*
“Searching for Friends”/”Peaches in Regalia”
*
ST. IGNATIUS
*
Off the coast, there is an aircraft carrier from another place in time and space: USS Enterprise (CVN-65). On it’s deck sits a 1990-something Ford sedan, itself a traveler across space and time. Below it’s deck, beneath the planes and the tools and the barber shop and the mess, there’s a cell in the brig with a “guest.”
A(84) sits, cross legged and floating above the cot in the cell in the brig on the Enterprise. Sunglasses hanging from the collar of his shirt, he runs a wet stone over his curved blade. Hums to himself. Smokes a joint, conjures a joint. Smokes. Then he smokes two more.
Admiral Granite and the annoying captain watch the man on a viewscreen in the CIC. “Anyone want to tell me why our guest has both a sword and a schedule 1 controlled substance in my brig?” Well, sir he was quite cooperative. “Good behavior is not a satisfactory explanation. Is this a goddamn United States naval vessel or a god-forsaken Beatnik commune? Don’t answer that.” The eager captain puts his head down. “Why does he have the weed and the weapon?” You see, any time anyone tries to take either from him, he just goes, well, ethereal. Sir. “Ethereal?” I guess non-corporeal is more accurate. He doesn’t resist or anything, your hand just passes through him. You could say he phases or ‘goes astral.’ “Yes, I get it.” There’s more sir. “Oh, I don’t doubt it. Inform me.” The ship’s ventilation system, for whatever reason, can’t handle the weed smoke. That whole section is hotboxed, it’s going to overwhelm the ship at some point. We’ve got the men in that section wearing gasmasks. “And?” Sir, this man’s weed is too dank and he keeps conjuring more. It’s only a matter of time until the whole ship is all high as fuck. Sir.
*
There is a small fixed wing drone frozen above Ira’s village. It’s got something like a go-cart engine. A drone, droning on like a flying box fan, little camera like one of god’s infinite eyes catching the light when the angle is right. Droning like a box fan slip-slow octaves too low. It’s annoying as fuck at first. It’s the smell of Puffin shit–sharp until you block it out. Then it’s white noise that VHS warble distorts with the wind. Over days, it becomes “Jolene” at 33 RPM and Ira opens the window at night expecting to hear it and wanting it to help lull them to sleep–at least at first.
Days to weeks to months before Lu’s strength comes back. Longer still till she’s walking, but they’ve got the time. Something’s wrong with Ignatius–off–more than the normal wrongness and off-ness of the Islands. They all see it hanging in the sky.
Ira and the younger villagers that run into town to scavenge, the burnt town, their town sometimes pass by the big city. They don’t dare go down where Cassius and the goons went–where the guards in riot gear reek of brimstone. Where everything moves fast–literally fast–until you adjust.
Stay home and wait it out–that’s what Gram-Gram would do. “That’s what we’ll do” spooning the “goood soooup” for Lu who’s sitting up and smiling a crooked smile. Lu, who has taken a few steps with help. Lu who, like everyone in the village but Ira, loves the Puffins. Oddly enough, though none of them could’ve imprinted on the recuperating stranger, the birds seemed to ‘love’ (in so much as the little beasts can) Lucretia.
*
Admiral Granite juts his chin as he’s done so many times in his career, furrows his brow to appear in thought but it feels like his brain furloughed out his ears. He’s afraid, though you wouldn’t know it to look at him. He’s not afraid of a dirt-hippy in a robe, but of of the weed smoke. The man is a lapsed Mormon. Shed everything but the tea-totaling. Never been high in his life. Needless to say, but let it be said anyway, he is not handling recent events very well (namely the timespace slippage of his ship). “Get me a gas mask, I’m going in. I want to talk to this man.”
*
Highway ‘i’ on the scorched plain at the End of Time is everywhere-nowhere. It’s one lonely road that goes where it needs to or is haphazardly rearranged by the flow of fractal chaos on the wind or the march of ash dunes across the Great Waste.
On some section of blacktop smooth, so smooth it follows the very contours of the plain as it writhes imperceptibly on Leviathan’s back, a convoy of Fed trucks rolls in perpetual motion–always mobile. Middle truck, mid-bench Mal does what she spent much of her mortal life doing: she assesses the situation and prepares her recommendation(s).
