’Neath Quicksilver’s Moon by Jaye Michael
Chapter Twenty-Two ― Moon of My Delight

 

¿Hasta cuándo, oh simples, amarán la simpleza, Y los burladores se deleitarán en hacer burla, Y los necios aborrecerán el conocimiento?

— Proverbios 1:22

How long, O simpletons, will you love being simple-minded, and you tricksters delight in trickery, and you fools hate the truth?

— Proverbs 1:22

 

 

Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits -- and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. Verse 73.

 

 

World Senator Jaime Ortíz was in an expansive mood as he stood looking out over the reflecting pond outside his office overlooking the World Senate compound in New Washington. The World Senate Building was within walking distance, although he often saved time by taking the underground tramway direct to the Senate antechambers through tunnels deep below the surface. The reflection of the Senate dome was mirrored in the pool, so it looked, he thought, vaguely similar to some of the vids he’d seen of the Quicksilver night sky, except that the dome and its mirrored image were constantly changing, as the holographic threedee displays which formed a seamless mosaic over its surface showed an endless series of live views of the many places inhabited by Man. There was the unmistakable skyline of Nueva Bolívar in the Antarctic Archipelago, and now Moskva, then Brasília, and then, fittingly, an image of Quicksilver itself, among the newest outposts of Mankind, quickly transitioning to yet another habitation of humanity, one after another. He turned to the Captain of his security forces — and personal friend — Jorge Chunco and said, “So, Jorge, has our wandering boy slipped the surly bonds of Earth and flown away?”

“Of course, Jaime. You know I rarely fail at any task I set myself. He was at the spaceport at least half an hour before your scoutship was scheduled to depart, and only a little the worse for wear and lack of sleep. I sold him your horses, on your behalf, because he needed a bride gift.”

The World Senator whooped with delight. “You rascal, playing matchmaker at your age.”

“Not matchmaker, exactly — their match was made in Heaven, I believe — but rather a facilitator, if you will, to set him on the proper path toward a lasting marriage with a proud woman like Barbara Big Horse. I couldn’t let him arrive empty-handed — other than the mere credits in his bank account — so listened to my own heart and soul to incline him to imagine what Barbara would feel flattered by, offering him the benefit of my own experience, as a father might do for his son. This is Jack’s first real relationship with a woman, and it’s important to put one’s best foot forward in these matters.”

“He can’t have been such a novice!” the Senator exclaimed. “He’s a man of fortitude and courage.”

“Not where women are concerned, Jaime. His own father died when he was quite young, so he had no masculine example of courtship and marriage to draw upon. He’s been very close to his sisters and his mother, but these have been the only significant women in his life.”

“Well, that seems just, then. I approve.” He nodded his benediction.

“As it turned out, he didn’t need much more than encouragement. Although I suggested that he arrive with a gift to place in her hands, what he chose to give was truly inspired, and spoke directly to his appreciation of her heritage, and her woman’s soul. He will do well, I’m sure, and he has a marvelous singing voice, which is always beneficial.”

“¡Ay, Jorge! ¡Que huevos, cabrón!” said the Senator admiringly.

“One does what one can,” Jorge said modestly. “I suggested an appropriate song, took him to a local cantina to hear it sung as it should be, then transferred an example sung by a professional signer to his communicator, plus an instrumental version for practice, and told him to practice on the way. I managed to find a local group of musicians to meet him at the spaceport as well. All in all, it was a good night’s work. I don’t doubt that the Honorable Governor may be wearing her skirts a little higher in the near future.” He grinned in a moderately suggestive manner, waggling his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

“He sang well, then?”

“Like an angel, as I said, dead on pitch, his timing is perfect, and his phrasing is filled with nuance and emotion. If he didn’t already have a job, he could make his living at it.” Jorge shrugged in an almost Gallic manner.

The Senator furrowed his brow. “It’s a puzzle, then, why he didn’t sing to begin with. Such talent usually springs from a natural source, and cannot be denied.”

“I suspect the trauma of his father’s death — murdered, as I understand it, before his very eyes — might have something to do with it. His father was a policeman, and Jack’s essential focus has been on replacing his father in the only way he could, by becoming the heroic cop he imagined his father was, and of course his father died defending his family against a street thug during the Food Riots twenty years back, so he has good reason to believe that, although I’m told he has no direct memory of it. Repressed memory syndrome, I imagine.”

Now the Senator’s face lost its good humor for a moment as unpleasant memories of his own past rose to the surface. “Perhaps. Some things are better left forgotten, I think. All of our experiences, both good and bad, make up the sum of who we are, but it’s not necessary, strictly speaking, to know exactly how one’s pancreas works in order to lead a good life.” The Senator considered the question briefly, and then dismissed the issue from his mind. “How are the prosecutions of the Sarantapechaina/Tsukasa cartel going?”

“With the usual delays, Patrón.” Jorge slipped smoothly from friend to employee. “Their lawyers are claiming entrapment, visitations from angels, unfortunate alignments of the stars, and whatever other quasi-legal excuses for vicious greed and animosity they can think of. The Senator Sarantapechaina may escape consequences, since her constituency is relatively complacent, but the fact that she ordered the attacks on Luz Calderón on might weigh heavily against her, even in Greece and the Balkans. She’s also managed to generate a vociferous set of urbopolitan enemies, from environmentalists — who are angered by her arrogant coóption of the public water purity and flood-control system as her private ‘back door,’ — to religious fundamentalists — who are equally offended by her posing as a man ‘in contravention of Divine Law’ — and both groups are loudly spreading it about that only the guilty make plans for their escape. Even courts martial pay some attention to politics, since all military funding depends upon political maneuvering.”

“Well, no matter.” the Senator said. “Either or both of the Senatorial players will eventually turn upon the other in mutual back-stabbing, so their political power is dead, even if they manage to squeak out of the legal charges. I’m done.” He turned to his keypad and started to work on something.

Captain Jorge Churco walked out of the room without another word, familiar with his friend’s mercurial moods, and with his limited tolerance of ‘distractions’ from whatever schemes he had next in hand.

To say that the Tsukasa Yakuza was in disarray would be gross understatement. The military arrest of their Oyabun, and the public attention drawn to the fact that the head of a criminal gang was the World Senator representing the Kingdom of Japan was profoundly embarrassing, despite having been an open secret — that no one talked about — for many years. Other ‘chivalrous organizations’ were already beginning to ‘muscle in’ on some of their most profitable enterprises, and subtle hints had been let slip that only the ritual seppuku of the Oyabun himself could restore the family honor.

The Oyabun and World Senator Tamotsu Tsukasa was not so inclined, which did little to increase his standing, either among his enemies or the members of his gang, since he had himself often imposed yubitsume, the ritual cutting off of portions of one’s own fingers, as punishment for infractions against the honor of the organization, despite his claim that his strict incarceration made it impossible to obtain the necessary tantō, a Samurai’s short sword or dirk, much less the kaishakunin — ‘second’ — required to perform the final — and merciful — beheading.

Only a week into his imprisonment, his underlings demonstrated the untruth of his claims by smuggling in the very implements and final executioner required and performing the service for him, despite his cowardly cries for help from the guards, who had all been called away on important business by separate messengers.

Unfortunately, through lack of practice, and hampered by the frantic struggles of the Senator himself, the kaishakunin untidily separated the Oyabun’s head completely from his body, which was widely seen as a bad omen, and so the ‘honorable’ Senator’s death did little to stop the gang’s rapid decline, despite having conveniently removed a source of great embarrassment to the Japanese Imperial family and the current Emperor.

Hisashi Yamaguchi, erstwhile assassin, current prisoner, was sitting quietly in his cell, untroubled by events outside the durasteel walls of his circumscribed world. His conscience was clear and untroubled by his actions, since it was only his failures that shamed him, and these troubled him greatly. Anaïs Foucault and her children were not an issue, since they had only been targets of opportunity, a necessary distraction intended to draw out both O’Hare and Webster, but his plan had failed for some entirely inexplicable reason. He’d been well back from the action when a threedee camera had somehow picked him out from a crowd of at least two thousand onlookers and in an instant he’d been catapulted from the unobtrusive anonymity he cultivated into the glaring spotlight of the news vids, where he’d seen his own face staring back at him in sufficient clarity that he’d known that attempting flight across borders to Japan would be useless.

The failed attempt to kill Jack Webster had been an attempt to quickly salvage some semblance of his mission objectives, but Webster must have been waiting for him, because he hadn’t been sleeping, as his instruments had indicated, but was calmly waiting by the side of the door, well prepared with some sort of powerful striking weapon, perhaps a short bō, and had possibly employed Kuji-kiri, some powerful combination of the legendary ‘nine characters’ and mudrās used to immobilize or slow an opponent, which implied that Webster was himself a Ninjutsu or other Budō Master greater than had been seen in a century or more.

