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Fin’ly, five decades after my people’s landin’ at Prescience, we relaunched the Ship what bringed us there.
Anxin’n’proudful at one time hearin’ them words made me, like a pa, an’ like she an’ me weren’t so diff’rent as a god an’ a worshiper, nay.
The final drop shook free an earlier memory of blackness, inertia, gravity, of being trapped in another ford. Where was it? Who was it?
But as the Boardman’s anthem says, Nea So Copros is the world’s only rising sun! Pre-Skirmish East Asia was the same chaos of sickly democracies, democidal autocracies, and rampant deadlands that the rest of the world still is! If the Juche had not unified and cordonized the region, we would have backslid to barbarism with the rest of the globe! How can any rational organization embrace a creed that opposes corpocracy? Not only is it terrorism but it would be suicide.
Think of the Bolshevik and Saudi Arabian Revolutions. Think of the disastrous Pentecostalist Coup of North America. Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed?
But…why would—What would the purpose be of such…carnage? The economics of corpocracy. The genomics industry demands huge quantities of liquefied biomatter, for wombtanks, but most of all, for Soap. What cheaper way to supply this protein than by recycling fabricants who have reached the end of their working lives? Additionally, leftover “reclaimed proteins” are used to produce Papa Song food products, eaten by consumers in the corp’s dineries all over Nea So Copros. It is a perfect food cycle.
What you describe is beyond the…conceivable, Sonmi451. Murdering fabricants to supply dineries with food and Soap…no. The charge is preposterous, no, it’s unconscionable, no, it’s blasphemy! As an Archivist I can’t deny that you saw what you believe you saw, but as a consumer of the corpocracy, I am impelled to say, what you saw must, must have been a Union…set, created for your benefit. No such…“slaughtership” could possibly be permitted to xist. The Beloved Chairman would never permit it! The Juche would ionize Papa Song’s entire xec strata in the Litehouse! If fabricants weren’t paid for
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Our sex was joyless, graceless, and necessarily improvised, but it was an act of the living.
What do you mean? What “next stage” of what? Of the theatrical production, set up while I was still a server in Papa Song’s. Wait, wait, wait. What about…everything? Are you saying your whole confession is composed of…scripted events? Its key events, yes. Some actors were unwitting, Boom-Sook and the Abbess, for xample, but the major players were all provocateurs. Hae-Joo Im and Boardman Mephi certainly were. Did you not detect the hairline cracks in the plot?
Wing027 was as stable an ascendant as I: was I really so unique? You yourself suggested, would Union truly risk their secret weapon on a dash across Korea? Did Seer Kwon’s murder of the Zizzi Hikaru fabricant on the suspension bridge not underline pureblood brutality a little too neatly? Was its timing not a little too pat?
But…Union? Are you saying even Union was fictioned for your script? No. Union prexists me, but its raisons-d’être are not to foment revolution. Firstly, it attracts social malcontents like Xi-Li and keeps them where Unanimity can watch them. Secondly, it provides Nea So Copros with the enemy required by any hierarchical state for social cohesion.
I thought of Primo Levi’s Drowned and the Saved.
Nor were the part-time botty wipers, bath scrubbers, and gunk cookers about to jeopardize their lofty positions in society by springing one of their charges.
“Freedom!” is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.
(The Organs of Venus are well known to all but, Brothers, the Organ of Saturn is the Bladder.)
Hooded doubts dogged my heels. Why was Denholme paying my captors his last precious kopecks to infantilize me? Had Georgette, incontinent with senility, told my brother about our brief diversion from the highway of fidelity, so many years ago? Was this trap a cuckold’s revenge?
Your beloved large-print sagas of rags, riches, and heartbreak were no camouflage against the miseries trained on you by the tennis ball launcher of life, were they?
I needed a miner’s helmet and a ruddy pick to locate this “library.” It was down a dead end blocked off by stacked-up Great War memorial plaques headed “Lest We Forget.”
“Oh, once you’ve been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn’t want you back.” Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. “We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”
Ernie divided up the last drops of malt. “What gets my goat about him is how he leaves his keys in the ignition. Every time. He’d never do that out in the real world. But we’re so decrepit, so harmless, that he doesn’t even have to be careful when he visits.” I judged it poor form to ask Ernie why he had noticed a thing like that. He had never spoken an unnecessary word in his life.