While Mal devours the Fed file on one Gaius Cassius Longinus, the Witch A(79) searches for him. Her illuminated vessel hovers in the back-back of the fed truck–quite corporeal. Her mind and being have zeroed in on Ignatius, and she flips through iterations of the island(s) like she’s shuffling through a deck of cards.
“How do we know this Shakespearian asshole is on this island?” The witch mumble-yells the reply over the chatter of the mobile command center: because I can’t see him anywhere else.
*
The brig of the USS Enterprise (CVN-65) is hotboxed, the whole of the brig. But the prisoner’s cell in particular: “It’s like the inside of a bong immediately after the degenerate druggie has lit his drugs.” Granite’s voice is muffled by the gas mask. There’s just the bars, blue thick steel, visible. Cot. Shitter. Sink. The tiny space completely hidden by roiling smoke. The admiral approaches, stands before the bars. “You in there?”
The smoke parts as if to answer, and the stoner levitates cross legged up and toward the cell door and eye-to-eye with the admiral. “I’m right here, man.” The worn bathrobe dangles off him. His vest is something like Kevlar. His sunglasses reflect the world dim and distorted and hide the sad-dog always-blood-shot eyes. He puffs weed smoke out his nose like a dragon, and the joint dances on his lip when he speaks. There’s always a spare spliff pinned behind either ear.
“Stop smoking marijuana on my ship.” No-can-do, bossman. It’s mission prep. “What mission?” Yours and mine. “I’m not in the mood for games, druggie.” No games. We’ve got a mission. No doubt you’ve noticed your jammed communications? “We have.” Woo-woo and fringe science source, but I promise you it’ll fuck a compass sideways. “Which means?” Use that fine looking destroyer and this hero ship set a mile or two apart to triangulate, then see where the compass points. “Where will it point?” The tower of Babel. But that’s not all. “Of course not, continue.” The admiral stifles a cough, the smoke’s creeping into his mask. The stoner intones: you have to have sent up drones? “We did.” So you know. “Most of them didn’t come home.” That’s because time is all fucked up. “Ah yes. Thank you for that expert assess” And that’s when the stoner’s hands leap up and snatch the admiral by the sides of his face.
“You let him go right the fuck now!” From the annoying and terrified Captain. A sailor tries to remove the stoner from the Admiral, they try to pull Granite back, but their hands pass through both. “Don’t you hurt him!” On repeat from the captain.
You see? “I do.” The stoner lets go. The Admiral, the teetotaler takes off his gas mask and breathes deep, reaches for a joint no longer ethereal. “So what’s that give us, a month to prepare?” Something like it.
“Captain, we have mission, a mission from god.” Sir? “Let our guest out” Sir? “You stuck on loop? I said release him, now.”
*
Earth (0x53): Overview of the 72 Hours War.
*
The United Nations, lead by the security counsel (typical members), responded to Cassius demand for surrender: “get fucked” (or depending on language and custom some reference to Cassius mother, parentage, breeding, etc.).
On the first day, all the military powers found the barely populated bird-shit covered islands that Cassius signal emanated from and lobbed missiles, so many missiles, at them. And some poor iteration of St. Ignatius burned and choked and was reduced to rubble. Ira and Lu and the villagers heard thunder all day and through the night. The ground shook and the horizon lit up like a storm. In Cassius Port Town, bomb blasts over the hills broke glass.
But all the big missiles and all the fast planes couldn’t find the right St. Ignatius to hit.
On the second day they fired up Babel’s tower, really cranked the amps past 11. Tower-Eiffel, Tesla coil, Edison abomination. The thing bristles with antennae. It is an electro-magnet. It is a woo-woo antenna. It is the littlest Caesar’s codpiece.
Missiles and more missiles. Lightning flicks off the tower drops them back from whence they were launched and on them that launched them. From the bristling antennas and off compromised satellites, Cassius live-streams his conquest of-them to-them.