That interested him. If he could escape, if he could find and defeat this so-called Jack Webster, it would salvage his reputation, perhaps even if he lost. It would be no shame to fall before a spiritual Master of such power, and even the attempt would demonstrate his courage and devotion to duty. He saw now that it was O’Hare who was the pawn, O’Hare who should have been his first target, since the Yamabushi Webster had obviously felt so secure in his own person that he had no need of bodyguards or access-controlled enclosures.

He stood, and faced toward his home in Japan, focusing on the family shrine there, bowed deeply two times, clapped his hands twice, and then prayed silently for guidance: ‘With all the respect from the depth of my heart I ask that the gods hear me, especially the spirits of the Sky and the Land. I pray in humility, and with great respect, for the spirits of Creation to take hold of the many evils which surround me, to take hold of my own failures and sins, and purify them all.’ Then, he bowed deeply twice again and returned to his former seat on the edge of his sleeping pallet, patiently waiting for something to change.

Ten days after their last meeting, Jorge Churco, Senator Ortíz, Maria Ortíz-Berkowitz, his wife, Celestina Churco de Alvarez, Jorge’s wife, Alanna Ortíz, the Senator’s daughter, and Adela Maria and Carmen Jacinta Churco, Jorge’s daughters, were sitting before a threedee wall in the Senator’s residence. When they were all comfortable, the Senator thumbed the control to start the show.

Evidently, either Barbara or the Mariachi band had brought along a camera crew, because they saw the scoutship land on what must be Quicksilver, because almost everyone in all the human worlds at least, had seen the Quicksilver Spaceport many, many, times, either in the original shows or the dubs in translation.

As they watched, Jack Webster exited the hatch and climbed down to the ground carrying a small duffle bag while, one after another, a dozen men followed close on his heels, grinning and nudging each other like freshman college students on holiday.

Not surprisingly, the production values were superb, and Jaime made a note to ask Barbara if she’d allow the production company to syndicate it. She already had a following of many fans around the world, and advertisers would clamor to sponsor a special featuring her wedding to the man who’d traveled across space to consummate their long-distance love affair.

Jack was, as Jorge had claimed, a natural vocalist, and all he needed was a charro outfit to match the rest of the mariachi band to fit right in. He made another note to dispatch a request for one to be fitted and sewn on Quicksilver. He was especially impressive on the huasteca sections, in which his falsetto voice sounded as rich and pure as most altos. ¡Carajo! They could make a fortune from the recording contracts alone, and with the tie-ins to the shows, he could become a franchise of his own.

The entire vid was only thirty minutes, from landing to the final shot of the wedding party sloping off toward town, so they might need a few more shots to establish the marriage, but Barbara had already mentioned that. He made another note to see what he could have done to expedite the passage of Jack’s immediate family to Quicksilver, and to secure screen tests for each before they left, so they could see whether it might be worthwhile to send a camera crew along to capture the voyage for publicity. Jack’s trip out could be faked, of course, since he was due to come back and report on his findings.

After the lights came up, his darling wife went out to the kitchen and brought in a tray of fruit.

“And now, children, honored guests, we have a special treat, the very first shipment of fresh fruit from Quicksilver, so you all can taste the exact same fruits Luz Calderōn talks about on her threedee shows.” She set the tray down on the table in front of the largest divan.

The children reached first, of course.

Alanna picked something that looked something like a purple peach and sliced off a segment. “¡Madre de Dios! It’s delicious. Mamacita! You have to try this! It’s like a combination of mango and passionfruit!” She sliced off another segment and handed it to Maria.

She took a bite, and said, “You’re right, Alanna. It’s wonderful. Offer pieces to our guests, dear. We have a large number of different kinds, and I’m afraid we won’t be able to sample everything if we take too much of one fruit in particular.”

The girls quickly took upon themselves the task of serving up mixed portions, handing each of their parents a dish of mixed fruit and then settling back in their seats with their own.

Jorge tried several pieces, one after the other, before he said, “The Goddesses and Gods on Mount Olympus would barter ambrosia for a taste of these, all different, all separately wonderful, and yet never cloying. They have just the right trace of tartness to offset the sweet, and yet the individual fruits have a unique and desirable flavor of their own. Jaime, I believe you could pay the entire cost of your running your spaceliners through devoting a bit of cargo space to these. Do you have any idea how well they keep?”

“I don’t,” he admitted. “I’ll have to ask Barbara or Luz. In the long run, it doesn’t matter, because I could always devote a scoutship or two to the trade. I have to admit that my first thought was that I could raise the cost of a ticket to Quicksilver as soon as these reach the fresh produce stores, but that was merely capitalist greed speaking. No, my ultimate intention is to push Mankind out into the Galaxy, and even beyond as new sciences make it possible. I need to run the liners at a profit, but not so much profit as to strangle innovation and emigration.”

His wife pursed her lips slightly and said, “Jaime, if you don’t stop talking about business during a social gathering I’m going to have to send you off to a finishing academy to teach you better manners!”

“I’m sorry, dear. You’re right, of course. I apologize to you all.”

Jorge added, “I apologize as well, Señora; it was entirely my fault, because I mentioned the business end of things to start with.”

“But you’re our guest, Jorge, and not within the reach of my sharp tongue.” She smiled to show her general good will.

“None-the-less, Señora, I know Jaime well, since we were boys together, running wild on the streets of Ciudad Juárez. His brain never stops working.”

She rolled her eyes toward Heaven. “No need to remind me, Jorge, and I admire that brain of his quite a bit; but it does drive me crazy at times.”

“Señora, you needn’t remind me.” He rolled his own eyes skyward. “Even as we were running for our lives as boys, being chased by street gangs with knives and guns, the Rurales, or the Federal Police, he’d be talking to me about his next plans for making money so we could eat, a different scheme for escaping our pursuers, or a new hiding place where we might safely spend the night. If it had been a dragon chasing us, flying through the air on bat wings and breathing fire, he would have been calculating how many yards of dragon leather it would take to buy us a bicycle.”

Jorge said, out of the blue, “Only thirty-five yards, at my projected value of dragon leather at the time, and it would have been two bikes, compadre, as you well know.”

Jorge smiled. “Yes, Jaime, I know it well.”

Jaime winked at him with just half of a smile. Then he settled back on the divan, put his arm around his daughter Alanna, and said to her, and to her young friends, “Alanna, Adelita, Carmen, dear friends all, it’s only in recent months that I’ve realized how obsessed I’ve been with worldly success, to the sometimes detriment of my family obligations. How would you all like to take a little trip to Quicksilver sometime soon? The end of the Senate session is coming up, and summer break will leave you girls with some free time. It’s been years since we’ve had a real holiday together, so what do you say? I’m pretty sure we can arrange meetings with Luz Calderón and Barbara Big Horse …. Perhaps you might make an appearance on her show.”

The screams and whoops of the girls were answer enough, and both Maria and Celestina looked fondly on their respective husbands. For all their faults, they were decent men, and every day becoming better fathers and husbands, despite their rough upbringing.

After some interval of days, a guard appeared to announce a visitor, his court-appointed lawyer.

Hisashi Yamaguchi wasn’t particularly interested in the process of law, but this was a change in the routine, so he said, “Yes, very good. I’ll be ready directly.” He put on his shoes very carefully, then walked over to the door and calmly stuck both hands through two openings beside the door so they could cuff each hand individually to an eyebolt welded to the wall before they opened the cell door to handle fitting him with manacles for transport. Then, seven corrections officers crowded into the cell to maintain physical control of his body during his chaining, since he’d managed to put several officers in the hospital when he’d first became conscious after Webster’s thorough pummeling of his body. Four held him physically, while two more — armed with neurolizers — held back to cover him from behind before the seventh carefully placed the chain-link belt around his waist and double-locked it, only then kneeling to cuff each ankle, one after the other, with one half of a pair of leg irons joined in the middle with two lengths of chain which were brought up before and behind him before locking them to the belt. Then, a separate chain was wrapped around his legs at the knee and locked, then locked again to the chains before and behind him. Only then did the two men waiting outside the cell before release his left hand, which was pulled back through the hole provided for it by the two officers on that side, re-cuffed, and then fastened to the belt before the other two officers repeated the process with the right hand. Then, yet another loop of chain was wound around his arms at the elbow, locked to the fore and aft chains, and only then was he pronounced ready to travel, trussed like a turkey for roasting, frog-marched shuffling sideways though the door by four of them, two on each elbow, while the other four went two by two ahead and behind him and the seventh brought up the rear.

