In Arms We Trust

Part One of Five

by Vasilis Adams A.

It is not because other people are dead
that our affection for them grows faint,
it is because we ourself are dying.

[Partial information was given to me by the people themselves. The rest was acquired from the archives of the hedron, the damaged facet of what remains of the second Hexahedron, of Starseed, as it calls itself. The montage of what follows is mine. P.P.]

A cozy new world.

Unite to obliterate identity.

The mockery charred and chipped away at his innermost tenets. But the promoters of all that went wrong with the world had not the vision. They had not the heart and virtue freedom needs to breathe and be. So, they choked freedom. Smothered it under the guise of 'planetary civism'. Their brave new children attempted what wise men dread:

Utopia through unilateral information dominance promoted by dogma and arms, drugs and computer bondage.

The new order of things to come was to be a supranational, an incorporate Earth, run not by communism or capitalism, but by the I-Soldier.

The by-product? A form of totalitarianism that would have stunned Orwell. Chickbrow had mastered well the crumbling volume on his shelves. Given to him by his grandfather Cleon.

Chickbrow had not neglected any of the other's words.

"There must be an antipode ... " the old man had told him, back then in the thirties.

Chickbrow was still in his teens then.

"It's the pivotal point of any kind of Democracy. There have to be either bona fide opposing political parties, or nations -- at least a bilateral model. Communism may have posed a threat to us after the second great war, but as well had been a check and balance on our Democratic system: what Democracy needs in order to be healthy and workable.

"When the Soviet Union collapsed, and China adopted the Chart of Provisional Free Enterprise, the West fell in the very selfsame rut a score of others had fallen throughout history.

"No threat.

"No contention.

"No controversy or opposition.

"Presumption.

"Smugness, conceit, coquetry and self adoration.

"I just call it being spoiled stupid. Democracy, David Chickbrow, has to have tough and durable debate to survive. None of that patronizing and humoring, superciliously cute and 'darling' stuff between Republicans and Democrats -- two sides of the same dollar.

"No variance.

"No ability, or margin, breathing space, to adapt to.

"Zero evolution.

"Extinction.

"A lot of agreeing and splendoring in profusions of endearments may be fine for erotic escapades, sweethearts, heartthrobs and sweet old ladies -- but for Democracy ... they decay it. Spoil it.

"It happens to countries just as easily as it does to people. To young or old nations. Particularly to ones that have never felt the stomp of a conqueror's boot on their native soil. Have not endured defeat. Not suffered humility in a long, long time. So, forgot what it's like. Vanity, like that in a Congress of aristocracy and a Senate of gentry, or an Executive branch of an unchecked and self-appointed oligarchy, is a flaw easy to detect, but ornery as hell to rectify. Because it suits the handful who governs. Sweetens their palate. And they'll fight with rabid fury any and all change threatening their post.

"Power is never easy to step down from, David. But in the history of mankind there has never, never, been enlightenment in power. Never has -- a smidgen even of -- good come out of it. Except a dominion's own degeneration. Its fall from within itself -- like the dominion of dinosaurs."

The Sachem, what they used to call grandpa -- a Ph.D. in Social Science and an Assistant Professorship at Harvard Government School seemed as good testimonial as any -- taught one thing and lived another. He had done this to survive the anachronistic despotism that somehow crept in and managed to rule unchallenged over half of the world for nearly half a century.

The wealthy half.

"Before it had become through-and-through ripe," the old man had told him, "and impose itself by force in 2020, tyranny had been noiselessly but resolutely slithering like a pit viper closing in. Oppression had been smoldering like smokeless coal before the flash of kindling for more than a full twenty years.

"And when the tinder burst to flame, the utopia of a 'new world order of things' turned into a world incubus. Abreast of the rise of the three camps: internationalism, nationalism and fundamentalism came the threat of international gray zones where law had no effect, nationally or otherwise. Here, David, globallized organized crime burgeoned in the form of economical, defense-hysteria, mass-media, Mafia, drug-digital, nuclear, biochemical terrorism."

Chickbrow's grandfather in all modesty was set on besetting his damage over the greatest number of top honchos over the longest period. He was part Hammurabi, part Confucius and Alexander, a Che and a Nathan Hale. But most of all he was true American. To the marrow, a Brave.

"Babylon, Persia, Rome were not brought to their knees by conquerors from outside. They were vanquished, devastated, from within their own stockades. First by narcissism and self-induced conspiracy, then by biting off more than they could chew. By sheer snow-balling. Through an avalanche of their own over-confidence. Soviet communism lasted a little over seventy years, Yankee capitalism almost two-hundred-and-fifty... "

The third millennium, Chickbrow reflected, was going to be full of surprises. His own removal from the space team had been one. And racism had everything to do with it. Contempt for minorities had been another. It seemed there are cycles in history in which some form of intolerance prevails speechlessly under a benign guise. The circumstances, in this century as well as the previous one, were favoring the stooped-head, the post-Hi-Tech informer, the corporate yes-man, the company infiltrator.

Definitely not the redman. The few of his kind that were left.

***

  "Where am I?" she asked. She could not suppress a shiver. Her heart fluttered wildly.

She was not present, yet she was not elsewhere or totally unaware. Reaching out with a tendril of thought she merely perceived eruptions and flashes of what seemed to be a tunnel of beaten gold. It shone intermittently in alternation with deep expulsions. Prismatic needles of tincture emanated from the labyrinthine cavern and from a carved, melanite-embroidered, crystalline fissure up ahead. An enormity of space was ahead and beyond. It swirled in buffed-sable and russet-scarlet. A vortex generated of dancing lusters ... of wizardry, was swallowing her. Her stomach lurched.

She took a quick glimpse behind her, down the tunnel. She felt her chest constrict. I must survive, she thought. She had to learn a great deal about light, strength and wisdom. About Godly things, too.

She purled along.

She surveyed for the mode of her displacement. The principle behind it. No bearing. No point of reference. No air stirred by. No resistance or drift, only a silent disengagement, then a discharge, a release through a milieu she could not relate to or identify. The tunnel was uninterrupted and invariant, slanting every-which-way ... and there was this smell. She sniffed, acrid and sweet, stale too ... the smell of old suns and mutated nebulas, all in vast, spanning reaches.

Her nostrils felt dry, her muscles taut; she thought her forehead burned with hot sweat; and her brain cringed in strokes of insane conjectures.