On the third day, lighting flicks off the tower to bring a crushing wave of beige men and women, armed, from every other corner of the multiverse where Cassius has dice cultists to attack the people of Earth (0x53). Oh, they are such a small portion of the overall human population across the multiverse, and god’s machine (for all it’s faults) gets the distribution of assholes correct (or at least it used to). But the tower uses magnetism and something else to tunnel through–to allow Cassius’ followers to circumvent the machine’s eye and travel ‘sideways’ in the multiverse. And once congregated and congealed, they choke and conquer.
The last nation to formally and actively resist Cassius surrendered at closer to the 70 hour mark, but the almost-72-hour-war doesn’t roll off the tongue with as much ease. It was less a war and more a global hostage situation, but that’s not really breezy, it does not ship. No, it’s the 72 Hours War, and Cassius won. In less than three days, Cassius conquered all of Earth (0x53).
*
6,000 sailors on an aircraft carrier and few hundred more on the Occoquan are obscured beneath a weed cloud, a thing that rises like a prayer–burnt offering from the most-high to the most-high. It obscures the view of satellites and high flier drones. Around them, at sea level it is a several-square-mile patch of fog. Not unusual in the sea of oddities that surrounds every iteration of Ignatius.
It’s not clear to anyone involved, not even the illuminated-and-resurrected(again) A(84) which folded iteration of St. Ignatius they sit offshore of. The sunlight drips through the weed cloud, refracted-reflected and amplified. The ship is lit by honey-sunlight all the long-lit day, every day while they train.
Every sailor, even the annoying captain who remains protective-of-his-admiral and skeptical, trains. For a month, they greet the sun with dance, meditation, exercise. They do wake and bake and keep baking through the day, every day. They do all the normal tasks to maintain ship readiness atop their woo-woo training and general efforts to increase metaphysical awareness. When the training is complete a month later, each and every one of the 6,000-plus-odd sailors is “all they can be”, as close to jed-eye-as-crash-course-can-make. Each and every one of them capable of killing a goat with a glance.
The final week of preparation, the horizon of “need-to-know” necessarily grows and before the rumor mill can fill the vacuum, the admiral addresses the ship from the CIC: Whatever force is jamming GPS and communications is in practical terms a great magnet tugging compasses off course: Babel’s tower. In woo-woo terms, the tower is also a great magnet, pulling ourselves and our stars off course and carving new fault lines and failures across the firmament. We, being an aircraft carrier, will launch aircraft that will eliminate the source of the jamming and the threat to ourselves and some iteration of Earth.
3 pilots and one illuminated being: A(84). One “wild weasel”–a 1990-something-Ford-sedan–guiding three F-18’s. Every frozen drone, their own or Cassius or the forces that tried to map and attack Port Town in the 72 hours war hangs in the air or crawls (depending on the pace and vector of time at its place). They sit like buoy’s on the sea, slalom hills to skirt. When the planes (and the Ford) leave the deck, they’ll follow a course only the schnoz can perceive.
*
ST. IGNATIUS–PORT TOWN (THE BIG ONE)
*
The brief and terrifying reign of Cassius was just that: brief but terrifying. Historians of the island in the academy and island historians (various Gram-Grams) cannot agree on how long Cassius reigned.
Oral histories and various after-action accounts of day-to-day life on Ignatius do contradict and confound. A single shift at a job across town might last a whole week. Workers would return from toiling 40 hours in a day to find they had 4 no-call-no-shows. A PMC soldier/cop smacking someone on he street to “make an example” (common in those days) might take hours–a quarter of a day spent watching the truncheon inch glacier-slow toward your nose. Days waiting in line for basic necessities, not just because of the common shortages, but because time itself writhed and expand-contracted along the very line one waited in.
And everywhere in the town the “quality of life policing” by the new and meaner goons–Cassius demons wearing human faces. They shrugged off the time dilation-distortion-compression and “broken windows” policed the town with a vigor so that those living at the tops and tippy-tops of concrete and glass blocks could feel safe again–even as time and space quaked and reality shivered all around them.
Port Town (the big one) is a a geographic ‘toilet-bowl’ around a sheltered-but-stagnant natural harbor. We’re talking an area no larger than the island of Manhattan–a city whose favela districts look like they’re clawing their way up the hills that surround it. And in that tiny space, gyres and dust-devils, time storms raved and ravaged-froze and fast-forwarded the town seemingly at random–the chaos driven by Babel’s tower and the meter-by-meter machine that powered it.