They made a strange procession moving through the hall — which had been cleared of everyone else — out the main gate from the maximum security cells, and then into the interview room, where he was locked down to a steel chair before his lawyer was allowed to enter through a door opposite the one he’d been ushered through, evidently the door that led outside.

Hisashi Yamaguchi was calm, aware of his surroundings, and waiting.

The lawyer introduced herself as she was led through the door. “Mr. Hisashi Yamaguchi? My name is Karen Atwater, and I’ve been appointed by the court to handle your defense. All right, gentlemen, you can leave now, so my client and I can talk in private.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” one said, evidently in charge of the rest, because he said, “Detail, exit the interview cell.”

The men filed out the door they’d come in through, back toward Hisashi Yamaguchi’s section of the prison, and shut the door with a clang. He filed the information away, building a rough picture in his mind of what the layout of this floor must be like.

The interview went well, he thought, because the woman was nervous, and repeatedly ran her fingers through her hair, over her forearms, almost as if she were petting herself, seeking to calm herself through physical contact. She knew, of course, what he was accused of. He smiled at her, which made her even more nervous, but he made all the appropriate responses, so she started to believe him.

Yes, he’d been at the threedee show rally, but only as a spectator, and he had no idea how or why anyone could think that he’d had anything to do with the death of the man who’d been killed in the explosion. He’d been well back from the scene of the crime and was as astonished and horrified as everyone else.

He was very sorry that he’d broken into Jack Webster’s apartment, but had been robbed by someone on the street who looked very much like him, and had lost his head when he saw a man who looked like the man who’d accosted him, so followed him home in hopes of retrieving his holiday money through quietly looking through his apartment. No, he didn’t actually need the money — just look at his credit card limits, the amount in his checking account, and call up his stocks and commodities broker to check his net worth — it was the principle of the thing.

Yes, he had been in possession of locksmith tools and what turned out to be an illegal blade, but he was a registered locksmith back in Japan, and a member of a historic martial arts dojo where such things were commonplace. He had no idea that things were different in North America. And as for who had assaulted whom, one had only to look at this Jack Webster, the supposed victim, who had not a scratch on him as far as he could tell, whereas he himself had been beaten within an inch of his life, and all of this over a perfectly innocent mistake!

It was then he saw it, the change in circumstance. She was running her left hand through her hair again and dislodged a hairpin, which fell — from Hisashi’s highly-focused perspective — in slow motion toward the floor, and then bounced under the table. He followed its arc with his ears, since it was hidden beneath the table, quite near his feet, he thought. “Is there any possibility that I might write a note to my family?” he said. “They won’t let me have any writing implements in my cell, or paper. I’m afraid my mother will worry about me, when she doesn’t hear from me.”

She looked up at him, startled. Then she thought for a few seconds and said, “That seems reasonable, and certainly within your legal rights. I’ll notify the guards.”

As she walked behind him to ring the guards, he quickly used his feet to feel out the hairpin, then work it up the side of his foot and into his other shoe, trusting to his sense of touch to be certain the pin was all the way down the side of his shoe. The door opened and all seven guards filed back in, grabbed him in the usual drill but this time unchained one arm and fastened to the table instead. Only then did they make a final check and exit the room again. “Thank you, Miss Atwater,” he said. “I’ll need a piece of paper and a pen or pencil.”

She was startled again. “Pen? Paper? Can’t you simply input your message to my communicator?”

“I’m afraid not, Miss Atwater. My mother lives in the Hokkaidō Historic District and speaks an extremely rare language. No standard software application handles it that I’m aware of.”

She rolled her eyes and went to the other door, the one she’d entered through to begin with, pressed the button, talked to the guard who opened it, who closed the door and went off somewhere to find paper and pen — which Hisashi imagined just might take long enough — while she waited impatiently. In the interval, he slipped off his shoes, used his toes to extract the hairpin, and then lithely brought up his foot — with the hairpin still grasped between his toes — to his semi-free hand and manipulated the pin in the lock with movements of both his foot and hand until the lock opened. Once free, he used the same pin to systematically open the rest of his bonds with his free hand until his bonds were shed, then quietly crept up behind the woman and fell upon her with a quick movement of his hands at the back of her neck. She collapsed without a sound, so it was Hisashi who was waiting by the door when the unsuspecting guard brought in the requested pen and paper. From there, it was relatively straightforward to exit the building, leaving behind three unconscious people — one of whom had supplied a new set of inconspicuous clothes — and six corpses, one of them his court-appointed attorney, who had supplied his freedom.

Jack Webster woke up with a smile on his face, feeling better than he’d ever felt in his entire life. He looked over to the other side of the bed, and it was empty, but it neither surprised nor alarmed him. Barbara had work to do, he knew, and they’d taken to bed very late indeed. The sun was rising by the time they tumbled onto the mattress in a froth of clothes and bedclothes and pillows flying every which way, then finding safe refuge in each other’s arms. Now, for the first time, stretching his long limbs out across a strange but familiar bed in a strange but half-remembered room on an exotic but strangely homely world, he knew what Pippa had felt like in Robert Browning’s ironic little poem, ‘God’s in his heaven — All’s right with the world!’

Just then, his communicator chimed. It was Barbara.

“Hello? Barbara?”

“Hi, Sweetie. Ready to ‘rise,’ if you know what I mean?”

Jack blushed. “Unh …”

“Never mind, You have work to do, if you’ll recall, and it’s my sworn duty to help you do it.”

“Right, unh …. What is it I’m supposed to do, exactly?”

“Solve the mystery of the Burlador, of course. Didn’t Jaime Ortíz tell you?”

“Well, yes, but I thought I’d need to investigate the ….”

“Of course not, Jack! Any child could tell you if you asked.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“You’re on Quicksilver, Jack, and everything is different here. Well, it is on Earth too, and all the colonies, but it’s not nearly as apparent in those places, at least not yet.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a little difficult to explain, but have you surprised yourself by knowing something that you wouldn’t have known in the ordinary course of events?”

“Not that I can think of, why?”

“Do you speak French, Jack?”

“No. Should I?”

“So if I were to ask, let’s say, what Candide said to Pangloss in the last line of the novel, you’d answer …?”

Jack spoke without thinking, “Cela est bien dit, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin,” but then couldn’t explain, even to himself, how he knew that, much understood it, and even less than that how he knew that he was right. It just came to him. “Do you mind explaining what just happened?”

She laughed in a perfectly charming way, or at least Jack was charmed. “You’ll have to get dressed and come down to my office, first. I’ve invited Luz and Dan Asquith here for ten o’clock, so you’ll have to hurry. I had someone leave some clean clothes in the front room, and they ought to fit perfectly.”

“But ….”

“It’s no good wheedling, Jack. You have an obligation, as do I, and if you get here before Luz and Dan do, I’ll make it worth your while.” Her voice dropped to a low and seductive feminine register that had him instantly hard.

And that galvanized him into action. “Be right there, he said,” and thumbed off.

Somehow, he knew where everything was and was washed, dressed, teeth brushed, hair combed neatly, and out the door in three minutes flat. He timed it.

Then he ran up the road toward the spaceport and admin building. It was just coming up on fifteen minutes to ten when he walked through the door. “Am I on time?”

Barbara grinned at him and walked out from behind her desk and simply launched herself into his arms ….

 … and he caught her from out of the air as effortlessly as he might have snatched a butterfly, but she was kissing him like a full-grown woman, suspended between heaven and earth in his arms. “Plenty of time, sailor. I betcha I can show you a really good time, in fact.” She reached down and grabbed his ass …

 … just in time for Luz and Dan to walk through the door as Luz said, “Well, I see you two know each other!”

Barbara didn’t miss a beat, and neither stopped fondling his ass nor nuzzling his neck, so her next words were slightly muffled. “And very well, too,” she said. “He said the magic words last night and presto-chango! we were married. So we spent last night getting to know each other much better.” Only then, did she look over toward her guests. “You’re early,” she said accusingly.

Jack didn’t know what to say, since he had his arms full of the Planetary Governor and his official boss, who seemed perfectly content to stay there, so he wisely said nothing, or so he thought.

Luz said, “What’s the matter, Jack? Cat got your tongue?”

“Uh, how do you do? I’d offer to shake hands, but I seem to have a previous engagement.” This wasn’t going at all the way he’d imagined, but he didn’t feel particularly awkward. ‘When in Rome …’ he thought, then ‘remembered’ that it was a quote from St. Ambrose, translated from Medieval Latin: Si fueris Rōmae, Rōmānō vīvitō mōre. ‘Whoa! This is seriously spooky!’