Although her senses worked, her being did not possess form, but was part of one -- no, two, and more -- of many, many tinklings drifting towards and encircling her, hues wandering and opening like blooming buds, scintillating softly-singing glimmers right at the edge of this fracturing night. They were as one and difficult to separate. One of her eyebrows she imagined rose as if in response, a queer gesture in a study of rapture and despair.

Among the bursts of movement, of star-glow, she glimpsed something enormous and motionless. A deep stupendousness of no edges. A volume. Glowing patterns circuited to and from it.

She drew herself together obediently and became still as a helplessly poised animal. She then shrunk into a distilled point.

"Who am I?" she asked. And knew that instant. 

***

  He raised the Vessel over his head whispering prayers. When he opened his eyes he saw the ball of brightness. A fist of radiance that seeped through the domed ceiling of his church as though it were absent and streamed down to the gold Hallow Chalice he held. His hands trembled as the Vessel commenced to glow from within. It flooded his church with thick silver light.

"My Lord -- "

He shuddered, let go, and recoiled. The Chalice remained. The light changed to molten gold, welled over the Vessel's lip, and trickled onto the Altar below, to the floor. And the light rose from its knees.

"A message," it said. "Come. The Bond of the Covenant is Opened!"

Then in a more distant but clear voice, "'For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under Grace.'"

The Vessel hovered in clear, empty air.

"Miracle! A Miracle!" the congregation echoed and ...

... awoke Lukas with a start.

The sheets were wet and salty from his sweat.

In retrospect to Father Lukas Mettropoulos's dream that night, more than a quarter of a century before -- and a quarter of the way around the world -- a similar lamentous Holly Mass and thrum of chanting were just reaching an apotheosis. 

***

 [As recorded from the opening of the archives of Starseed. P.P.]

 The Book of Peace

 Pandect of Concord, Proviso of Intendments.

 Intendment 1: Faith, Love and Virtue are chaotic pockets. They pose paradoxes, of counter- or non-entropic, direction-giving configurations common to civilization-forming processes as are Dreams, Hopes, and Visions. Whosoever directly or indirectly conduces, or in any mode, plan, or method, endorses the uninstituted and impending encroachment upon these six pinnacles, as well as the eminence of Grace, shall be expelled and ostracized, in the isolation rendered by temporal tributaries, for the period commensurate to the degree of the abuse. Furthermore, the above Distinctions of Trust shall be shielded by the prudent Ward of Reason we call Olympion [The Head Chair on the Primary Planet, Olympus, in the Sirius group colonized by Orion migrants. P.P.], and not be ranked second in priority to that of opportunism or any aspect thereof -- no matter the encumbrance.

 Intendment 2: It is further intended, to encourage peace in our Galaxy, that we now acknowledge the existence, but control as well, of the Intrinsic Power-Calling from within us for actions of armed antagonism, behavior of lethal aggression, and other varied manner of injurious and harmful hostility. These wanton but inevasible and primordial reserves of entropic assertion shall not be allowed to trample on our or on others' rights and liberties, but be given vent by the re-establishment of the archaic, but noble and incorrupt, competitions of the Olympus planetary system: The source-cell of enlightenment throughout our Galaxy, and further. This Calling of Primitive Ambition and Dare shall be thus re-directed and shall abide by the Regulations of The Games, leading to zero-claim and non-destruction of opponent's/competitor's persona, world, or planetary system. Contrarily, it shall be conducted in such a way as to honor, above all, the value, dignity and the inalienable benefits of peace for all of Life. The Games of The Power Triad, Business-Politics-Religion, referred simply as The Civil Games, in contrast to The Athletic Games, shall be molded and modeled after the contests of the Archaic Olympiads, the original twelve civilization-bearing, civilization-casting worlds (Zeus, Athena, Hera, Aphrodite, Apollo...) had attained to consummate under the fountainhead guidance of the Olympion of Olympus. These Games shall have the Golden Spiral of The Galaxy, in contrast to The Golden Wreath of Laurel for sports events, as the highest distinction of honor. Fair play shall prevail -- as all two hundred million worlds have partaken to uphold and respect -- and this shall be regarded as the summit for, and of: survival through variance, cooperation through growth, and coexistence through communication, all instituted peaceably in good will and faith and in efforts to encompassing all Galactic civilizations. 

***

 [Thirty years before, 2022. P.P.]

  ... Steamy incense, burning candles, and the scent of olive oil wafted viscously in the chapel's atmosphere, billowing like blue gossamer over bowed heads. The baritone voice of the leading chanter attained a crescendo. Three measures later the bowed heads cut into the somber solo in compressed resonance and the twilight of dusk trembled on the stained window-panes.

Through an old, rusty grate under the chapel's Alter, the subsonics of the hymn spilled into the hollow earth. Several among the innumerable cavitous spaces below and nearest the reciting source acted as resound chambers interfering constructively to effectively amplify the flurry of the voices into a swelling booming tumult. Like thunder, it roared, racing at the speed of sound through kilometer upon kilometer of passages within the bowels of empty mountain-core ...

Above, the thick smells hung vaporously in the air and permeated throughout. The solemn counterpoint rose from antiquity's end to console, like a clement blanket of faith, the Mount of Holiness: A grand city of twenty monasteries spread upon a peninsula all of its own.

Compliant to time, it propagated life and faith of a thousand years tranquilly and traditionally into the twenty-first century. The Holly Mountain ran its length amidst the most fertile and green of the three Hellenic peninsulas of Macedonia like the backbone of a supplicating Titan.

As the chorus of celibates to the right of the iconostasis faded, that to the left strengthened. A somber and imposing requiem reverberated throughout this Fidei Defensor of Orthodoxy. A forte of hallelujahs thundered amidst isolated, towering monasteries echoing over and covering this untresspassed, autonomous territory of northern Hellas. Thirty square miles of holy land resounded in psalms.

No human or domestic animal of feminine gender had stepped upon the sacred soil. Here, the Holly Mary and a handful of saintesses were the only depictions of, and references to, the female sex.

On these premises male monks did all chores, from mending to cooking, cobbling and cleaning house to washing clothes and conveying to new generations the Divine Ceremonials and Arts of the Church. No one was simply a monk; everyone contributed a functional and necessary allotment of work each day. And when the daily tasks and jobs were complete, praying and services commenced. Hard, rigorous, exhausting dedication. Enough to suffice and atone for the sins of man.