Looking back, I see that Ernie tolerated my posturing because he knew Veronica was only humoring me.
but watching him coax the Victorian boiler system into life one more time, I always felt shallow. It’s true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.
“My brother has died! Dead, do you understand? Stone Ruddy Dead! My sister-in-law’s bonkers, and she doesn’t know what to do! This is a family emergency! If you have a Christian bone in your ruddy body you’ll help me sort this out this godawful ruddy mess!” Dear Reader, Withers saw only a hysterical inmate making nuisance calls after midnight.
“In a dream he told me that Denholme recently passed to the Other Side. ‘Phone your sister-in-law,’ he said. ‘She needs your help.’ I told him using the telephone was against Aurora House rules, but Saint Peter assured me that Nurse Noakes was a God-fearing Catholic who wouldn’t mock such an explanation.” La Duca was actually halted in her tracks by this balderdash. (“Know thine Enemy” trumps “Know thyself.”) Noakes ran through the alternatives: was I a dangerous deviant; harmless delusional; realpolitikster; Petrine visionary?
After my modest victory I played patience (the card game, not the virtue, never that) in the lounge,
The heating systems composed works in the style of John Cage.
“What would I do,” says one triplet, “if I was president? First, I’d aim to win the Cold War, not just aim not to lose it.” Another takes over. “I wouldn’t kowtow to Arabs whose ancestors parked camels on lucky patches of sand …” “… or to red gooks. I’d establish—I’m not afraid to say it—our country’s rightful—corporate—empire. Because if we don’t do it …” “… the Japs’ll steal the march. The corporation is the future. We need to let business run the country and establish a true meritocracy.” “Not choked by welfare, unions, ‘affirmative action’ for amputee transvestite colored homeless
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Roland Jakes gouges wax from his ear with a pencil. “I met the drummer who’d done the actual drumming on the Monkees’ hits. He was banging on about tantric sex—I thank you. His favorite position is, uh, called ‘the Plumber.’ You stay in all day but nobody comes.”
“Take her to the lockup. Nothing dirty before you shoot her. She may be a reporter, but that doesn’t make her a total whore. Dispose of the body in the usual way.”
Fay Li pulls out a vanilla binder. The HYDRA-Zero Reactor—An Operational Assessment Model—Project Head Dr. Rufus Sixsmith—Unauthorized Possession Is a Federal Crime Under the Military & Industrial Espionage Act 1971. Fay Li permits herself a jubilant smile. The land of opportunity. Then she sees two wires trailing from inside the binder to the back of the strongbox. She peers in. A red diode blinks on a neat four-by-two bundle of taped cylinders, wires, components. Bill Smoke, you goddamn—
“Yo! Amaba! A! Ese! Jodido! Perro!” Luisa checks Joe Napier. He looks on, unhurt, thunderstruck. The señora wipes her mouth and leans over the motionless, pulp-faced Bisco. “And don’t call me ‘wetback’!” She steps over his clotted head and unlocks the exit.
The nineteenth-century ship is indeed restored beautifully. Despite their mission, Luisa is distracted by a strange gravity that makes her pause for a moment and look at its rigging, listen to its wooden bones creaking. “What’s wrong?” whispers Napier. What is wrong? Luisa’s birthmark throbs. She grasps for the ends of this elastic moment, but they disappear into the past and the future. “Nothing.”
Dr. Egret gives me the creeps. Never met a quack whom I didn’t half-suspect of plotting to do me in as expensively as he could contrive.
Dhondt drives a claret 1927 Bugatti Royale Type 41, a real spanker, Sixsmith.
Do wonder if my brother liked boys as well as girls too, or if my vice is mine alone.
In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order.
Mme. v.d.V., who also summered in Switzerland, gave laborious accounts of how Marie-Louise had been eulogized in Berne as “the Flower of the Alps” by Countess Slãck-Jawski or the Duchess of Sümdümpstädt.