“I thought we were going to be invited to the wedding,” Luz said.

“You will be. We’ll have to do it again when his mother and sisters get here, and if I know Jaime, he’s already planning to rebroadcast the original footage and dramatic re-creations from now until the end of time. By the time he’s finished milking it for building and expanding the colonies, we’ll all be heartily sick of my marriage, and you’ll thank me for having spared you one.”

“You filmed it?” Luz asked.

“Of course I did.” Barbara said. “In the first place, I knew you’d kill me if I didn’t, and in the second I didn’t want to miss any of the details.”

Jack was puzzled. “Wait a minute. You filmed it? How did you know that I was going to ask you?”

“Jack,” she said with mild reproof. “ people don’t travel twenty light years to pick up a quart of milk, and it’s not exactly every day I see a mariachi band march through town on the very day your flight is scheduled to arrive. I went to the Police Academy, the same as you, and have been known to put two and two together on my better days. Not to mention the irreducible fact that Luz foretold our marriage in prophesy, and Luz is never wrong. When’s the last time you’ve seen a wedding without cameras? Heck, we didn’t even have to pose on the courthouse steps, which is lucky, because we have neither courthouse nor steps on Quicksilver.” She thought about this, then added, “No, there are a few maintenance stairs in the hangers and whatnot in the spaceport, but they hardly count, since they’re boringly utilitarian.” She turned to Luz, still in Jack’s arms, one of her arms around the back of his neck, and as completely at ease as if this were her normal mode of conducting meetings. “I think we should have the prop department whip up some excuse for stairs. They do make lovely backdrops, and we could get some great visuals for the shows.”

“You’re right, of course, Barbara. We should have some built into the posh houses, which means a second story for each, and probably put up some sort of ‘Governor’s Palace.’ as well. They used the Iolani Palace a lot in the old Hawaii Five-O series, to show off the exotic setting of the series, and of course the old Melina Mercouri vehicle Topkapi was built almost entirely around the setting of Topkapi Palace in the Istanbul urbopolis.”

“I’m not sure,” Barbara mused aloud, “that we should go for the Topkapi look, actually, but something like the Iolani Palace sounds nice, if slightly anachronistic. Would we get to live in it?”

“I don’t see why not,” Luz said, “and it will make a nice vid-op stop when Jaime gets his tours going, so we could write off the whole cost against one or another production company ….”

“Ladies?”

All eyes turned to Dan Asquith, who hadn’t said a word up until then. “This is all off-topic. We’re here to fulfil Senator Ortízes’ request, to brief Mr. Webster here on what we know, and what we suspect, about the ‘Burlador’ phenomenon. I don’t think either he or I signed up for an impromptu meeting of the Silver Light Production Company, as fascinating as I’m sure this is for all of us.”

“Ooops!” said Barbara.

“Same here,” said Luz. “I’m sorry, Jack, but threedees are our primary export and source of income, so we tend to be a little obsessive about new ideas to improve our ratings.”

“I’m not offended, Luz. Barbara here is my wife,” he gazed at her with fondness, “so her life is part of my life now, and I know I have a lot to learn. I’ve never been off-planet, and have no idea how colonies work, so this is all very enlightening, even if I don’t understand some of the infrastructure that all this revolves around.”

Barbara positively beamed a smile back at him. “Thank you, Jack.” Then she turned to the others and said, “I started to explain a little, but I think Dan is the best qualified to present the basic facts. Luz and I can jump in later, when we get to our own fields of knowledge, so take it away, Dan.”

Dan grinned. “Fair enough, since I was the one who brought up boring job requirements.” He focused on Dan, since he was the primary audience. “I don’t know how much you know about Triffids, so I’ll start at the beginning.” He brought up an image of the original Triffids on Barabara’s threedee wall.

Damned if he didn’t have a laser pointer in his pocket. Jack wondered idly if his university issued one with the degree.

“You’ll notice this bulging outgrowth here, beneath the flowering body. It was quickly identified by the first scientists to study the Quicksilver flora as a type of vegetable brain which helped to coördinate the movements of the tendrils and the flower, since Triffids can move at suprising speed and what seemed like conscious purpose. What they didn’t know was that these primitve Quicksilver plant ‘brains’ depended upon the superconductor nanofibers in the ‘tails’ of the pseudo-spirochætes which permeate every cell of a Triffid’s structure to transmit information to each other using unimolecular rectifier and inverter structures within their cells connected to longer fibers which acted like miniature antennae. Because the electric potential which can be developed by a plant is relatively small, they were able to achieve a very limited interplant communication by means of these super-conducting organic ‘radios’, but what they were transmitting was surprisingly detailed information about their own genetic structure, by means of which they were able to modify their own structures to match those of more successful Triffids. This astonishing innovation was enough to speed up evolution a thousand-fold, because the Triffids as a whole could ‘learn’ from the experience of other Triffids, and incorporate desirable traits by proxy, even at a distance.”

“All this was unknown until I was able to study the plants without the history of commercial hostility which had infested the thinking of those who came before me, who saw the Triffids only as particularly noxious and invasive ‘weeds,’ to be destroyed by the most expeditious means available.”

“At first, they used ordinary organic weedkillers, but the Triffids themselves used organic toxins to regulate and control their own growth, and were extremely quick to adapt to these new poisons, so every new poison quickly became useless, and once the plants learned how to produce them, became tools in a counter-arsenal of toxins designed to control what the Triffids saw as an infestation of human beings.”

“Wait a minute! Are you saying that the Triffids are intelligent?”

“Not exactly. To convey these complex concepts simply, I come very close to anthropomorphism, which is incorrect on many levels. Let me start over: The Triffids use these superconductive organic ‘radios’ to transmit genetic information to one another — much as we, in our own bodies, use organic chemicals, hormones, neurotransmitters, and the like — and are so intimately connected that they could, in some sense, be thought of as a single organism, so that one might more properly think of the ‘Triffids’ we think we see as portions of a single planetary Triffid, so that what we thought of as individual Triffids are really more like single cells within a single organism. A planetary intelligence, with no peers with whom it can communicate, is a psychological conundrum, since we humans are defined by boundaries and communication. We communicate to cross boundaries, and by our communication we define not only ourselves, but the spaces between ourselves, and we have an entire repertory of mental skills designed both to cross and maintain those boundaries, among which the first are language and the realization that there are others inhabiting the same world as ourselves. In the human sense, the global Triffid was no more capable of what we would think of as real thought than a rock.”

“But in another sense, looked at from a purely human perspective, Triffids were connected not only to their own bodies, but to one another at an intimate — but unseen and unsuspected — level that’s even now difficult to comprehend. What it amounted to, however, was that in some sense the Triffids were individual components of a very slow but pervasive planetary ‘brain,’ limited only by the extremely short range of their individual transmissions. Their vegetative ‘synapses’ couldn’t generate enough electrical potential to power transmissions with a range of much more than twenty or thirty meters, so passing information from Triffid to Triffid was a relatively slow process, and from — again — a purely human perspective, that brain was catatonic, completely incapable of responding to any other individual.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Let me see if I understand this; the Triffid was in what amounted to a vegetative coma, ‘brain dead,’ as it were, but was still alive and potentially conscious, but still stuck in limbo.”

“That’s an interesting way to put it, and brings to mind another human allegory. What do we call that … spark … that makes us unique and alive?”

“I don’t know … a soul?”

“That’s the word I was thinking of, a soul, the moral and emotional nature and sense of personal identity that makes one human. The Triffid had no soul, no spark of life that breathed ‘humanity’ into it. I’ve discovered fossil records in ancient shales that show what looks like the same Triffid in existence almost a hundred million years in the past, perhaps even further, since my writ doesn’t run to mounting extensive fossil-hunting expeditions, but it seems clear at least that this planetary organism was extremely stable over geologic time. We’ve been around for a million years, if we’re generous about what it is to be ‘human,’ but what looks like the same Triffid has been around essentially unchanged for at least a hundred times our entire history. It seems clear that Triffids weren’t going anywhere, and were at an evolutionary ‘dead end.’ ”

“Then, three things happened: First, people came along, whose brains create electrical potentials plants could only dream about. When combined with the pseudo-spirochætes which permeate the air on Quicksilver, some human brains became ‘infected’ with tiny pieces of the Triffid neurosystem, and eventually became at least potentially capable of interacting with the plants, and vice-versa. Second, because biological poisons had failed, Chillings and associates began a policy of burning Triffids, which released microparticulates, a sort of Triffid smog, into the atmosphere of Quicksilver, thereby vastly increasing the rates of infection in humans. Third, however, and most important, was the fact that the operation of ansibles requires massive amounts of power, which was heterodyned into the plants, and into those humans infected by the pseudo-spirochætes, eventually every human alive on the planet. But in the early days of the exploration of Quicksilver, the power wasn’t available to operate the network for more than a few minutes each day. Nothing happened, pretty much, since there wasn’t enough constant power available to keep the network powered up continuously.”

