Chapter 2:
“In spring, when kings go to war”
SOURCE: Debrief/After Action Report, Scribe A.GIF
*
As below, so above. Heaven cares only slightly more for graduate students than most colleges and universities–so pretty-much-not-at-all.
But kill an A series, a divine canary in creation’s mine, before it’s time? And we have a problem. They don’t grind them up at the plant any more. Perhaps the machine performs exit interviews when one of us gets hit by a bus or does something rash? No one is weeping for the lost bureaucracy of heaven, but the machine doesn’t exactly explain itself.
We get our orders, that’s enough for a loyal being.
It doesn’t even proclaim. It just hums on, sorta kinda holding the new cosmology afloat. The whole thing was really about Cassius.
Explain.
He’s a known quantity, a tab to be kept, a stick pin on a cosmological map. When the Great Bifurcation happened Leviathan shit out Cassius, the machine found him quite quickly and imposed protocols–it cast him down to a random Earth and quarantined him there.
Because the system, our system, works. The machine can adapt to any circumstance precisely because it’s God’s.
I admire your faith, I really do. But god’s eye, or that of its proxy, was drawn away from Cassius and toward a blowed-up A series on another Earth.
Many Earths many eyes.
Because that’s not creepy. So Cassius is trapped on Earth(0x7DD), and all the sudden there’s a catastrophe elsewhere. Convenient.
That’s not how it happened/un-happened.
With respect, I was born with a heart and numbered days, I get causality and (admittedly thin) plot structure a little bit better than you all. So everyone is in position and ready to quarantine Cassius. Then all of the sudden chaos on an adjacent Earth.
The two Earths involved are not adjacent.
Yes they are. Your god’s capacity for omniscience is debatable and endlessly debated, but the machine’s attention span is limited, or at least that’s what he was betting on.
Heresy. Continue.
You know what St. Ignatius is. I know, Cassius knows, because Cassius knows all sorts of shit he’s not supposed to-and-is-known in all kinds of ways that aren’t allowed–in nightmares and Shakespeare plays. And you think the machine is going to let that thing fuck around with Ignatius? No. Cassius needed a distraction, a big one to escape. So he blew up Big Bird, well, one of them.
You’re calling God fallible, and if I heard you right, you don’t even believe that the author of all is God.
And you will likely use that as an excuse to preemptively discredit everything I’m going to tell you.
*
LOCATION: St. Ignatious; Southern North-Atlantic Ocean; FRAME: Earth (0x7DD)
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A British sailor in the age of tall ships gave the tiny group of islands, St. Ignatius the closest thing to an endearing nickname the place has ever had–preserved in a journal in his own flowing script. The Brit called the green ring of rock climbing out of ever-angry seas “the birdbath.” The man was days away from anything, homesick amidst the vast and (almost) empty Southern North-Atlantic. There, at the apogee of angst sits St. Ignatius– just over halfway between US and UK (depending on which side you leave from and when you go and how fast you’re going).
The Brit was a momma’s boy, and he saw home’s ghost on the horizon. The brilliant green of the island’s forested mountains and hills all ablaze in the sunrise or sunset. The temperate rain forest dripping with life, red rock and sun fire peeking through waving gaps in the foliage.
In that moment, he was two places at once: the Southern North-Atlantic and an English garden at the end of summer. Garden is overgrown, and mother’s singing to the plants while she musses his hair. It’s hot in the shade, that late summer way–evenly oppressive heat. Every time he tries to sleep, some leaf dips and the sun clips off the mottled copper of an old birdbath at the heart of all the growing things.
When he’s back aboard, his heart aches to know that string of islands, the place gleam-growing faster in his imagination than on the horizon.
When they arrive, the HMS Superfluous offloads men to fetch water. They seek to purchase provisions from the small port. When ashore, half the men were anxious to get to sea proper and half were eager to be on with it and home. The Brit? He was heartbroken. The island was fool’s gold, a siren-painted sunset or sunrise covered in bird shit and people covered in bird feathers. The Brit hated all he saw, called it a “shithole”. And indeed, the sailors of the HMS Superfluous could smell the bird shit while they were still a full day out.
Birdbath. Shithole. For some of us, we unhappy few, St. Ignatius is home.
*
FRAME: Earth (0x7DD), 2009, 1-March. AGB
Two of Lucretia’s fingers tap the table by an empty wine glass. “Should you be drinking?” from a tycoon down the table. He’s trying to express concern, as he has observed his staff and servants sometimes do for other humans. Lucretia (Cassius wearing her skin) silences him with a look.
“I understand that you’re…”
“Angry?” Lu’s face showing the irritated boredom that only the truly rich can muster–the kind that suggests they’ll have someone killed. “You understand nothing, Jefferson.” To the servant, “keep this glass full.”
They are somewhere semi-tropical or perhaps warm-wintered, an undisclosed location in the US or its territories. Lucretia (Cassius) is convalescing after surviving a horrendous terror attack on the Wicker Man festival. There were no terrorists. There was only the botched human sacrifice of Lucretia and subsequent “possession” by her ancestor Cassius.