  The treasures of this Holiest of Mountains came in many forms: wood-carvings of intricate and delicate designs, ornate prayer stands, liturgical crosses, Episcopal thrones, lecterns and chests. Along with the paintings, carvings and the libraries of parchment, silk and paper manuscripts of the Holly City, precious reliquaries were kept in the sanctuaries. Also, numerous liturgical vestments of exquisite hand-woven and gold-embroidered craftsmanship were preserved. Amidst this wealth of arts and sanctity one could not help but wonder what more had been watched over?

The oldest among the monasteries, Xenophontos and Lavra, over a millennium in age, were ones endued with gravest respect and most reverend cognizance. They were the heart of the Faith. Beneath their grandeur of buildings and halls of old wealth and immaculate decor existed a maze of catacombs and vaults. They hid and protected the fortunes of the vanquished Byzantium. Within the Earth's crust lived still the legacy and mythical treasures of an empire, maintained by secrecy and observance. Only few knew of its whereabouts, of its incredible presence. Fewer still experienced themselves its revelation.

Yet, while the Services inundated above, treachery preponderated below.

The confidant of the bishop's council froze in his tracks at the din. Then dismissed it with the waving of a hand. The maverick look in the red-rimmed brown eyes now shifted into a waxing skittishness. His gait quickened while the storm-lamp in his right hand threw a tottering giant's shadow on the dank dirt walls after him.

"Down there. Go!" he urged himself.

His hawkish nose almost ensnared the frayed piece of marked cloth he had been grasping in his left hand. His eyes darted back and forth from it to the forking of the tunnel not far ahead.

"To the right, monk -- the Lord is always to the right, muddled monk," he hissed, and broke out into a braying, raw laughter.

The renegade confidant took it upon himself to abscond with a mere speck of the subterranean acres of gold, silver, precious stones, icons; with a mere drop from a venerated sea of preserve of the richest dynasty in the history of mankind. But when he confronted cavern upon cavern of innumerable kingly ransoms of the purest, biggest, rarest jewels; a legacy of the finest etched and embellished cutlery and crockery, artifacts and weaponry; the regal treasure troves of forty-five generations of emperors, royal courts and their heirlooms -- the covetous monk was simply overwhelmed.

As madness saturated and delirious by the opulence surrounding him the raw-boned driven man now ventured into a far cavern, uncharted as many were not, and seeking refuge within its bowels confronted a vista no man everbefore beheld. Into a thicket of monumental abnormalities and agonizing irregularities, of violating symetrical perfections and aberrations commiserate to a starting pupil of Chinese, who must disentangle ideograms by the handfuls.

In a frenzy to escape Nemesis he had encroached upon what paranoia must have construed to him to be the very kingdom of Heaven -- or Hell.

Tears of terror and anguish swelled in his red-rimmed eyes, mouth drooled and nostrils flared, and his throat pained from uncontrollable contractions brought on by excruciating efforts to let out a scream.

When his sight grew fully accustomed to the thin pink light and delicate beams that dimly emanated from everywhere and nowhere -- augmented by giant fountains and geysers of pulsing violet -- the deep yellow glows and intermittent flashes of diamond-burst brilliance before him, he finally reckoned that he no longer stood in man-made tunnels.

About him spanned a space not unlike the outside. And this vastness had above it a sky -- studded with the heavenly bodies of night -- but alive and stirring, flecks and speckles that left in their course rainbows and motion and soft scintillating tinkling sing-song echoes. He looked upon this expanse, and before his mind went into utter shock, he glimpsed upon towering solid contours: of pyramids and spheres, upon an inner city of polygons and polyhedrons -- and in front of him a glow that was a woman.

A distant almost familiar drone thrummed on as he lingered there dazed.

Catatonic, the intruder, lumberingly, turned about and exited. As he did, behind him materialized a solid rock wall, eradicating any indication of an entry way ever being present. 

***

 [From the archives of Starseed supported by the decoding of Linear A, the Disk of Phaestos and the Great Pyramid of Gizeh. P.P.]

  ... On a bizarre vast edge between two voids, one of the Universe the other of the indefinable Erebus beyond, Residua of Essence spin in felicity, counter-spin in enchantment and unfold progressively more pronounced. They intently and enthusiastically shift back and forth -- among their supplementary domiciles and rivulets of edifice-plasma -- uniquanta of knowledge, insight and lore.

It took them only a small fraction of a hyposec to assimilate the new and utterly unexpected bit of data of information inflowing through the elliptical space-time curvatures that furrow the vacuum of the eleven dimensions available to them.

But they greet and accept with loving eagerness the embrace of the extraordinary and magnificent experience of the joining of life -- a new and most integral 'being' -- to them once more. They and the flowing edge complete the vortex, the revolving sphere-shell, Front of Creation which, along with its angular motion, has been traveling radially outward at the speed of light since its inception. It would have taken the Front of Creation, at its current curvature of largeness and speed of rotation, thirty-seven billion years to achieve a single circuit about the blue glowing hub, the core that is the sweeping blister of the Universe.

The multitudes Residua of Essence would have in effect been termed souls, till of this late happening, this instillment of joyous hearkening, when a passage of a ripple of force imbued itself within them bridging the domain of spirit- and faith-essence to that of energy, form and matter of the Universe Proper, entelecheia your Aristotle calls it. And that which had once been invisible and immaterial, but aware, aethereal ambiance began slowly to acquire the prominence and salience of its kind and shape, that is, its former nature ...

... In the very start, the first color shifts had been detected by our equatorial astronomers at a distance a hundred-fold beyond that of your Virgo constellation and that of Vereniki. They had been in the form of a traveling peripheral ripple heading toward neighboring galaxies omni-directionally -- a vast sphere shrinking back onto its source. Back to the very asymptotic, geometricalless and temporal source of Creation. The color of the stars this ruffling undulation had been leaving in its wake was an almost stand-still pinkish-white brilliance in the spectrum shift. It not only showed that the Universe had completely and unexpectedly begun to slow its expanding, but, by further observation and straight forward calculation, it was discovered that it had begun doing so for an extensive time. The steady rate of expansion, which for thousands of millennia had served as a heat sink, had ceased long-long ago ...

  [What analysis did not show, however, until later, was that the edge of the Universe, the Front of Creation, had initiated the awesome operation of braking four billion years back. P.P.]

  ... Unthinkable quantities of trapped force [Starseed goes on] were been introverted; reconciled and re-conducted in a spontaneous manner counter to the original path of their impetus. Against the grain of their nascent momentum. Instead of turning order into less order, the internal pressures had reversed, compoundingly, releasing free magnetic monopoles.