“And then along came Senator Chillings and his friends, who were so committed to micromanaging Quicksilver that they wanted to keep the ansible network in operation almost constantly, so provided the necessary power on both ends, on Quicksilver and on Earth, so now the plants, and sensitive people, were heterodyning on top of Chillings powerful spy network, and it was almost constantly available, so parasitic heterodyning became fashionable, in an evolutionary sense. And then Chillings and company decided to add high-def video to the mix, requiring still more power — and vastly-increased bandwidth — and suddenly we have massive communication opportunities. For the first time, it’s possible to create a Triffid which requires a high average level of ambient ansible traffic to survive, but also allows the plants infinitely higher levels of communication, so ansible-sensitivity became a survival trait, since genetic information could be transmitted much more quickly by the ansible-sensitive Triffids, thus allowing them to adapt more quickly, so the Triffids, being the opportunists that they are, adapted.”

“Now let’s step back a bit to see the larger picture. People, like much of Earth-based life, had developed in a completely different relationship to their environment. Where Triffids had completely dominated their entire ecosystems, people, and all Earth life, had developed many different strategies of coöperation among different species, from parisitism to symbiosis, from predator and prey to herder and protected flock. We can’t even exist without the help of ancient entrained bacteria, the mitochondria which power cell metabolism. We have an intricate relationship to bacteria in general, as every woman knows, and not only tolerate but require a healthy microfauna living on every body surface to maintain our health. We even have a special nerve, the vagus nerve, running from our digestive tract directly to the brain, where it lets us know if our bacterial flora are happy and content by making us feel good, and the opposite if the bacteria are unhappy.”

“So we were already primed to take advantage of the Triffids when they crossed our path, one more advantageous creature to incorporate into our repertoire, one way or another.”

“Since the Triffid micro-encapsulated ‘spores,’ — with their entrained pseudo-spirochætes — had been piggy-backing on “Earth” crops raised on Quicksilver from the beginning, so people both ingested them and tossed them out into the larger environment with the garbage, or into the sewer system, Earth itself was slowly being primed to receive the transmissions that Chillings and company used to spy on their colony, and the Triffid — still catatonic — used the spying to strengthen its unconscious ties to Earth, and sensitive individuals among the colonists did likewise, and I suspect gained some advantage by doing so — perhaps heightened intuition, a better feel for emotional situations, or an advantage in deftness and coördination — so Quicksilver, Earth, and every human colony developed a ‘field’ of nascent intelligence that extended throughout every soil and environment, but no one was alarmed, because it either didn’t do any harm that anyone could notice, or wasn’t noticed in the first place.”

“But then Chillings and his pals did a very stupid thing, they began to kill colonists in such numbers that they started burying them at random, instead of safely interring human bodies in carefully-maintained cemeteries kept free of Triffids by human effort, and one colonist in particular, Margarita, who had no reason to love Chillings or his friends, was buried beneath a pile of Triffids, whose roots and tendrils grew into her still-intact brain, and whose networked intelligence preserved some semblance of the human consciousness which comprised the real Margarita’s ‘standing wave,’ and so Margarita/Quicksilver was born, both on Quicksilver itself, and a crippled version of itself/herself on Earth, since Earth had, as yet, no actual Triffids as carriers of the standing wave which is an intelligent entity, but that pattern was constantly being restarted, echoed, and reinforced by Chillings’ ever-increasing two-way broadband ansible communications between Earth and Quicksilver.”

“Hold on, you lost me again. ‘Standing wave?’ ”

“Have you ever heard of a seiche?”

“No.”

“Have you ever held a seashell over your ear to ‘hear the ocean?’ ”

“Yes, I have. My grandmother had a seashell, and she showed me how it sounded. I thought it was some sort of sound inside my head though.”

“That’s a common misconception, but that ‘ocean’ sound is a seiche, a standing wave captured within any resonant cavity that’s powered from outside that cavity. If you ever experimented with a shell, or a teacup, or even your own cupped hand, you know that the pitch of the seiche can be altered by varying the acoustic resonance of the cavity by varying its depth, so as you move the shell closer to your hear, the inchoate pitch of the sound goes up, and as you move it away the pitch goes down. Because ambient noise is usually random, you have many multiples of many different pitches all being reïnforced at the same time, so it sounds like roaring. If you fed the sound with a pure tone, as happens when a bay, for example, is flooded by a tsunami — a series of regular waves — the seiche can build up until it becomes very destructive, increasing the amplitude of the base signal until it’s much larger than the wave which fed it.”

He nodded. “Okay, but what’s that got to do with consciousness and souls?”

“Human consciousness is a self-reïnforcing chemical standing wave, a seiche, if you will, caused by our interactions with the events of the outside world. The chemical signals of consciousness echo constantly in our brains, even when we’re sleeping, and if they stop, we die, just as a sound dies when it ceases to echo.”

Luz broke in. “Why don’t you let me finish this, Dan. This part of the story concerns me personally, and I loved Margarita more than anyone.”

“Of course, Luz.”

“Thank you, darling.”

“As Dan was saying, Jack, Chillings and his crowd started killing people, because a non-violent resistance had started to spring up on Quicksilver, because their drive for ever-increasing profits was tempting them to squeeze every dime that could be had out of the people working for them, so we were spiraling down into a cycle of endless poverty and deprivation. People resented it, and began calling for a fairer distribution of the wealth that Quicksilver produced. Frightened and indignant that their profits could be threatened by mere peasants, the Chillings crowd began using strong-arm tactics to suppress dissent, which quickly escalated into armed force against unarmed civilians, and people started dying, including both my children, Conchita and Pablo, one killed by brutal clubbing, the other by gunshot, and my brother Miguel.”

“Also, the ‘agricultural smog’ Dan mentioned was poisonous, which Dan didn’t mention, and some sensitive individuals developed symptoms of that poisoning, the very same protein hypersensitivity that you experienced in Wyoming, Jack, and made you very ill, even though your exposure was relatively minor. The people on Quicksilver were being exposed to hundreds of times more toxins than you experienced, and some died, including Margarita, my wife, and almost me. We were both imprisoned in a sick ward, but no actual treatment was given, since they thought that we had a contagious plague and were afraid of us, so they let my wife die with no real attempt at care, although they did hook her up to a respirator, but didn’t bother investigating to see if the problem was allergic reaction, so didn’t use the epinephrine and other measures which might have saved her life. I watched her die in my arms, and listened as her last breath left her body.”

“But you were married?” Jack asked. “Were you a lesbian? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but you seem very heterosexual now.”

“No, I wasn’t a lesbian at all,” she said smiling. “I was a man.”

Jack was highly sceptical of this claim. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, Luz, I find that very difficult to believe.”

She smiled. “It does seem unlikely, doesn’t it, but I assure you that it’s true. Dan can tell you too, because he was my best friend back when I was an almost illiterate campesino, a farm worker who struggled every day just to get by.”

Jack looked over at Dan, who nodded his assent, then said, “It’s true, Jack. I didn’t see the first change, but she convinced me that it happened by telling me things that no one else knew, and I saw the second change with my own eyes, so I know exactly what’s possible. When I first saw her as a woman, she was the near duplicate of one of the nurses at the hospital, but didn’t act anything like her, but then I saw her change into the beautiful woman you see now with my own eyes, in what can only be described as a miracle, and the miracle affected me as well, because I fell in love with her in that moment, something I very rarely do with my male friends, especially, but then I probably had help.” He smiled to show that he was making a joke, and then smiled again at Luz, a smile which fully communicated the depth of his love, at least.

“I still don’t understand,” said Jack. “Were you a transsexual? Did you want to be a woman? And I don’t understand about this so-called miracle. Miracles simply don’t happen.”

“Really?” Luz asked. “What would you call the Fury who attacked you in Wyoming? A child in a Halloween costume? Out trick or treating early?”

“You saw that too?” Jack was dumbfounded.

“Of course I did. Did you think it had no objective reality?”

“But the cameras didn’t show anything. I just collapsed,” he said, but it sounded weak, because he didn’t believe it himself.

“That’s only because mere cameras don’t capture the entire spectrum of energies that were present. Shall I describe her face? Her fangs? The snakes she wore for hair? The fiery sword she carried and cut at you with? Her wings? Oh, she was very real, Jack, and nearly killed you, but she looked into your heart and weighed it in the very instant before she struck home. That’s why you’re alive today. Senator Chillings and his gang of thugs in business suits were found wanting, and died.”