There on the highest hill, little-lesser-codpiece anti-aircraft guns flanking it, stands Babel’s tower. The thing itself glows, red hot. It’s the profane opposite of the Cristo Redentor. Whatever woo-woo let’s it communicate and transfer matter across the multiverse creates time and space turbulence locally. The thing is hell on non-shielded electronics.
But that’s fine by Cassius and the goons. Fried cell phones and body cams can’t capture their innovations in policing/’social cleansing’–an act that satisfies their sadism and calms the people in Port Town’s penthouses.
They were rattled, the rich. The sound of all the world’s, all of Earth(0x53)’s ordinance flying overhead and failing outside of town in the 72 hours war, the profane glow of Babel’s tower, and the knowledge that poor people lived and breathed below them in Port Town. All of these things had made them afraid. They weren’t Cassius constituents, for he had none. Rather, they were his audience. And if he didn’t care much for their actual safety or need (he didn’t), he cared greatly that they remained a receptive audience capable of awe at his greatness.
*
Offshore-and-elsewhere the Enterprise launches 3 Hornets in turn. This happens three times: twin engines yawn, belch primal flame with engineered precision as the catapult pushes the plane into the air. Each aircraft waits for the rest of the flight–the group of four.
The Ford, with the smallest gas tank. is the last to launch. sits with a welded rig add-on resting on the catapult. There are weapons tack weld/wired/bungied to the vehicle. On the roof is a laser designator, beacon, disco-ball-to-guide-death. Arrayed across the hood are dazzlers, jammers, antennae, tin-foil-and-coat-hanger shapes that came to sailors in their dreams–everything needed to befuddle air-defenses and guide in friendly missiles.
The driver adjusts his safety belt, checks the wipers. ‘Check Engine’ light comes on “We good on pre-flight?” He flicks the glass in front of the console, doesn’t answer the radio. “Wraith 1, are you clear pre-flight?” A(84) pounds the top of the dash with his fist, the light goes out. “Wraith 1, We are good.” He lights a joint and leans back into his seat bracing. Zappa blairs. “Let’s go.”
The force of the catapult surprises A(84), pulls the cherry right off his joint. Down his chest and into his lap it goes as the 1990-something Ford nose dives the fuck off an aircraft carrier because it has the aerodynamics of a Ford and not a flying machine. Every set of ass cheeks watching clinches for a slow-mo-century long moment as every observer is pretty sure they just (high as fuck) catapulted a man to his death.
There’s a sort of waiting-for-the-splash anxiety on a flight deck. A few shouts: “Shit.” “Oh fuck.” “Did we?”
The sound of the engine then the thing itself: the silver 1990-something Ford sedan climbs, nose up and doors open like the Hornets with their flaps down. The other planes come down from where they were circling lazy and the flight of four heads off toward St. Ignatius in trail formation. As the Ford passes the Enterprise, the driver wags his “wings” (open passenger doors) spilling ever more weed smoke. There are cheers on the flight deck, but he can’t hear them over the Zappa in the car’s cockpit. A(84) pushes the pedal past the floor. Acceleration presses him deep into the seat. The car doors slam shut secure.
*
Lu walks the village twice a day, in the morning and night. She walks the tiny town, it’s one “road” a circular path around a common orchard–a dozen fruit and nut trees (all local species). The cane keeps her steady, the Puffins that adore her most keep her company and flock like pik-creatures. She sings to them, tossing fodder to crowds of them. Her voice is sweet. The smell of bird shit and their squawking as they try to peck each other to death in competition for Lu’s food and attention is the bitter note.
It’s been 6 months in village time. And there is this eye of the storm domesticity that Ira’s never had (but loves) and Lu’s life is simple and she loves that. Before, money made it simple, yes. But sympathy for the nepo-baby devil (if only for a moment). She’s the figuralitertive, the figurative and literal, daughter of Faust–and she was sold off in the fine print before she was even born. In the before-life Lucretia knew leisure, and she knew the suffocating responsibility of living as a potential sacrifice. Here, she’s known life, and it’s been beautiful and boring in equal measure.