The preserving mechanisms innate to the Front of Creation had at this point collapsed; already several rents were being torn in the fabric of the void and were now made accessible to Residua of Essence.

Elsewhere, within this fringe, the Vanguard of Creation, point-pockets of internal pressures were mounting to those experienced in the Boundary, turning upon their fountainhead to cause a rip in the Plank wall. They induced a laceration into chaos ... and spawned small split cells, bifurcations, of fractalian repercussions in place of anomalies, but with asymmetries: ports of forthwith temporal bonds for the reconstituting Residua of Essence. Beyond this point our space, time and matter fundamentally broke down. What the Residua of Essence peeked into, over this limit, on the outlying extreme side of Creation, was the birthing of a new Universe of the furthest completeness ...

... Meanwhile, the wealth of might, at once loosened in the braking Universe Proper, sought instantaneous and new direction. And not only by revivifying the Residua or violating accessibility across Plank time.

Sentient life scattered all over the Cosmos, along with being sapient entities of identity, of thinking, feeling and ken, were, as well, entities of direction. Entities that could use up further this excess energy. Coolly fuse it into action, assimilate it into motion and mold it into fractals of organized and functioning matter. These organic assemblages, sapient transducers, manipulated raw force -- even of unrestrained pressures -- to give it vector of focus, adjustment and design.

Once, the Residua of Essence too had been such.

Corporeal beings that could forge from concepts by their acumen, spirit and will-strength alone: could steer their realizations and translate them into palpable action through their physical bodies and could aim their course tangibly as well as immaterially. This initiating of the direction-giving process was referred to by them as reflection and insight, expectation and sagacity, prudence and wisdom, verity and belief.

And now, they jubilated in its reacquirement, rejoiced in the regeneration of their corporeality in the tenfold.

But often, as well, the outcome, or, the prime consummate and culminator of a portion of this pent-up and undirected loose energy, had invariably been the fury of malcontent, the insobriety and overindulgence the sweet brew of power excites and then goads within us, the surge and rage of raw violence, the vehemence of dissension, and the hand-released arrow that swiftly and pointedly darts for the unsuspecting heart of peace ....  

***

 [The teacher's obituary for his killed in action, older son, Kyrillos, during the last invasion attempt against his homeland in 2002 by descending, starving and banded Caucasus tribes, Turanian hordes and Tartar-Mongol legions armed by Glixxon's rising World Confederation. Arms in exchange for Black and Caspian Sea oil. From my journal, 15 August 2052. P.P.]

  "'These were our children who died for our/lands.../ But who shall return us the children? -- Rudyard Kipling, THE CHILDREN .... '

" ... this is my promise and pledge," the teacher writes, "my covenant of testimony and grief for my own lost and unreturned child, Mr. Kipling. To the bringer of holocausts, to the shamer and exterminator of dignity and kindness in man and upon planet Earth, to the trespasser of the limits, to the non-citizen of humanity I vow my non-alliance and my non-affiliation. I commit my disunion with and divorce from him. More. I firmly establish my dissension with and division from him. This, I promise to the breaker of the covenant between man and peace. Further ...

" ... Past oppression and ignorance, indigence and beggary sired violence, passed it down to the present and strive to keep it bustling into the far-deep future ...

" ... Violence wroughts up anarchy. Or welts dictators," the text I have unearthed goes on to say. "The stipend of either is misery, the rack of the mind and soul, isolation, exile and death to those who side with enlightenment and freedom, roots and balance ... "

I read these pages the teacher had written one half century before, again and again, and in my search I see yesterday's questions become today's, today's questions the future's, and the future's become a distressing way of life.

More questions come:

" ... On one hand there is this suffusion of talk on amity and labels about peace, accord upon all Earth. On the other all this High Definition and Dolby Surround Sound of blood-surfing.

"Why this worshipping of weaponry?

"Why this eliciting of respect by instilling fear, by ingraining death-and-rage? Why this flair for mass-expiration in 'best sellers', this propaganda in praise of a state of perpetual war and siege -- in the warring hero -- capitalized in animations on the monitor, motion pictures on the big screen?

"Why this thrust of thirst for Inquisition- and Nazi-like tortures that daunt, instruct and institute terror and minister mistrust, paranoia and neurosis, epilepsy and murder into the innocent, sensitive and impressionable souls of our children today with each such book read and each such film seen around the world, children that are brainwashed and are destined to grow up to become the hard-hearted, senseless barbarians of a boot-camp world tomorrow?

"Why this paean to hate?

"Why this trundling paradox?

"Is it only the paradox of naiveté?

"Where is the source of this child molester?

"Who and what generates the oxymoron?

"How is this condition licensed to propagate and reach our children -- throughout the globe?

"When did it begin to perforate as part of their reality?

"Why children?

"In place of marbles and dolls, rector sets and chemistry sets, microscopes and telescopes -- an endless variety of new and civil toys -- we give them Winchesters and Star Wars, Colt 45s, Desert Storms and Desert Foxes to play with. In place of books and tutoring, art and music -- boundless new horizons of worthy literature, creative and humanizing recreation, means of civic scholarship, harmony and philanthropy -- we give our children Magnums, tanks, Stealth fighters, Harriers, Eurofighters, a licensed NATO on the stand-by to indiscriminately incinerate, butcher and mangle infants, the old, the helpless (not to mention innocent animals and plants. Don't these as well have the birth given right to life? Don't these give sustenance to all of the biosphere, Homo Sapiens included?).

"Why do we hustle into our children's hands raw fury and spite to build upon; rush into our flesh and blood's lives animosity and malice -- these cruel tools of war and slaughter -- to settle differences with? ... "

The text I have unburied proceeds to ask more:

" ... What manner -- brand -- of peoples have the propensity to lavish in, to glory in, crime of wrath, molestation, mistreatment, to splendor in intimidation and harassment, bigotry, in the harnessing of revenge and rancor having as prime premise difference? Difference, as that of the privilege and right to come from another source of parameters, to come from, believe in, stand by, a different process and system of values, concepts and interpretations of Life, Love and Liberty? ... "

Next to this outraged man and educator, I too dare pluck up my courage. I stand by this begrieved father's loss of his boy to those reverent and worshipful in the implements of war and wars themselves and I boldly ask:

Who are, on our globe today, the modern Hannibals, the new Genghis Khans and Tamerlanes that triumph and tradition in arms and armament? Who today thrive on a way of life based on that of the invading Goths and the raiding Vikings, the plundering Visigoths and the butchering Huns, on retribution and raw conflict, on the proliferation of accouterments of bloodbaths, hatred and wholesale killing?