“But why did you choose to be a woman if you didn’t have those feeling before? I’m still not understanding something.”

“It wasn’t exactly a choice, Jack, in either instance. Margarita chose for me. The first time was simply a reaction, I think, perhaps because she wasn’t fully comfortable with her powers, and she had just been buried, and the roots of the Triffids were still seeking out the formations of her brain and lingering thoughts, so she chose the first form she saw through my eyes that looked serviceable for what she had in mind. I was looking at the photo ID of the nurse Dan mentioned, with some vague idea of disguising myself so I could escape my prison ward, but knew it was impossible before she took over and changed the possibilities. The second was purely intentional. At the time, I was in mortal despair, surrounded by death, the utter destruction of everything I held dear, and I wanted to die, in order to be with my wife and with my children; I actually tried very hard to kill myself, and would have succeeded, except that the ‘poisonous’ Triffid fruit I ate had changed for the better, and then it changed me for the better, because Margarita had come into her power, and made all things new. Margarita gave me back my life, and made me a source of life, a woman, in order to repair my broken heart and make it into something whole, and to make me learn how to love again. Margarita is very good at her rôle in this new pantheon, and it worked just as she’d planned.”

Dan added a little science to the mix of ideas. “And don’t forget, Jack, that the Triffids had been using their limited communication skills to decode and broadcast their own genetic structure for millions of years. Building organic structures to order was old hat for them, especially when mediated through the lens of human perception and intelligence. With Margarita adding real humanity to the stew, there’s very little the gestalt of Margarita/Triffid couldn’t do if she puts her mind to it.”

“Margarita was, and is, a wonderful woman,” Luz said. “She has a very strong sense of justice, and she didn’t feel that it was fair that I should suffer after her death, so she released me from my marriage in the simplest possible manner.”

“Do you miss her still?” Dan asked, but not in a hurtful way.

“Oh, yes. Every day, my darling, but it doesn’t hurt any more, not really. I have a new life, and a new life growing inside me, and it’s partly Margarita, because she set all this in motion. I can look around me and see the world that Margarita made, the Triffids as she wanted them to be. In a way, she became the mother of us all, much bigger than simple Margarita, my wife, and someone much more important, more like a saint, or perhaps a Goddess. I’m not sure which. I’m not even sure that it matters. She clasped her hands around her belly, cradling her growing child. It’s a girl, you know. I’m going to name her Margarita, in honor of … not Margarita herself, or maybe partly, but mostly of her world, and the part our children will play in it.” She looked at her husband with the purest love in her eyes, then reached out to touch him with a lingering caress.

She continued, “Luz was born when Juanito wanted to die — a joint creation of Margarita, who loved Juanito, and Quicksilver itself, which wanted to live, and had shaped itself to survive over millions, perhaps billions, of years of perfect evolution — and Luz was the perfect vehicle, a consummate actress, businesswoman, and ‘threedee personality’ who people wanted to see, the evolutionary creation of the combined wills to survive of Margarita and Quicksilver, who changed my mind even more than she changed my body, who taught me the skills I’d need as a woman who could ignite the need for a growing network of ansible communications between Earth and Quicksilver, and every other planet. Margarita was much more clever than Juanito, and is much more clever than any of us are now, because she fully incorporates the knowledge and spirit — soul, if you will — of every human alive. She saw exactly what was needed, and simply created it ex nihilo.

“So Margarita is the Burlador?” Jack asked, still confused.

“Not at all, Jack, the Burlador is/was the spirit of Senator Chillings, and Senator Tamotsu Tsukasa, and Irene Sarantapechaina, and Senator Jackson and his son, all of whom were vile, hateful people, and whose collective hatred and greed created the crippled version of Margarita who was left behind on Earth when they broke off communications during the riots and deaths on Quicksilver — just as the new Margarita/Quicksilver was being born into new life — lest they be caught at ordering the massacre. One of the reasons I came to Wyoming was to find and heal her, and to bring her back into full communion with the complete Margarita avatar on Quicksilver, and I succeeded.”

“So, you’re saying that Senator Chillings and his friends created the Burlador? The same Burlador who destroyed them.”

“Funny, isn’t it?” Luz mused. “Sometimes people actually do get what they deserve.”

“But isn’t that spirit still there?”

“No, not really; no more than a human being is still the conjoined spermatozoon and ovum which started their growth into full life. The Burlador was no more than a very powerful, dangerous, and angry infant, trapped in the moment of its creation by the anger the evil Senators inspired in a mother who had seen her children murdered before her eyes, then thrown into prison where she died. Have you ever seen someone who’s experienced a real religious conversion?”

This seemed like a non-sequitor, but he answered anyway, “I guess so, but I’ve seen a lot more who say they have, often for the purpose of conning gullible people out of their life savings.”

“You’ll have to trust me on this Jack, but by conversion I mean something that changes your soul, not just your body. … A Goddess … if you can forgive the expression, but I think it's fairly accurate — who can change a quasi-literate male peasant into an urbane and talented heterosexual female in the twinkling of an eye, fully functional, and highly motivated, if you know what I mean, is close enough to a real conversion for me, and I offered the crippled — and ‘sinful — ‘Burlador’ spirit the same sort of spiritual rebirth as a vibrant force for good that had been so generously offered to me, with the help of her powerful avatar back on Quicksilver. If you’ll recall, we were using many ansible channels to carry our threedee signals both ways, and so were pumping a lot of power into the local environment. Margarita/Quicksilver was able to help her, with my help, into full consciousness and love.”

“She offered me a similar miracle as well, Jack,” Barbara added. “And I took it like a drowning man gasps for air. Margarita changed me for the better too, and I’m very grateful.”

“Don’t tell me you were a man as well!” Jack cried out. “I don’t believe it!”

“No, Jack, I was a woman all along, but not one you’d particularly like to know, I think. I was heartless, cruel, and unforgiving. I especially didn’t like men all that much, if you know what I mean. Margarita looked into my true heart, saw exactly what had made me so unhappy, and cured me with one of her miracles. She forgave me, even though my own fear and negligence had caused her death, and helped me to heal, so I’m very happy now, and a huge fan of Margarita. She gave me back my life, and my chance at happiness.” Her face worked itself into tears of gratitude and joy. “My life has meaning now, and it never had before.”

“But this is crazy! You’re talking about some sort of insane mind control, and it’s sick! That’s all it is, just sick!”

“Jack,” Dan said. “Do you believe that people can change? Do you believe that you can change?”

“Well, yes, but not where it counts! I’m sure of that at least!”

“What about people with mental diseases, like psychoses? Can they be helped by medicine?”

“I suppose so.” He saw where this was going, and he didn’t like it.

“Is the psychosis an essential part of them? Or is there a better part of them that the psychosis overwhelms?”

“I don’t know.” He sounded sullen, even to himself.

“Does Luz look unhappy to you?”

“No.” ‘Dammit! He was sounding like a child. And he had changed, he realized it now. That’s what Barbara had meant when she’d asked about Candide. There was something of Margarita inside him, but he didn’t feel different so much as better. In fact, when he thought about it, there were a lot of people inside him, his mother, his sisters, even the father he barely remembered. Weren’t they all a part of him. Hadn’t they all helped him? Even Barbara was inside him, a part of his soul whose presence he could feel, and she made him feel sanctified by her particular blessing. Wasn’t there room for one more?’

“Would she have been better off killing herself? Her children had been slaughtered, after all; her wife had been abandoned by the medical staff, left to die alone in agony, and then she did die, gasping for breath in her very arms, when she could have been saved with a simple injection, just like you were saved. What’s the point of living after that, Jack? If you’d been there, would you have strangled her, as a quick and merciful end to her suffering, or would you have tried to help her?”

“I would have tried to help her ….” ‘ …of course!’ he almost added.

“What about Barbara? Believe me, Jack, a more unhappy woman I’ve never known, and like many unhappy people, she took it out on the people around her. Do you think she’s happy now? Would you have preferred knowing the old Barbara, the sad Barbara, the angry Barbara who would have thrown you off a cliff as soon as look at you, if you’d annoyed her?”

“I don’t know. Yes. No. I can’t tell.” But he could. Whatever Barbara had done in a past life, it was over now. He knew that with certainty. The Barbara he loved was now. The past was irrelevant, because he could feel the goodness, the compassion, inside her.

