A Quaternity of Renaissances.

Yes. Wonderful title I dont know how I forgot but in it you, quite correctly in my opinion, prophesize that the age of the virtual is now entering an obsolescence it would have entered centuries ago if it hadnt been for that terrible cataclysm of irrationality.

Im sorry I didnt read this article, said Chinaberry.

Rosier drained his cup and refilled it. The thrust of my article was that since basically we now have the technology to augment fetuses and have the augmentations develop over the course of the term and mature with the child this negates the need to outsource both labor and calculation to automation. Later theres talk of encoding these augmentations into DNA, not genetic engineering per say. For example. Cognitive enhancement. A microchip to develop in the brain would be fed by supplements of silicon, copper, gold, administered by osmosis and constructed by nanomachines at the appropriate time in fetal development. These would be self-replicating and could be passed on to succeeding generations without further intervention. So it removes the need for machines. Or conscious machines.

Exactly, interjected Seabrook. Now from my understanding that technology is not far off.

And youre an agriculturalist, said Bejeck.

Yes I am, said Seabrook.

And this technology could feasibly be written into say a cereal and transmitted to those who ate them. Or any other food group. Or comestible.

Rosier nodded as though to concede partially the validity of his thought. Thats not how it would work but you could do something similar. Its very technical.

And so were all here, said Bejeck again. Obviously no accident. And considering recent events. Assassination of the leader of our regional competitor. What do we do?

Well to start we might try normalizing relations, said Seabrook.

A heart bleeder said the brigadier.

I am deadly serious. Even before the assassination I think the suspension of trade served only to deteriorate relations. And now new leadership has been installed and lets stay clear of the conspiracy theories about that but let us seize the moment. Thresh when the wheat is green you know? Certainly Im not excusing any of the grotesque transgressions committed by the Russian government but I dont believe that this country has acted any less deplorably towards our near neighbors. Need I remind you of the terrible excesses of the army of plunderers and manquellers hired by a one eyed slaver who shrewdly argued against, successfully argued again, an official military response so as to maintain the appearance of respecting the demilitarized zone but which a moment so epochal would have fully justified. This security force as it has come to be revealed by survivors degenerated almost immediately into what can only be described as a sanctioned genocide on a completely defenseless people while securing plausible deniability but is there any real doubt that this was not the intent from the beginning. That is a rhetorical question by the way. And while I can understand the predicament of you and your crew dagestai I feel it was absolutely criminal to keep news of your arrival secret for as long as it was. I think it was very crafty that you established relations first with a smaller power, I suppose the logic was superior technology might negate the advantages of a smaller power as opposed to a large one. I cannot fault you for that but nevertheless the fact of the matter is your arrival was used as an excuse for an illegal annexation of territory and the inexcusable slaughter and displacement of many hundreds of thousands.

Mai-kin looked to the pilot.

Juraiska sipped his beer. On behalf of the dagestai I apologize that every last of my friends, many of whom I knew since childhood, died upon arrival.

Seabrook clucked his tongue in a toss of his head. Dont mistake me I dont blame you. But your arrival did precipitate a deluge of bloodshed that had up to that point been kept in check.

You might want to close your mouth, said Egeux.