Who prey on the incitement of doubt and insecurity?

Who mock precepts that have passed unscathed the test of time as human reason and moderation, the wisdom found in tolerance and restraint -- simple and plain horse sense in a nut shell?

Who privilege only those who unquestioningly put in with them, but spur their SIA, intelli-bombs, seek-and-sack missiles, spy and laser-bearing satellites and Citizen Protectors in cold candor to devastate and pilferage, pillage and terminate all who do not?

From the text I have undug:

" ... What nations live by the fire arm? The sword? Bolster and brace soldiering from cradle to coffin? Have to dodge bullets in their own city streets, hospitals and schools? What peoples subsist by -- get their kicks from -- the drawing of blood, and silence eternally the irreconcilable?

"What peoples browbeat and mute those opposed to their 'custodian-like' arrangement of things? Hush those who are of a different history or stock of roots, of a contrary trust of values, and those who believe in an alternate form of Democracy?

"What manner peoples thrive on war and sub-war, insurgence, coercion and scuffle -- on the code of the Universal Barbarian? And ... let the rest cry their beloved country? ...

" ... What manner peoples foment internally and internationally the strife of greed as a National Product -- as a way of life -- and with a straight face proclaim this attitude to be 'a marshaling of the competitive spirit'? ... "

I gnaw and pick at parched lips at this man's dare, his pain of loss ... as these numbing questions of his -- this bizarre manifesto-of-a-manuscript I stoop over -- reel into and through my amazed mind to ask in writing that which most of our world citizens cannot utter in resounding protest or even whisper, in principle or document, or indeed in loud thought in 2052, at fear of their lives and the lives of the ones they love.

" ... Who are those that gain profit by candying the act of rapacity? Honey a coexistence that is based on mutual suspicion, so as to bolster their arms sales and fatten themselves from it -- arms sales to my divided island's oppressor, to the fresh primate hordes of a modern roused Attila -- and do so with velvet language and a silver tongue? Who wear the mask of the 'verist', a domino of 'dismay', 'mince' words and didactically 'admonish' -- or use some such philippic poise and prose -- that which they covertly and by example provoke, grossly, in bulk and en mass? War games no less.

" ... Who do away with esteem and self-respect and instead bring discredit to non-war, and cynicism to peace-first, and proscription to entente for peace, at the peace table, prosecuting and abolishing by this attitude and these actions world-wide fidelity, world-wide union?

"Who persist in their own opinion of deontology? Are almost convincingly engrossed in their own efforts at rediscovering, revivifying and resurrecting 'what a comprehensive yet practical interpretation of ethics is', that is, at rediscovering the wheel of virtue; while these same peoples are shystering and pettifogging, trickstering and hoodwinking world economies?

"Who are immuned to pangs of conscience? Self-righteously consider themselves the new Rome Imperium?

"Who reckon themselves absolved from the transparency of pretentiousness and presumptuousness in their usage of words like globalization, democracy and communism, coherence, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Amnesty International and egalitarianism, partnership for peace, socialism and suchlike fiats and caveats as if the globe were a joint-game-board of Scrabble and Chess to have fun with and get rich from; to ridicule and sport from the torture and anguish of wearied refugees, the 35,000 children who die daily from poor peoples' disease; sport with toppled economies and indebtedness, famine, with ruthless and unchecked bombings so their brood of Generals can try out their new arms on living flesh, the afflictions and fears of the powerless, the helpless? ... "

The manuscript then alludes to the 1946 writings of George Orwell. Apparently 106 years later nothing improves ... nothing emends ... nothing encourages:

"In our time, political speech and writings are largely the defense of the indefensible. Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, 'I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.' Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

'While freely conceding that such regimes exhibit certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which certain people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement ... '"

The text of the manuscript goes on:

" ... I now think of the tragedy of my beloved son and land, my beautiful brilliant isle torn in two, and of that other fair and green island, Ireland, and its many sons, the same of fate; and of the sons of the Scots and Welsh, the same of fate; the fate all weakened minorities evidently must face and endure; of the sons of the trampled and smothered Balkans, of the sons of a starved Sudan, an emaciated Africa, the un-unified Koreas, the sons of the calamities of a Vietnam, a Laos, a Thailand and a Cambodia, the toll of sons of an Afghanistan and a Chechenia, the genocide of a Curdistan and the million-and-a-half dead sons of an Armenia, the twenty million Russian sons and daughters a political experiment murdered, of an Iran, of a Lebanon and a smashed and famished Iraq, the sons lost in the fifty-year strife of an Israel and a Palestine, the sons of the world's downtrodden ... and I wonder when this sacrifice of our children will suffice? When will it all end ... as Popes and Presidents, Muftis and neoteric Sultans, Patriarchs and Planetarchs, Rabbis and Prime Ministers promise us it will before, or in, their term of office? As universal treaties and alliances, as Human Rights and International Criminal Courts are there -- are paid billions by us, the World Citizens, each year -- to arrest, deactivate and abrogate ... since 1946?

"When is that 'Universal Soldier of Mercy' sung so much by us -- that long-awaited neutral but civilized NATO and that long-anticipated impartial but humane UN, that modern but just 'Nuremberg Trial' -- spoken of so often by so many coming to judge the handful of overly zealous, dallying, arrogant politicians and gung ho soldiers, the war-gaming power-anxious oligarchy, responsible for the consequence of a Pearl Harbor, a Hiroshima and a Nagasaki and their 210,000 innocent sons and daughters dead, the ten million killed in a First World War that man should have had the manly decency and sense to avoid, a Second World War that extracted fifty million more mostly young innocent lives, the slaying of two million innocent Vietnamese and fifty-three thousand innocent Americans, the carnage of a Mai Lai and a Kent State and a Tiananmen Square and a Baghdad, and the bestiality upon innocence as that scaring the naked napalm-burned tiny torso of a Kim Fok; and wipe out soldiering and bullying once and for all!

"Then this is the violator.

" ... I bring visions of Rwandan, Somali, Sudanese, Bosnian, Serbian, Moslem, Albanian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Armenian, Vietnamese, Chinese and Iraqi, Central and South American, Cuban war- famine- and drought- and disease-vanquished victims to my mind," the teacher says, "and ask how many children's and infants' swelled, empty bellies, napalm-scarred bodies, sexually-exploited lives, AIDS-ridden days have these Christian, Moslem, Hebrew, Hindu, Buddhist ... promises filled or comforted!