“I despised the old Barbara, Jack, and I think you would have too. She was a lot like Senator Irene Sarantapechaina, always out for number one, and to hell with number two, number three, and anyone else. But I love her now, and she’s one of my dearest friends, but at the same time, she, or the she she was back then, ordered the attack on the protesters that killed Luzes’ children, her brother — and many others — and arranged the cruel quarantine that killed her wife. How do you suppose it’s possible that Luz and Barbara love each other now?”

Jack spoke reluctantly, but spoke. “Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil Free me so far in your most generous thoughts That I have shot mine arrow o’er the house And hurt my brother.”

“So spoke Hamlet, and so speak we all, sooner or later,” Barbara said. “I did all the bad things that Dan told you about and more, and wish like very hell like I could simply ‘take it back,’ as if I were a child and still believed in magic. But all I can do is love Luz twice as much as I hated her, be generous to her twice as much as I was jealous of her, and perhaps in a long lifetime love her enough, love the world enough, to make some small amends for all the harm I’ve done.”

“In her defense, Jack,” Dan said, “she was following the orders of Senator Chillings, and would have had to comply even if she’d hated it, but she didn’t hate doing it, because her father had been a hateful man, and raped her repeatedly when she was a little girl, until all the innocence and goodness was broken inside her, her very soul shattered into sharp shards and daggers, and she was so warped from the cruelty she’d suffered that she’d become someone who wanted to become cruelty itself. Kālo ʻsmi lokakṣayakṛt pravṛddho; lokān samāhartum iha pravṛttaḥ. Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds, devouring Mankind.”

Jack understood the reference. ‘Krishna to Arjuna, in the Bhagavad Gītā, The Song of God, in the chapter called The Vision of the Universal Form. I’m represented by Arjuna, of course, the querent, but Krishna is time itself, which eventually destroys everything, no matter what we do, and we can’t escape our fate, But time is also the source of all creation, deep time, stretching back to the first creation we know of, in which only light spewed forth into darkness, and everything goes right back to that singular instant of time in long cycles of creation and destruction. We are all stardust, born of a series of catastrophes, formed of the wreckage of exploding stars that formed the very atoms of our bodies in the instant of their destruction. In the words of another song, everything is going to be all right.’ “All right,” he said. “All right,” he said, and all the salt tears slid down his face unheeded.

Hisashi Yamaguchi stood outside Jack Webster’s door, fully armed and prepared this time, but there was something wrong. Someone had decorated the familiar plastic door with yellow and white plastic flower decalcomanias like stylized daisies, which didn’t quite fit the image of the ascetic monk whose quarters he’d briefly seen before he was captured. Curious, he hid his weapons beneath his ceremonial black robe and knocked on the door. Someone, a woman, called out from within. “What d’ya want?”

“I’m a friend of Jack Webster and was wondering where he was,” he said.

“Fat chance,” the woman answered, approaching the door, but not too near. “If’n he was your friend, he would’a told ya, wouldn’t he?”

“Told me what?”

“That he’s off to the colonies somewhere. He’ll be a corpsicle by now, so ya’ll have to remember to look him up in thirty or a hundred years. If’n he owes ya money, good luck collectin’.” She laughed at him and walked back across the room.

He knocked again.

“Fuck off, jerk-face! I’ve called the police,” she said, “and they’re on their way, so shut the fuck up and scram, asshole! I’ve got better things to do.”

He left, his face impassive.

Mamoru Terakado, the Sensei who’d taught Hisashi Yamaguchi, had been dispatched by the Tsukasa Yakuza to track down his errant student and demand an accounting, but also to handle the execution of World Senator Ortíz, whose hand had been seen behind the arrests of Senators Tsukasa and Sarantapechaina, especially because he now appeared to be employing Jack Webster in a private capacity.

After studying the situation, he quickly found a weakness which he intended to exploit, the so-called fool-proof faux-dirigible in which the Senator and his family often began or ended their travels. The preparation time involved in getting the dirigible ready for lift-off allowed him to plan an interesting exploit, so he decided to do that first.

He developed a ‘sound footprint’ of the noises associated with the preparation of the disguised V-Lift and its folding shell for lift-off, and set it to spy on the Senator’s compound while he took his ease outside the Historic District, which hampered many types of assault. Westerners often forgot that Ninjutsu was an art of warfare, not limited to sneaking around in black outfits with throwing stars and flash powder. The goal was the covert destruction of an enemy, not theatrical tricks that played well on the threedee screen.

Soon enough, his preparations paid off; his monitor had detected the first signs of dirigible preparations.

Quickly, he left his rooms for the private San Diego Urbopolis airstrip, just down the road, where he had a sub-orbital runabout waiting, the pilot already waiting for clearance. From the private terminal entrance, he ran across the tarmac to the small airship and gave the signal for takeoff even before climbing into the stratospheric assault armor he’d had installed in the airship with its own dropchute.

Within ten minutes, he was circling at 40,000 feet, well above and to seaward of the compound and outside air traffic control zones. He was watching the ‘dirigible’ lift off its landing pad through his heads-up display and ready to ‘drop’ at the calculated moment. An automated sensor array fired the armored capsule from its dropchute and he settled in for the three-minute guided free-fall to earth already traveling at terminal velocity when he left the chute. Automated steering vanes, as small as a gnat’s wing, kept the capsule headed directly toward its intended target.

From there, the entry to the V-Lift was child’s play. He fired a small rocket into the folding ‘skin’ of the airship, which trailed a grappling hook and wire which pulled his capsule in even as it prevented the disguise from unfolding properly, hampering the aircraft’s maneuverability and slowing it down. Once the drop armor contacted the airship skin, he added electromagnetic power to his landing contacts and was fastened like a limpet to the shell. The escorting military fighters were powerless to intervene, of course, since firing on him would probably destroy the V-Lift he was fastened to. Within ten seconds, he was through the skin, had blasted through the main cargo door with a shaped charge, and was in the passenger compartment where he found, not the Senator, to his great disappointment, but three little girls, dressed in zoris, bathing costumes and loose coverups for a day at the beach.

‘Oh, well,’ he thought. ‘There’s more than one way to make yakitori.’ He pulled out his weapons, a military neurolizer and a wakizashi, to handle any intervention from the cockpit, and said, “Be still, children, and you won’t be hurt. Is your father aboard?” He might yet salvage the mission easily if he was, and if not his new hostages would give him ample leverage for a more direct assault.

One of them said, “You want to hurt my father, don’t you?” She had an angry scowl on her face.

“There’s no need for you to concern yourself with that. My business is private, and it’s with him alone.”

“No! I won’t let you hurt my father!” She unbuckled her seat belt and started toward him with childish fury.

He shook his head and tucked the neurolizer away to give himself a free hand to slap her into submission. If not, a kote gaeshi or similar movement would force her to comply. “Be quiet, girl! or ….”

To his intense — and painful — surprise, the girl slapped away his hand as if it were a rice straw, and followed this astonishing movement with a kick to his shin that actually broke the tibia, sending him to the cabin floor as his fibula collapsed behind it, both shattered by the force of her blow. She then kicked him in the temple, fracturing his skull at its weakest point, moving so quickly that he barely had time to be amazed by her martial prowess before he lost consciousness. His last sight was an ever-narrowing vignette of her smirking face, her childish jaw jutted out in anger, until the encroaching darkness claimed everything.

Hisashi Yamaguchi, disappointed by the disappearance of Jack Webster, decided to focus on his original target, Tom O’Hare, salvaging at least a portion of his appointed task from the general wreck.

Once he was back on track, his plans worked perfectly, of course. People who live behind walls, with a phalanx of guards on call, get careless. He was sitting quietly in one stall of the men’s room where O’Hare usually went to pee after his morning cup of coffee when one of his guards peeked in, then okayed it for his boss.

O’Hare had one hand occupied, the other casually on his hip, when Hisashi’s knotted strangling cord settled around his neck and he was dead before he hit the slightly grubby white tiles of the floor.

The guard peeked in again behind his back, but Hisashi wasn’t worried. He’d finished his primary task at last, despite a lengthy hiatus, so he could count this mission as a success. He didn’t even bother to turn around before the guard started firing his weapon, too late for O’Hare, of course, but Hisashi imagined it must make the silly bodyguard feel like he was doing something. ‘Amateur ….’ he thought contemptuously, and died.