Now, there is the gaggle, group, or perhaps cabal of tycoons. They’re on a Veranda bigger than most apartments that is attached to an obscene house on a private beach. The sky and sea are angry. These beings are business plotting the demise of a small nation at the hands of friendly (to them) nations and a host of Private Military Contractors (PMCs) they own. There’s a barely touched feast, one bound for the trash, on a table surrounded by billionaires. The wine and whiskey flow freely. A few are dice cultists, a few more at the table were present when Cassius arrived, cast down onto Earth(0x7DD). Only their outward appearance remains, their essence replaced by hench-demons–brimstone goons wearing their skins like cheap suits.
“My dear Jefferson, let us be very clear, this is an act of love.” And the brimstone goons and tycoons all golf clap and toast to that. “We are going to show St. Ignatius our love and undying commitment. We will embrace the Ignatians. And civilization, the whole process, will ‘take’ this time.” The fingers tap, more wine, the glass barely touched.
Lu’s body gestures to the LT. in the austere uniform of some PMC. He begins a demonstration of the sales pitch in-progress to publics and policy pushers the world over about how the tiny nation of St. Ignatius succumbed, how they came to hate a world that had repeatedly dragged them civilized. The El Tee with a degree in Pee-Arr, described how eco terrorists fed on the bird-worship of their ancestors had blamed global innovators and thought leaders for changing weather patterns and declining fisheries. He lamented the tragedy-of-history and Ignatians going full eco-terrorist–culminating with their horrific attack on the Wicker Man festival.
Even Jefferson, knowing full well the story was bullshit, found the case for war against the bird-worshipers of St. Ignatius quite compelling. “But where does our interest lie? Where’s the money to be made?”
Lu looks at the man like she wants to garrote him because, truly, Cassius wishes he could. “The real money is in rebuilding in the aftermath, always has been.” And Lu’s finger taps away at the table demanding more wine in her full glass.
*
FRAME: Earth(0x53), 28-29 NOVEMBER 2013, AGB.
*
“What do we know? Who is this guy, the victim?”
“Some graduate student no one gives a fuck about.” No one but the person who blew him up.
“It’s like Condor.” What? From the young fed trying not to look cold. “Operation Condor. Like this, but not at all. Way before your time. Pinochet’s people blew up someone living in exile. Here. Our soil.” She’s quiet for a long time. Ma’am, what are we doing? From the big muscled twenty something man, the one not built for cold. ‘Poor thing is freezing’ she thinks to herself, grinning.
She takes a long drag: “we’re letting the scene speak to us.” He nods, gravely. She chuckles, “dumb ass, you see the people behind us?” Hooks a thumb over a short shoulder, and he is all yes ma’am about the other cops, the locals, every fed agency. Then there’s the news vans, way back past the cordon. “We’re here to show them we are aware of the gravity of the situation, as our superiors have done for us. Part of that demonstration is this.” She gestures to the car and the charred corpse. “We have the privilege of seeing the scene after forensics but before things get trampled to shit.” Are we gonna “Approach the scene with a lit cigarette? Or at all? No, we’re going to stand here and look serious and thoughtful for exactly this long.” She puts the cig out on her shoe. Hands the butt to the younger man, “follow me.”
Mal’s badge shows whatever agency and rank it needs to to whomever challenges her on the way from crime scene to parking lot “command center.” No subterfuge or witchery, just technology (so both, actually). She’s federal and official, just works for an entity not known to the broader public (but on this Earth, charged with the oversite of all).
A Hoover, a Marshall, three locals and the Sherriff all shush and wait for the word when she enters the trailer. They turn down squawking radios and prepare to report. Whadda-we-got? “We’re thinking this is drug related.” It’s not. “Ma’am?” It’s not drug related.
She lights another cigarette. Ma’am you can’t… “I’m going to smoke in here. It’s not drug related, but you are going to run with that, and we’re going to make the spectacle go away quickly so that we” quick nod to each other Fed “can work quietly.”
And away we go.
*
FRAME: St. Ignatius; Earth (0x53)
*
Little chocolate chips, dollops, dark rock set on fire in the dusk and dawn–the effect most striking at some distance. Solder fillets floating on always angry ocean. Ancient lava rose, fell into the sea, we live on that largesse, that excess of rock that became soil, became forest. It is beautiful, in a hideous way.
St. Ignatius should be beautiful, but everything anybody does to the place just uglies us up worse.
There were indigenous Ignatians, but there’s not much written about them, except that they pre-date the Christian mission and the christening of the islands. There’s the storm-scoured half-burnt skeleton of a church on a lonely island in a patch of forest people leave alone. That’s all there is.
There’s an archeological site from when we were a staging pen for the enslavement and transatlantic trade of human beings.
There are overgrown failed farms and plantations, fruit and coffee that wouldn’t grow right in the odd weather–water to cold wind too warm (a recipe for fungi best not named).
There’s the husk of an electronics factory that up and fled not five years after they built the place. And if I’m grateful I learned to solder before the place up and left. Like every other gift to the Ignatians, it killed our birds (lead poisoning).