"Then this is the coveror of Truth.

" ... Whose history and philosophy of living is based on the business of death-dealing? On the industriousness of warring and fortification? Proliferation of a way of life founded and based on armament and expansion? On a leveling machine of intervention upon, and occupation of, sovereign Lands? The hammers and the sickles? The Apocalypse of the thunderbolts, the pretext of the NATOs, the pretense of the UNs, on a defunct Security Council and the Armageddon of the blazing mushrooms? Whose ambition and 'Manifest Destiny' is rooted in the use of the scimitar and embedded in the horror of the swastikas -- in genocide? The unjustness of, and wastes in, terrorism and murder? In the symbol of the phoenix bird afire? In the Cross aflame? On the word not kept!

"Then this is the breaker of the covenant between Peace and Man, Harmony and Grace, the usurper of our kin and children, Mr. Kipling, the children that will be returned to us when hell freezes over," the teacher writes.

[My intention is simple, yet involved. I can divert the past into a different present by preventing the birth of one man. But to do this I shall have to travel in time. Go by way of the fringe to find his forbears and curb their intentions.

I shall also have to seek out in this past a machine from the stars gone amiss.

But I can do neither, with any degree of safety either to myself or our time-line.

My attitude about all this is one arising from a firm trust that sides with the customary, everyday folk on the street and their time honored understandings, the practical wisdom of Aesop: Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.

I state my purpose then. It is to prove that no union here on Earth or beyond is above the strength and quality of its weakest bond of harmony. As J. F. Kennedy had once put it, "Arms alone are not enough to keep the peace. It must be kept by men."

But some prefer Thomas Hardy's, "War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading." Or even Adolf Hitler's, "Mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles and it will only perish through eternal peace."

The salary of my job, although amply satisfactory, is notably beneath the means of granting so much of an undertaking. So, I have to contribute part of my hard-earned savings to try and find Paul Valery's peace: " ... a virtual, mute, sustained victory of potential powers against probable greeds."

Considerably less nonviolent and pacific has been the harmony within my own health, worsening lately with every change of climate, topical diet and venue of exploration. Gastric cramps, flux and steady loss of weight have been my staunch companions.

My background, too, is not one in full compliance with the further demands I place upon myself; and this time all on behalf of this oddest of odd findings I have incidentally unearthed. I hope this commentary and my journal's notes, in the event of my absence, account enough to shed some lumination on subject-matter that needs much-much more than a single man's shallow reckoning.

No matter. My new venture has its roots in the fact of several archeologists being called upon by the Ministry in 2047 from the University of Cardiff and Edinburgh, Schools of Classical Studies, to come and assay any and all ancient artifacts the two mechanical digging moles, Hephaistos and Demeter, encountered in the city's efforts to complete the supplemental tunneling of the Athens Metro -- left incomplete at the last Games -- before the hosting of the 2052 Olympics.

I say 'new venture' because I had only recently completed a piece of work here that I shall not easily forget.

A job I'd as soon put behind me and talk of as little as possible. It had been a journey through a living nightmare. It had been a hell of catastrophe and madness the people of this city are just beginning to recover from. All brought about by these queer and devastating, as some call them, phenomena, and by the ravings of the demented piece of contraption I mention in the beginning -- not of this Earth, as itself claims and elucidated later on. It as well explained and illustrated things of proportions that boggle one's mind ...

But that's the story in progress. Done in full detail and accounted for, and from which the world in its entirety will probably never recover totally. It is a story that shrinks all else almost into insignificance --

One thing at a time.

Priority has the status quo here, and I shall deal with that before any more comments and elaboration on this other ... this Starseed that changed the immediate lives of all of a dozen of us -- and the ambivalent fate of a world-to-be. Most likely it could still alter the very destiny of humanity in ways undreamable by us.

But, back to the Athens Metro.

Deep under, in the Panepistimiou Avenue Station, just a few meters to the south of the Academy building and twenty meters down, upon my solo and unannounced inspection by my Ministry of the archeologists and the imported soil-eaters at work seven months ago, I catch glimpses of a metallic-like luster.

I stoop and draw out a half-soiled object. The casing is curiously unmetallic to my touch synthesized from sturdy stuff, but with a gloss of polished gold. I clean the dirt off the rest, quickly place it under my gabardine and make no issue of it.

It had not been for my own keeping that I took it in such a hasty fashion, but to avoid the sensation and thus the disruptive effect this would have on an already lagging schedule of the job in progress.

Upon opening the carapace-like container in my residence that night I hear the "whoosh!" of rushing indrawn air, and confront what seems like a sheaf of peculiarly laminated, written sheets. Two initials, T. A., were scribbled at the end of the last page. A manuscript, I surmise, and later proven correct.

I read all that night, and the night after.

In expectations that I had disentombed the anciently old, I instead unburied a pioneer and trailblazer. A vestige of anything but history or prehistory, or before that -- or even anything remotely concerned with those antediluvian parahistorical and Atlantian epochs lost in times out of mind ... the date printed upon it reads 2004.

It is a time capsule. From the last hosting of The Games of Peace in Hellas.

Apparently, the burier of it hoped that the finder would be persuaded by its encounter and contents to continue a most curious pursuit: To thwart off a Nostradamus-like prophesy. A forecast that the author strongly foresaw coming, arising from a probability trend and a converging indication during his own times.

He seemed to fear for his life, as well, at his mathematical discovery, which pointed with deft and fateful accuracy ... at a tendency, already in progress, that would turn into a full-fledged scheme of trickery and intrigue against the citizen's of the world in 2020! He had buried the capsule in a strategically conspicuous spot, as my sources denote, before he, himself, disappeared a few months later.

This begrieved man's motivation to put things right by placing his life in jeopardy had been his deep love for children. His own and all children. For he was not only an indignant -- an anguished and exasperated -- man, but a teacher, a tutor of maths and later of languages, and as such studied the psychology of youth throughout the world. In his studies he discovered that youths do not mutate into bad adults by nature. Nature does not care. They mutate by distorting-standards, the fault of omission and neglect. By self-seeking, unresponsive and unloving grown-ups. And it had been this that wrought-up his spleen and piqued at his grief.

His precision of prediction, our shared love for young people and the bad that was to come before the good, indeed persuaded me to take up where he had left off.

The chronicle's purpose was to forewarn and counsel.