The Quicksilver Wedding Special was the most advertised show of the year, with more newsvid coverage — as it turned out — than the Superbowl, and the rates for pre- and post-ceremony ‘announcements’ (with hard sells strictly prohibited) were steep even by Superbowl standards. It started with a simple statement from Luz Calderōn.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, you’ve been watching our shows for almost a year now, and we appreciate your interest, so we’d like to take you ‘backstage’ for a bit, to be with us as one of our regular character actors, Barbara Big Horse, who in real life is the Planetary Governor and Chief of Police … ” Here she paused for a humorous aside … “We’re a small community still, and we don’t have much need of either of her jobs on a full-time basis” — then she went back to her prepared invitation, “is married to her sweetheart from Earth, who set off alone across the stars in an experimental airship to be with her for eternity, the devilishly handsome and hunky Captain Jack Webster, Police Detective and Warrior Extraordinaire, with his family and hers as guests, along with most of our local community. You’re welcome to join us.”

With that, the camera pulled back and up into a long shot down onto what seemed to be an American Indian encampment. A male announcer said, in that hushed half-whisper usually reserved for golf tournaments, “As our regular viewers know, Barbara Big Horse is a full-blood Oglala Sioux of Pine Ridge, sometimes called the Oglala Lakota, originally from what used to be South Dakota. In honor of her heritage, the wedding is being held in an historically-accurate encampment of her people, and many tribal elders have been invited as witnesses. Standing beside her is Luz Calderōn, since they have adopted each other as sisters, and one of the only surviving members of her birth family, Inez Big Horse, her youngest sister, although she is now very old in comparison to her older sister because of coldsleep and time dilation effects. Barbara Big Horse is wearing an historically accurate recreation of the wedding regalia worn by Záptan Sunkawakan, her great-grandmother, fifteen times removed, which was given to her by her fiancé as a bride gift.”

The view cut to a close-up of Barbara, radiant in the brilliant Quicksilver sunlight, her black hair shining with rich highlights. Her dress was revealed to be a work of art as the camera pulled back slightly to a medium shot.

The male announcer spoke again. “As many of our viewers already know from the newsvid coverage, the Oglala Sioux have a matrilineal and partially matriarchal social structure, so suitors have to be approved by the female elders of the woman’s family as well as by the woman herself, and all marital property vests in the woman, as a protection for her children in case of death or abandonment by her husband. Their decision will be based in part upon the richness of his bride gifts, the ancient equivalent of a Dun and Bradstreet credit rating. Although male chiefs are traditional, many women have held this important post, and at least theoretically the eldest women of the tribe could formally withdraw their support for a male chief, and the man would have to resign his position. This ensured that decisions involving the survival of the tribe as a whole remained firmly in women’s hands.”

The view shifted to a long shot of a cloud of dust on the edge of a nearby hill and suddenly a lone figure on horseback rode over the hill, followed closely be a large herd of horses being driven by ten young men. The camera zoomed in for a close-up of the leader, who turned out to be Jack Webster, bare-chested, dressed in beaded buckskin trousers, and looking very fit.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe this is the bridegroom’s party just entering our view. They’re driving what appears to be a herd of a hundred and forty-four mares, although Jack Webster himself is riding a stallion. If this is Jack’s bride gift, in addition to the dress for his bride, it’s a princely gift indeed. Let’s see, at current values, that number of mares is worth an estimated one million eight thousand credits DDU Quicksilver Spaceport. ”

The horses were thundering down the shallow slope toward the encampment as a heaving wave of pinto ponies, almost a single mass, like a broad speckled caterpillar with five hundred and seventy-six legs and the camera shots alternated between three separate long shots which encompassed the entire herd from different angles and close-up and medium shots which captured individual horses or small groups jumping arroyos and navigating through narrow places on their downward path.

Through it all there were shots of Jack Webster and the Oglala Lakota riders riding like the wind, showing spectacular horsemanship as they rode down the hill keeping the herd under tight control. And then they were on the flat outside the encampment, where they gradually slowed the herd until they entered the loose confines of the camp at a walk, still keeping tight control of the horses until they stopped still, the horses shuffling slightly, excited by their headlong flight, but cooling down, and facing the women.

Jack rode forward and said loudly, “I offer these young and healthy mares of ancient lineage as the bride price of Barbara Big Horse, in addition to my previous gifts.”

Barbara stepped forward with her aged sister and said, “I accept these valuable horses in trust for my tribe, to be a matrimony for a new homeland on Quicksilver, purchased in fee simple from the Planetary Owner, comprising approximately ten thousand square kilometers and located on the plains beneath the western slope of the Olympus Mountains.”

Then the rituals began, with a series of shamans and tribal elders calling down blessings, wafting the smoke of burning leaves and herbs in the six directions, accompanied by a centrally located group of drummers beating a complex and ever-changing rhythm as first women, than several circles of women and men moving in opposite directions around the central area, sometimes chanting, sometimes silent, and then chanting in descant, the women chanting a separate song above the lower voices and song of the men, in an exotic pagentry of difference that hadn’t been seen, except in old vids, in hundreds of years.

At the end of the special, Luz Calderón came back on for the wrap-up and outro. “We of Quicksilver would like to thank you for your visit today, and let you know that on-demand streaming versions of the show will be available for a small charge on our web site. In addition, a special ‘home movie’ version of Jack Webster’s spontaneous proposal as he stepped off his airship is available now, which contains over an hour and a half of threedee vid and full-surround audio. Mariachi fans take note: This is the only vid containing the entire performance of Dos Arbolitos by Jack Webster with Los Charros de Mercurio as backup. A boxed set containing both threedees is also available on the site, which also includes a selection of very high-def still photos suitable for vid-walls and screensavers. These sets all include secondary audio channels containing Spanish and French equivalents of the entire soundtrack, with the principal actors re-voicing their performances in these languages for your enjoyment, assisted in some cases by voice-over talent for the secondary characters. We currently have editions which include German, Chinese, and Russian voice tracks as well, but these feature voice-over actors for all the parts.”

“On a personal note, I’m sure that some of you noticed how exciting cultural diversity can be, especially in a world which is becoming steadily more homogenized. On Quicksilver, we’re committed to seeing a thousand flowers bloom, as the Chinese saying goes, and to ensure this, we’re doing our part to ensure that the indigenous cultures of the Americas and the Eastern Pacific Islands have room to thrive. If you are an official of any recognized North or South American Federation tribe with treaty rights, including Native Hawaiians, Samoans, and Alaska Natives, would like to enquire about purchasing a Tribal Homeland on Quicksilver, with a minimum purchase of five thousand square kilometers, please contact any Federation Emigration Office with your bonafides and budget. Packages are available featuring seashore, savannah, island, and mountain meadow environments, all pre-planted with Quicksilver-specific food and grazing crops on surprisingly affordable terms, so your first years will be self-sufficient. Quicksilver also accepts individuals and families who wish to join specific communities, with certain skill classifications being offered special incentive packages for long-term immigration contracts.”

“Thanks again, dear friends, and good night, but please remember: There are many worlds to explore, and room enough to hold all our dreams safely, but the worlds of humanity have no room for hatred, corruption, or greed. In the end, it’s really quite simple. We must love one another or die.”

And then the credits rolled.

 

 

 

On Quicksilver, things quickly got back to normal, and all the standard line-up of shows were available on the threedee channels, although more episodes featured the Oglala Lakota Homeland and other Homelands, as they grew, which added the spice of variety to the mix. Jack Webster and Barbara Big Horse became so popular as guests that there was talk of spinning off their own series, tentatively called Crazy Horse Revisited in the pilot scripts, but the production company was still running focus groups before settling on the final title.

On Earth, though, things were changing. The most corrupt World Senators were facing recall, and their polling numbers weren’t good, since there were almost daily revelations of the latest scandals involving the still-entrenched, but weakening ‘Old Guard.’

And all over the Capital city, and all over the world, strange new plants were popping up, contaminating monoculture croplands, parks, forests, and even forcing themselves through plastic and durasteel pavements, growing so rapidly that a hint of green leaf had barely to appear in a tiny crack before it was a growing shoot, then a tree, and then ripe fruit was hanging from the limbs. They smelled wonderfully enticing. They were delicious.

High Flight
by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds …and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of …wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up, the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor even eagle flew.
And while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space …
… put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

 

 

‘High Flight’ was the official poem of the ancient Canadian Forces Air Command and Royal Air Force, and was required to be committed to memory by all fourth class cadets (freshmen) at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) in the old USA. It is still the official poem of the World Federation Air Force.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr. was an American pilot and poet who volunteered for combat duty in the Canadian Forces Air Command during the Second World War, before the United States of America had entered the war. He was killed over the village of Roxholm in Lincolnshire when the Spitfire he was flying collided in heavy cloud cover with an Airspeed Oxford trainer out of RAF Cranwell. He was nineteen years old.

Copyright © 1993, 2010, 2011 by Jeffrey M. Mahr

All rights reserved.

 

DEDICATION:

To my loving wife, Betty. She completes me.

 

 

Copyright © 2011 Levanah