Seabrook turned his finger to the general. I will not sir. I am not an officer in the army I have a right to speak and all the ribbons on your breast cannot compel me to silence. Now that genocidal piece of history aside I want to ask you dagestai your opinion on a matter of agricultural significance. I am by birth and trade an agriculturalist. Your people it is my understanding developed along different lines but in human history agriculture marked the downward trend of nomadism which even in this age isnt fully eradicated. Stability though, regular rhythms in civil life were the foundations which gave rise to the first city states and civilizations. Agriculture served the same purpose for mankind as the invention of the musket did for the aienee. If I could draw for your benefit a picture of a bacterial culture in a petri dish. A bacteriologist puts a strain in a specified environment with conditions amicable to its thriving and that is on a much larger scale the way of the human species. The better the conditions the better the society and culture except that now the petri dish is benefacted our harmed by policies, personalities, entertainment, housing, transportation, and a myriad of other factors. Now we have the rescindance of the Hines Act. Poultry, cereals, vegetables, fruits, almost everything comestible, all already under intense regulation is with the repeal illegal to sell in Russian markets which despite our hostilities was our largest trading partner. Now there was an article in the Horizon Gazette yesterday that reported near famine conditions in northern Russia. Tell me is that how a culture thrives? Our policies are serving to back them into a corner where there only option is war thereby creating a virulent and terrible strain. The policies of this government are draconian, undemocratic, and laugh all of you I believe in democratic ideals. I am an idealist. And ok laugh shed your scorn on me but I am not naive. Idealism is not the idea that perfection can be sustainably achieved but that for a brief moment it might shine through and if at the right moment alter the course of the world. In this country we do not have a realistic or sustainable diplomatic agenda. Tell me dagestai, because I really do want to know your opinion, what would your response be to a foreign rival, on your border, who had occupied your historical agricultural region, annexed an enormous section of your territory while you were under military investment, while your own people are suffering almost every privation that a sentient being can suffer. How could you in good conscience not act?

Stockton, a scientician of the military variety and the second most ranking officer at the table, replied on the pilot’s behalf. Because to think rapprochement is the appropriate response is to ignore three centuries of provocations. Considering the outrages weve endured this country has been heroically restrained in our responses.

Im appalled you would have the audacity to call annexing an entire mountain range restraint.

It was yielded. We take what is in our interests.

War is in our interests? said Chinaberry.

Egeux knocked the base of his butter knife against the table. Relax youll make money.

We are denied a significant and historical market.

I doubt you cant find a blacker market.

Chinaberry scoffed in time with Seabrook.

Stockton would know what mental deficiencies the traders suffered from. It would take a serious case of amnesia to believe that recent developments would cause any change in the expansionist agenda everyday espoused by Moscow of whom Dementyev has been the most notorious advocate.

And I would remind you general, countered Seabrook, of our neighbor’s history. For all your military learning you seem to have forgotten that the Russians have endured eight major invasions by Mongols, Napoleon, Poland-Lithuania, Germany, the United States, the TransBaltic states, China and most recently by those murderous hordes from across the mountains. All wars of aggression fought on their territory. You would have to be the most biased chauvinist to not concede that their paranoia if you can call wariness that, is if not justifiable then at least understandable.

I dont need to understand anything.

Yes yes I am sure that you received your stars by worshiping at the altar of ignorance.

The general flushed began to bluster but Seabrook went on.

In light of your statement I say their sentiments are fully justifiable. Fully justifiable with officers like yourself who profess the most grovelling fondness for violent solutions to anything more complex than starting a car. Thank you for your input sir but I do not believe further discussion would be useful.

Now you listen here.

Seabrook threw his napkin in his lap. I repeat I do not believe further discussion to be useful.

A vein was throbbing in the general’s temple.

For a minute no one spoke. Chinaberry tapped out a beat on the table. Then she inquired of the older general if he felt war was in the country’s interest.

Egeux replied measuredly. I think whatever secures the future of this nation is in its interests. Whether the route into future history is one where we and Russia coexist in a compact, one where Russia is expunged from the earth, or some medium between I cant say. I am a prophet insofar as a historian is a prophet in reverse. But without even making an historical appeal the simple truth is that right or wrong, justified or unjustified, Moscow is and has been on a war footing and has not signaled anything that could be interpreted as a desire to deescalate. I think the question of whether or not its in our interests is irrelevant.

But why would you-

Act against your own interests? Theres a bar down the street. Go ask every drunk who’s ruined a marriage, destroyed a car, lost his house, beat his children, why he continues to drink knowing that the drink is the source of his problem?

Its not the same, pouted Chinaberry.

It isnt terribly different. I dont pretend to understand why were fighting and I dont have the time to stop and figure it out, even if it could be figured out. What made you want to become a supplier to the army?

I didnt, it was chance. We manufactured prefabs and there was a contract out for field housing.