Forewarn. The chronicle alerted that things do not necessarily get better in the world. That entropy can overwhelm man's eternal fight against it, against deterioration. Entropy can prevail in the making of topical choices and contemporary history, profoundly. Due to a revolutionary and relentless mass media, citizen-spying and citizen-filing by other citizens, governments and intranational interests, a negative progression to civilizationizing had been unavoidable and was soon to be brought fully about.

The tutor labeled it "digitization rush".

It had all begun with what we today call "Drug Storming".

Even in his time, people were starting to show symptoms of becoming abnormally standardized and super-stereotyped life-units; of changing into assembly line products. They dressed, spoke and behaved uncannily similarly. Differentiation and variance were ceasing, then even. Women made up their faces the same. Men cut their hair the same. Everybody was beginning to eat hamburgers and drink Coca-Cola, break into drugs and rely on computer servility from Siam to the Amazon.

First came innocent franchises. Then narcotics and terrorism protection. Later, pogrom of politically and socially 'unincorrigibles'. Followed by thrusting victimization onto unreformers defying the new digitized grouping of things.

All of these were paving the way, becoming the vehicle and spearhead, for international 'brokers' and 'consultants' to perforate physically, but most of all, electronically deep within each other's systems of administration; and in due course regulate and steward, run a country, groups of countries, through stock market chicane and Hi-Tech armament cozenage -- remotely even -- over the better half of the world.

The deviation factor within this homoiomorphy norm of regimentation had already commenced shrinking in our teacher's time; had already begun its twenty-year journey, heading steadily towards zero diversion.

Identity meant:

Do what everybody else is doing.

Do it when they are doing it.

Be in phase, in step, smile and show happy.

Otherwise you'll be 'slighted'.

The school-aged young were targeted first, and chiefly.

They were the most impressionable. Had an intrinsic affinity to chemical codependency that was further augmented by subliminal virtual stimulation through drug-digital induced states. And, overall, children were the most cooperative and comfortable-to-mold age-group throughout the world. They were, too, the least resistant to indoctrinate into proselytization, into new ideas and fads, into violence-oriented 'methodologies', 'fashions' and 'goods'.

Adults bucked.

Children trusted.

Children developed into the great spendthrifts, the interacting and unstoppable chain reaction that quickly proliferated; that vindicated itself in the eyes of awesome profits and later absolved in sight of even more imperial returns and turnovers.

Central and South America paid national deficits by exporting marijuana and coke. To our north and east Balkan, Caucasus and Central Asian Tartar-Mongols paid for their arms -- along with their trade of huge reserves of crude natural resources -- by cultivating vast prairies and fields with cannabis and opium poppies and exporting the processed products throughout Europe. Both now protected by Glixxon's ad hoc Statutes.

This pinion of reign began to mesh with the larger gears of voracity and vanity; and, finely, grounded -- invalidating and crushing -- its flocks through the lame wings of narcissism, self adoration, autism: Wholesale daydreams, fantasies, delusions, illusions via natural and artificial morphines, opiates, codeines, soporifics ... were all part of Glixxon's NewTime Religion: Faith Galore, Unlimited.

Hence, parallel to war by means of arms, by the stick and carrot method of Information supply and demand, alongside digiwar came dopewar: The wage of war by drugs. By mounting para- and semi-legal drug-running. This was done by infiltrating huge quantities of drugs into one's enemy country or commercial opponent's stronghold. A stupefied nation, adversary or foe makes for easy extermination, or, subjugation, hence, domination.

So, piecemeal, an even finer and more difficult line of arguments now separated powers: the power of greed vs. the power of justice, power of acquisitiveness vs. power of organized crime, and the power of possession vs. the power of moral practice. Such was the strength of the former that a mother would sell her newborn's kidney to acquire and sample a new 'pharmaceutical', and add it to her lot. A daughter would steal from a dying mother's bequest all possessions to quench her body's crave of gluttony, without as much as leaving a crumb for her brother. A government would amass and stack territorial protectorates' and dependency states' appropriations and misappropriations (and thereof drug treasures in their raw form), when the native denizens themselves starved and were worked to the white of the bone.

What multinational businesses wanted was: To establish and secure an undying and compounding cycle of assimilation of their 'goods and services'.

Goods: Addictives.

Services: Drug-Digital Promotion Networks, first. Detoxification-Neurotherapy Corporates, second.

And all this standardization, being stalwartly brought about by all these principal interests, made our maths-language teacher's job of formulating prediction through statistics quite elementary.

For, a statistician's nightmare is a weighty factor of deviation. A shifting element of uncertainty. A hefty ingredient of unpredictability -- all of which are, as well, a binding presupposition and a tested working vector to a living and healthy evolution.

All of which, however, were steadily and methodically curtailed.

Restricting divergence.

Demoting variety in social contact.

Constricting and crippling a more permanent and enduring face-to-face and hand-in-hand human interaction. Crippling a much sought after and needed human emotionality independent of the drug-digital syndrome. Incapacitating any inherent balm of relief. Revoking any good-will to lean on, and an adhesion that only candor, good faith and caring can provide. And not commercialize, profiteer from, everything for anything.

Not by instilling drug-induced chimeras.

Not by ingraining digital-burgeoned pipe dreams.

Heterogeneity in people's lives was thus to be progressively dissuaded and discouraged ... and by all indications was shortly to become in effect absent.

Absent, so that by 2020 multinational interests, through vast merger, staunch ingraining and influencing, could manage to administer more directly and tightly.

As Eric Hoffer had once said:

"Power is always charged with the impulse to eliminate human nature, the human variable, from the equation of action. Dictators do it by terror or by the inculcation of blind faith; the military do it by iron discipline; and the industrial masters think they can do it by automation."

thus did heterogeneity evolve to quasi-homogeneity. And by my time, 2052 AD, is steadily evolving into mutageneity. P.P.]

***

  The tiny monitor did not allow a good look at the face. The voice on the other end had a tensile timbre to it, the kind that holds a mystical position of strength -- enigmatic, obscure and potent.

" ... be there in an hour and forty minutes."

He clicked the pillow-phone and pulled the covers off. Rummaging in the dark he found his slippers.

He blinked sleepy eyes, deep lagoons of sapphire and coal.

David Porter Chickbrow, ex-astronaut for the past five years, looked more Sicilian than the Sioux of Little Big Horn. His jagged face, sun-blanched and weathered as might have been a Calavrian fisherman's, had the tan color and contours of walnut bloodwood. He had a Roman nose, remnants of what once had been an Oxford accent, and his brows were more like a falcon's than a chick's.