The portion of her, Lu, that lived to crawl off the literafigurative altar was happy to be alive. Happy to be a person cared for and in turn to care for others–the flock of adorable little vicious hell birds and the big woman with the scarred ankles.
And through it all, 6 months, the drone above droned on. It was mostly white noise. But every once in a while, every time (and more and more often) Ira woke in the night reaching for the cricket bat with her strong arm and covering Lu with the other, that’s when the drone wasn’t white noise. The drone was something coming, some thing her half-conscious brain felt over a horizon as bible-black as the dead of night.
It happened like this: one morning, the sunrise ember-red and about to be, they heard the roar of thunder and saw a false sun over the horizon, from the direction of Port Town (the big one). Later that day, they saw the source fly by quite briskly: a Ford and 3 planes, armed to the teeth and contour flying so low the villagers could hear CCR on the car radio.
After and out of order, when the whole village was taking it’s mid-day meal and before the customary nap in the common orchard, the PMC goons that deserted show up–shooting into the air and demanding people gather in the square-that’s-not-square.
They would later/previously fled/flee the chaos in Port Town and accidentally stumble-fuck back to the village. “Everybody out now!” And they drag, coerce, threaten the village out. They’re tired and angry and scared and want some sort of payoff for getting shot at (almost entirely by their own but shot at none the less).
That’s when the LT with the PR degree realizes the woman with the cane is Lucretia–the one who bought their services and brought them here.
They stand at the edge of the orchard. Six armed men in dirty fatigues pointing rifles at a few dozen villagers with their hands up. The LT starts talking about what he’s done with and will do to Lu, and Ira can’t hear much over the blood pounding in her ears and getting louder. LT’s knife-smile. He shifts his rifle, holds it like an erect cod-piece in the crook of his elbow. Ira relies on lip-reading by the time he says the words “a little fun.”
She charges. Ira charges the LT with the PR degree, her shoulder catches him in the sternum. She runs through him. Lifts. Plows him into the ground. His rifle skitters off. Lu’s Puffins squawk and froth and rage and join the fight, and so do some of the villagers. The goons are befuddled for a moment. Their effort is mighty, but the birds are tiny. Ignatians are not fighters (Ira is a special case).
It only took one punch to push his nose back into his brain. The next few were catharsis. She could have beaten him for days and not had enough. The snap of the bullet that passes some fraction of a fraction and shaves a hair off her neck brings her back. Another shot from the goon. Ira winces. “Fuck you! God damnit.” From the other goon, the friend he hit. His third shot hits nothing.
Ira’s off into the trees carrying Lu in her arms. She’s running like a gazelle, loping long-legged and using the orchard for cover. She’s reacting. The only portion-of-a-thought demands she shield Lu with the trees and her body, that she get away–get anywhere else.
The bark explodes around her as the goons, enraged at losing yet another man, and eager to hurt the one they blame for the thing they chose–they chase.
Outside the village and into the woods the goons chase and shoot. Ira zig zags through the trees along the path-that-is-no-path. She runs until her heart threatens to beat through the door. She runs until her throat is sand paper. She runs until her arms feel as if they’ll rust in place holding Lucretia.
When they come to the clearing and the clover, it’s the smell of menthol that overwhelms. Ira has to stop, and gently drops Lu. “I gotta. We. I can’t.” It’s ok. You don’t have to. We probably lost them. “I gotta. I gotta catch my breath.” But the big woman can’t, and oh god baby you’re shot. We gotta get pressure.
And that’s what the goons find when they walk into the clearing: the small woman pressing her hand and the ripped off sleeve of her shirt to a bullet wound on the bigger woman. Lower abdomen, that place where movie heroes take it and walk away and real people die. The birds. The birds who love blood arrayed around the woman who weeps and repeats “baby, wake up. Come on now.”
“Stand up.” From the fifth goon, the one shot by his comrade, the limping self-appointed leader. “I said stand up.” He shoots into the air. Lu takes no notice, she’s slapping Ira’s face and begging her to speak.