Ok. What makes a mosquito suck blood? What makes a moon orbit a planet? Biology. Laws of physics. The point being is tendency is in all things the cause of which is sometimes intelligible and discoverable, sometimes not. The more primitive the system the more obscure the cause. What makes us fight goes back to abiogenesis. Im sure for a long time there were molecules that in their self-replication didnt eat each other and my theory would be that they flourished in the ancient seas until whatever resource they fed on became scarce and then whatever set of molecules first mutated to ingest its neighbor flourished until there was nothing left to eat or something mutated to eat it and then you had things that wanted to eat and didnt want to be eaten. If you look at a nation like a single celled organism then to my mind it becomes intelligible. A nation eats and knows other nations eat. Gentemophagy.

You mean germs eat germs? Is that a word?

I kind of invented it. Its supposed to be Latin.

Very nice. Though I think youre plagiarizing from mercantile theory.

Dont you swear by the laws of market?

In the market.

Didnt you say everything is merchantable?

Chinaberry inclined her head curiously, her lips queerly parted as though to chastise by private gesture but it was done and none failed to realize the implications of this revelation. Among the ensuing lurid mockery that cackled out an inquiry from one of the uncles would have been lost had it not been amplified by Juraiska and what it was he wanted to know was what would happen if there were war. A question which Juraiska himself derided but which the uncle insisted be answered by the men of uniform.

You mean with your family? said Egeux.

Yes my family, said the uncle.

I assume from your being at this table you carry significant favor with the dagestai. Probably she already has arrangements for you and your family’s evacuation if there should be a flashpoint.

Juraiska translated.

I no want to move, he said angrily. He formed an X with his crossed wrists and swung them outward like wings spreading. We do not move. In last war. Most family die. American shoot us. Taypalar shoot us. We have bomb. Our sheep. Our goat. Our camel. Bomb our home. We dont fight. I am lose six brothers. My father. My grandfather, my grandmother. We dont fight. Why fight us?

Egeux exhaled up into his trimmed mustache. He smiled an embarrassed smile and proceeded into the authoritative and euphemistic mode which men of rank enjoy speaking in when describing the reality of their professions.

While its the policy of colonial forces to under no circumstances knowingly target noncombatants it is a regrettable aspect of conflict that civilians are inadvertently exposed to fighting. We take seriously our responsibility to minimize any collateral damage and take appropriate precautions to that end but in an evolving theater where everywhere is potentially an immediate battlespace it often isnt feasible and often outright impossible to evacuate or even notify civilians beforehand. I understand the displacement conflict causes and I personally am committed to making every reasonable accommodation. Were a war to spill over into your living areas I can assure you that the appropriate agencies would establish camps for your housing and hopefully even before that establish and enforce blue zones.

The uncle wanted to know why such zones hadnt been established in the latest war.

The general shrugged. The war happened too fast. It hardly lasted two months in our AO.

The pilot leaned to the struggle who was straining to understand. The general means to say that he gives not a single fuck about you and that if the men under his command shoot your nephews then the practice they acquire in marksmanship will have been worth the sacrifice and if they rape your sister and niece then it is simply an ugly veridical of military operations.

Egeux slammed his fist on the table. Goddammit I didnt mean that at all.

The pilot smiled. Remember poor fool whose table you disturb.

Mai-kin chuckled quietly.

I will not be maligned, Egeux growled, wiping his lips and throwing down his napkin.

I did not excuse you.

I can see that I am not no longer welcome at your table.

You were never welcome at my table.

Then please explain why Im here. I have other business I could be conducting.

We understand esteemed general, said Mai-kin, that you believe you have other business but for the very service you are officered in it is not for you to decide. So remain at this table until I relieve you of it.

Id rather resign my commission.

Undress then. You can resign to me. We are integrated into the services. If you do though your freedom will be shortlived and you will find yourself unceremoniously drafted into the infantry as a private and deployed to the front.

The general sat but the Kazakhs excused themselves and quickly the girls exeunt.