She began to say something several times. In the end, she said (blushing!), “I was missing a certain young man I met this June.” You’re surprised? Imagine my feelings! Yet I was every inch the gentleman you know me for. Instead of flirting back, I said, “And your first impression of this young man? Was it not wholly negative?”
“He’s a tall, dark, handsome, musical foreigner?” She snorted. “He is … tall, yes; dark, quite; handsome, not so much as he thinks, but let us say he can catch the eye; musical, prodigiously; a foreigner, to his core. Remarkable that you know so much about him! Are you spying on him too, as he passes through Minnewater Park?” I had to laugh. So did she. “Robert, I sense …” She gazed at me shyly. “You’re experienced. May I call you Robert, by the way?”
A beguiling creature, she really is. My blood was hot, and I was seized by an impulse to give the empress of Bruges a lingering kiss.
Because all my life, sophisticated, idiotic women have taken it upon themselves to understand me, to cure me, but Eva knows I’m terra incognita and explores me unhurriedly, like you did. Because she’s lean as a boy. Because her scent is almonds, meadow grass. Because if I smile at her ambition to be an Egyptologist, she kicks my shin under the table. Because she makes me think about something other than myself. Because even when serious she shines. Because she prefers travelogues to Sir Walter Scott, prefers Billy Mayerl to Mozart, and couldn’t tell C major from a sergeant major. Because I,
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Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We do not stay dead long. Once my Luger lets me go, my birth, next time around, will be upon me in a heartbeat. Thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter, my resolution as perfect as my many-headed sextet. Such elegant certainties comfort me at this quiet hour.
A bell rang from the church tower & the captain slapped his forehead. “D—— my eyes, what am I thinking? It’s the Sabbath, by G— & these holy s—s’ll be a-braying in their rickety church!”
The table stood with each leg immersed in a dish of water. Mrs. Horrox explained, “Ants, one bane of Bethlehem. Their drowned bodies must be emptied periodically, lest they build a causeway of themselves.”
I quoth: “So it came to pass, see, Saint Peter, aye, ’im ’oo Mistah Jesus called Sweeter Peter Piper, he cameth from Rome an’ he taughteth them hooky-nosed Jews in Palestine what was what with the Old Baccy, an’ this is what I’m teachin’ you now, see.”
idea of Father Upward’s, at the Tahitian Mission. You must understand, sir, your typical Polynesian spurns industry because he’s got no reason to value money. ‘If I hungry,’ says he, ‘I go pick me some, or catch me some. If I cold, I tell woman, “Weave!” ’ Idle hands, Mr. Ewing, & we both know what work the Devil finds for them. But by instilling in the slothful so-an’-sos a gentle craving for this harmless leaf, we give him an incentive to earn money, so he can buy his baccy—not liquor, mind, just baccy—from the Mission trading post. Ingenious, wouldn’t you say?” How could I disagree?
“Now, our Polynesian. The visitor to Tahiti, O-hawaii, or Bethlehem for that matter, will concur that the Pacific Islander may, with careful instruction, acquire the ‘A-B-C’ of literacy, numeracy & piety, thereby surpassing the Negroes to rival Asiatics in industriousness.” Henry interrupted to note that the Maori have risen to the “D-E-F” of mercantilism, diplomacy & colonialism.
“Surgeons are a singular brotherhood, Adam. To us, people aren’t sacred beings crafted in the Almighty’s image, no, people are joints of meat; diseased, leathery meat, yes, but meat ready for the skewer & the spit.” He mimicked my usual voice, very well. “ ‘But why me, Henry, are we not friends?’ Well, Adam, even friends are made of meat. ’Tis absurdly simple. I need money & in your trunk, I am told, is an entire estate, so I have killed you for it. Where is the mystery? ‘But, Henry, this is wicked!’ But, Adam, the world is wicked. Maoris prey on Moriori, Whites prey on darker-hued cousins,
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My reason informed me that Boerhaave could not be in heaven nor Autua in hell so we must be in Honolulu.
common rooms of the drafty youth hostels where airport thrillers went to compost. Once I started writing, I kind of envied their authors. How blissful, to snooze through the war on cliché. To forgo character development and ignore plot cracks the size of the San Andreas Fault.