“You brought us to this shithole for some big important? What, nothing?” Lu’s laying across Ira body sobbing. “So stand up and pay for your fuck up. Get the fuck up and, like your girlfriend, get what’s coming to you.”
Lu hears the man ready his rifle. She looks up, meets the gaze of a puffin, snot hanging off her nose, half blind and still ugly crying. She reaches out and touches the bird’s beak “Get them.”
The birds are no bigger, but they seem suddenly-actually-instantly quite stronger. Their beaks are already like razors. They are already quite quick. And in the defense of a woman that they are inexplicably loyal to? They are deadly.
“Get them.” And indeed, the goons get got. The last goon alive is half sitting up, pinned to the tree where the Puffins caught him. The last thing the last goon alive sees: the door of the half burnt chapel back lit. Two women. Two silhouettes equal and opposite in all things backlit, one tall like Ira and the other in a flowing dress or robes, in the chapel’s doorway. The women walk in, close the door. They do not invite him. The dark takes him.
*
Ford and hornets in flight curling gliding along the geometry sublime. Fighter pilots are in good physical shape. A(84) is a born-mortal string bean continually reminded by G-forces that more-than-mortality does not make the body ache less or compensate for lack of physical conditioning.
The flight of four, the Ford and the F-18’s execute an overcomplicated and air-frame stressing maneuver at the South end of port town. Inverted climb-the crest of the hill that’s the southern end of the toilet-bowl port–then dive and disperse and end right side up and dancing for the AAA. Open ocean to the west. Forested hills leading to a cloud-topped mountain east. Babel’s tower dead ahead.
The air defenses open up. Old. Slow. Cheap Cold War surplus and mostly-Soviet. A cloud of missiles explodes over the harbor while the Hornets follow the thoroughfares and use the tops of skyscrapers for cover. Every window in every building shakes itself broken, glass falling at varying rates of speed.
Above, the Ford draws fire and dazzles radar. Tracers flit toward the firmament as A(84) ducks and weaves. Every muscle is taught whipcord. Every joint screams out its betrayal as the force of gravity multiplies his weight. “Fuuuuck me.” Then there is the fresh fear with every resurrection. The creature fear, animal base-of-brain in nature, that is the “new car smell” of a new body. He hasn’t felt it in forever past forever.
A missile, an old Soviet thing like the one that got Gary Powers, telephone pole big has him zeroed. And the thing’s to0 old to dazzle with the techno-shit welded to the car. And this is how I finally die? A lucky shot, non-zero event lucky shot, from some shmuck playing pong on a a piece of Cold War tin.
*
AFTER ACTION REPORT A.GIF
*
Why are you obsessed with A(84)?
I wouldn’t say obsessed.
You’ve chronicled his path for over 13 billion years. You’ve written volumes on the born-mortal. In the forward to Exile you say “you love and hate” your subject “in equal measure.” We judge this the language of obsession.
Fine, let’s take the love. He pulled me from the refuse pit and got me high. I wouldn’t have had a whatever this life is without that.
And the hate?
It should have been me.
Elaborate.
We’re the same thing made of the same stuff. We made the same choice: to end our lives. The only difference is the luck that makes a supernatural being decide to save you? Why in the fuck does he deserve that?
It rains on the just and …
Fuck off. *cross-talk* Fuck off.
…alike.
*
It’s nothing substantive of life but the desire for revenge against the last one that killed him. That’s what flashes before A(84)’s eyes in this moment he is certain he will die. He smells the strong smell of Tardigrade piss. He feels the rubber band pull taught and as time snaps back to relatively normal speed, he accepts perhaps this is the meaning of every snide-ass quip about “bro don’t go looking for vengeance or you’re gonna die.” Heraclitus or some shit.
The missile, the one in a million shot pierces the windshield on the passenger side, and arrow straight keeps going. The occupant is quite singed by the exhaust but alive when the thing explodes far behind. It adds to the metal rain storm, the frozen cloud of shrapnel suspended over Ignatius.
A(84) climbs over twists and dives on the tower. “Now!” to the Hornets that nose-up. Their missiles fly on following the Ford while the planes skitter away. The man with the schnoz can see tracers tracking toward him. He can perceive the turrets that hold missiles on platters like a waiters hand following him. He unbuckles and falls up from the Ford’s death-dive.