St. Ignatius is beautiful twice a day, and for a limited time. When the rocks light up. That’s literafiguratively, the light is fantastic, and the rocks themselves appear to glow, as if the mountains are composed of minerals and metals that simply are not present. If we had mineral wealth, it would be gone. If we had mineral wealth, the termite holes dug and re-dug in the mountains would have found it.
No, we have birds. There’s Puffins mainly, a sub-species unique to the island chain-larger and significantly more aggressive than their southern cousins. They are flightless, aggressive (did I mention that), unholy creatures that outsiders find adorable for reasons I cannot personally fathom.
No, we do not worship them, although my Nana (Baba), pampers her two little terrors like some westerner might a Pomeranian or some other little ankle-biter.
*
FRAME: Earth(0x53); LOCATION: Washington DC/Southern North-Atlantic, 15-MARCH-2009. AGB
*
“My fellow Americans,” began the man that marched down the long carpet, the red one signifying authority. At several points in the speech he brings a fist down sovereign, and the two Marine guards in the back look like they stepped from a monument and recruitment poster respectively and do themselves signify.
At the same time, to the East of Norfolk, somewhere on the water there goes a convoy. The gaggle of ships is long, and arrayed in a formation protective and cohesive. Most of the ships are privately owned and crewed, carrying drones and goons of a mercenary nature. The PMC ships are babysat and chaperoned by a few larger naval vessels. They are headed East, just about half way across and then some, to the Southern North-Atlantic. They are headed to do great harm to St. Ignatius. And away we go.
*
There was the Chinese auto factory, the Canadian winery, the off shore fish-farm and fish-oil plant. There was the eco-tourism, and I guess that stuck as a cottage industry. Rare is the person who wants to be chased through the jungle by hordes of tiny raptors.
Rats in the Pacific? They’re an invasive species nightmare, an ecological menace. The other side of the coin for cargo cults. They came on ships or planes and ate everything and fucked up life for anything that nested on the ground. Not here. The wild birds are mean enough to handle one of the worst invasive species on Earth.
*
Four P-51D Mustangs sat rusting to the side of a tarmac for the whole of, and long after, the first Cold War. They were a 1950’s surplus ‘gift’, along with the airfield and the capital that fed the failed plantations. They are history, complete with plaques in front of the weathered wrecks.
Drones, some fixed wing, some rotary floating flit over the airfield. They destroy our “air force”–the P-51 museum pieces (never flown) and a search and rescue helicopter and a few ultralights. They do so with laser precision and light guided munitions from the drones overhead, though this is not necessary. Everyone had the good sense to run at the sound of lawn mowers and the things filling the sky by the flock.
Then the little boats with the little erect mortar tubes come in to the symphony to shoot and chew up the runway with a creeping barrage pattern Every mortar chuffs like a firework and lands so much worse. But the sea is angry, the boats twist and sway, some mortars land on PMC troops taking to shore, some rip their own drones out of the sky. The sea is so angry it smashes two of the boats together with such force as to start a fire that spreads to a magazine. Poof. Magic. Two boats vanish.
The embedded reporters far back on the Navy boats hear from PMC PR people that the Ignations put up a fight for the beach and these are the first casualties, not of incompetence, but bird-worshiper aggression.
It goes like that: incompetence, or nature, or extreme bad luck down a helicopter or swamp a little landing craft full of goons. Other goons who only know the bullshit story of why they’ve come to the island get angrier and lob ever more destruction at the tiny islands where there is exactly no one to fight.
This happens to the remains of the factory. The primary school. The hospital, president’s house, and so on and so forth. A few ships, some country’s naval surplus bought at a song, sit in the harbor and blow up abandoned buildings and warehouses there.
The people watch in distanced horror. They look on from the little termite holes left by surveyors who swore there was gold/copper/nickle or whatever in them hills. They watch as all their worldly possessions, save for their beloved, wretched little pet puffins and whatever food they brought (food those vile creatures will certainly consume).
*
SOURCE: Debrief/After Action Report, Scribe A.GIF
*
You are quite focused on two Earths, no?
Yes.
You’re not going to let Cassius slip the net, yes?
No. He won’t.
Ok, so which of the two worlds was his target?
Both.
Think bigger. Say it with me: “All of them.”
*
“Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese,” on pizza mostly, with pepperoni and mushrooms. Brooklyn style, nice and thin. Don’t fuck with perfection.
The first night of the invasion, huddled up in boreholes that aspired to be mine shafts, the Ignatians tried to sleep. Those that did, surely dreamt of cheese. No creature that gives milk fares well there, but trade and colonization and all that brutal stuff leaves cuisine behind, and they fiend for cheese as much as any other group of humans.
Cassius dreamed of goat cheese. Big charred blob of it roasted over a fire. He dreamt of roast game eaten in tents tended to by servants and the wine of his age that was vastly superior. Cassius dreamt of all the comforts of home brought on the March. And while Cassius slept, Lucretia took a Lieutenant with a PR degree to bed–fully awake, aware, and in control of her own Earthly vessel.