Anti-aircraft shreds the Ford, but the Hornets’ missiles follow the cloud of hot aluminum steel and aluminum on in. All missiles find their mark. Babel’s tower groans and falls. And some slow motion shockwave, days-slow, does emanate and radiate from it’s base. The bass sound of thunder, like the basement below the lowest notes on the pipe-organ with the greatest pipes you’ve never heard rattles the town–the sound will hang in and below the air for days and will drive many mad.
*
Highway ‘i’ EOT. The mobile command center is just that: mobile and roaring down a highway over packed ash–nowhere to nowhere.
“Our timing has to be perfect.” Timing for what? Mal, the newest G-being is high-as-balls by her own admission and unsure what their intervention or plan of action is meant to be (or to accomplish).
“We’re going to snatch Cassius” The man responsible for the whole shit-sandwich? “Correct” Count me in.
3 Fed trucks become five and seven. Each new truck has G-beings gripping its roof, standing on the runners. Gaunt and awkward but serious-business looking in mortal proportioned body armor.
Up ahead, there’s an exit from nowhere to somewhere. The lead truck takes a smooth right and accelerates into the turn. Lightning. The sound of bearings on polished wood.
*
Observation of a thing or a system affects outcomes. It’s one of the cool-weird elegant things about the universe. Elegant is just a fancy word for simple. It’s “basic” with a suit and tie or dress (or both/either). But I like the word “elegant”, and it’s fun to say with your chin or your nose high in the air. Connotation is queen or king or drag queen/king–it’s that meaning that’s not in the dictionary. It’s the vibe, it’s what sticks to the word in use/performance/abuse/misuse and adaptation.
So, elegance? It’s beautiful and profound simplicity. It’s the sublime. What’s elegant is that a Witch’s observation of the Red Star influenced it’s orbit. A(79) sat with her shnoz wedged against the eyepiece of a garage-sale telescope, observing. The Witch sat in a tree for aeons watching a Red Star in a decaying orbit that never decayed at the edge of what we call existence, and at that distance her mark-one-eyeball, mortal born, changed what it beheld.
Stare into the void and it stares back; stare at the Red Star–last of the Locusts–and it stares back.
In practical-magic terms: some portion of that last Locust was Lilith, and that portion perhaps feared the only being in all of the long history of histories that had almost killed her. Some portion of the last Locust, small in relative terms but not insignificant, was Dez. Dez the picky eater. Dez the benign and benevolent and naively-and-gloriously-optimistic-about-humanity child.
At the end of all this (it never fucking ends) there will be blame to assign. And if you believe Woland’s propaganda? It’s A(79)’s fault for abandoning a watch she was never obliged to take up in the first place. That’s what brought the last locust. If you believe the bullshit spouted by A(48) “the Betrayer” (a conspicuously named man suspected of being the Nain Rouge, so if you ask me his credibility is nil) A(84)’s attack on the tower is what magnetized it and drew the Red Star in. Because the Locust sensed the witch’s eye on it, when she aimed her shnoz away, it sensed it was free to finally-free to act. And because 84 added so much ordinance-gas to the fire at the tower, it burned everything–honest-to-god everything down.
If your breath stinks of brimstone and bullshit you might also blame Leviathan, (both of her) that bears the burden-atlas and carries the twin firmament on her back(s). She’s supposed to consume anything that would threaten the garden–her pond.
But if you know–you know. And if you know you know long long ago, like before-the-Hebrew-Bible long ago, there was a man named Job and god and their companion in a traffic jam. Then there’s and an argument and a bad bet. The story of Job ended the relationship; the story of Job ended with the devil (whomever played the role) obliged to demand that every mortal being be tested as Job was-every single one.
If you know you know that there’s not one Abraham and one Isaac but many along many-and-any-old axes in time and space and many altars. And in front of these altars and ready to put their children on them are so many ‘good’ people. They are perfectly pleasant and smiling and right-thinking and upstanding, practical, frugal and patriotic people. Clean people. Pure people. “Good” people in their minds and utterly terrifying to their Isaacs.
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END CASSIUS AND THE WITCH 5