His ancestors, back to the mid-twentieth century, had been laureate graduates of commending institutions of distinguished learning. His grandfather, Sir David O'Killigain Porter, on his father's side, had been knighted for his research probing into undelved-before regions of Philosophical Cosmology. In a way of speaking, he frontiered the path for Krell, Mettropoulos and Lovesigh. His other grandfather, Cleon Morning-Sun, on mother's side, and who was more or less the cause for the sir-name Chickbrow had adopted, had taught at Harvard Government School, Native American Indian Jurisprudence.

Cleon categorically, softly, but with blaring arguments, protested that the thirtieth paragraph of The Declaration of Independence be struck out. That his forefathers had not been, out of no reason, " ... the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." But that his ancestry had been simply people defending their native lands from the boot of the colonist: the invader immigrant. As the latter defended his from King George III, King of Great Britain.

Chickbrow could unreservedly boast that he was not just Sioux, but highly educated and spirited Sioux stock. Chickbrow, however, would never have thought of glorying so.

His train of thought went back to the caller. He'll winnow this one out. As he had done when choosing his crew. Civil servants had the disease.

So now he knew who he'd be dealing with.

Or did he?

People could hide themselves well, he thought. People that deemed themselves high and mighty because those others, higher up, succored them. Especially today. These are wily times, he kept telling himself.

A lot of people had underrated Chickbrow. His soft-spoken intellectual demure was misunderstood for overmodesty, for full NewWorldization, and for his complete proselytization and full indoctrination to and digestion by the overall standing system of things.

With the release of these thoughts the aesthete Oxford countenance suddenly changed into a deep-furrowed and grooved, an etched-edged and disapproving Redman's face. But there was a tipping of the lips there, too. A stern, but visible smile. Momentarily, he wished people hadn't attempted to oversimplify him, to break down the puissant intricacy of his thoughts so as to manipulate him into an allotted and conveniently suitable slot; into a proper aperture of perspective, that involved their best interests at hand.

After all, was he not as much highlander blood as the best of fighting Irish Kelt?

But more was there too. And it was this that strayed by his peers. Missed entirely.

Undaunted and acute instinct.

The survival aggregate.

And the refined warrior. The Fighter-Bard. The Poet-Brave.

As these were at times discovered, they became disquietudes and concerns of only a few. Of mostly his enemies. For him they were his panoply. His arms and guide, his drive. He was not at all the reconciled, 'tamed', beast most took him to be. But a well-grounded organism with subtle, precision discipline and intense, armor-piercing focus. He was intelligent but unassuming. He deviated, when least predicted, insistently and assertively -- inconveniently so for his class and vintage of derivation -- from the humdrum and middling path. Chickbrow ridiculed, by example, the postulated standard of your stereotypical model of the condescended, the stooping and acquiescent run o' the mill docile, obliging, and compliant 'savage' in the eyes of his chums.

Other than Shakespeare, Lord Byron and Sylvia Plath, and a handful more, he'd liked to stretch his own attention upon the human predicament by reciting a poem or two to himself; but one in particular, he sometimes recounted in the presence of colleagues and fellow workers. One by Ian Serraillier entitled Prisoner and Judge:

  1

The prisoner was walking round and round the prison yard.
He had a low forehead and cruel eyes;
You couldn't trust him anywhere.

He dressed up as a judge; he put on a wig and robes
And sat in court in the judge's place.
And everyone said:

'What a deep forehead he has, what learned eyes!
How wise he looks!
You could trust him anywhere.'

2

The judge was sitting in court in the judge's place.
He had a deep forehead and learned eyes;
You could trust him anywhere.

He dressed up as a prisoner, he put on prisoner's clothes
And walked round and round the prison yard.
And everyone said:

'What a low forehead he has, what cruel eyes!
How stupid he looks!
You couldn't trust him anywhere.'

In quite a few ways Chickbrow was unusually un-NovaAmerican. He did not brandish the temperament or physique peculiar to most of the foster race; on the contrary, he was lean and small-framed and when he walked his stride bore likeness to a panther's tread than an elephant's trampling footfall. He was quiet as a tomcat, stealthily effective, shy but not timid, phlegmatic, sufficiently laconic, tolerably antithetical. To him Puritanism as an institution, pretentiousness as a tradition, and prudery as an attitude were one and the same, and the greater enemy to sound, sensible and decontrolled heads. Then again, the race of Indian in him made him un-European enough, too. Along with the Europeanness of refinement and sensitivity, there was the Indianness of rustic boldness and pastoral valor there, too.

Intuition? It was as inborn a trait to Chickbrow as was his color. Enough so as to have the insight to pluck out bad fruit easily. Stuffy collars he did not mind. High brow syndrome it was called. He could not avoid it either during those first days of 'flights to the stars'.

Wonderful, proud years.

He made a face.

How fast they go by.

Outside, thunder came in a stream of four detonations, like bombs in a night air raid.

"Why would anyone want to look at bugs -- at this hour?"

He shook his head sleepily.

A glimpse at the clock atop the night table showed three-twenty. He switched the light on and a copy of Fiery Particles by C. E. Montague dropped to the floor. The lamp flickered, and came back on. He retrieved the book and laid it back on the table between the bonsai tree and the little totem.

In his birthday suit, gangly and lean, he rose, covered his lady's exposed hip with the sheet, and headed for the shower.

The wind and sand howled outside.

The roads were empty at this hour.

The electric storm had ceased and the clouds along with the all-enveloping smog had moved far to the horizon. It turned into a brilliant night. Cities. Months had gone by since Chickbrow last saw the stars. The brown cloud of pollution fog wouldn't let their light through. Cities everywhere. New Mexico was no different. Once maybe. Sparsely populated then. A few civil men and women had come to flee from the strangulating and violent droves of the megalopolises. He stared at the road rushing towards him for a long moment. His black-blue eyes narrowed and his teeth closed tight upon the knowledge of no escape.

He tensed his grip on the wheel.

The green panel at the edge of the dashboard flared a red number, reminding him that his drive card would soon need to be replenished with government credits. He removed and reinserted it in its slit and the warning ceased, at least till he drove the electric car once again.

Having government contracts had its privileges.

Electric vehicles.

Zero exhaust fumes.

Complete and strict control by the government. All natural fuel reserves of crude oil had to be used up before giving public access to the e-cars. The Arab countries had been pumped bone-dry. Now, only the Aegean and Caucasus wells remained. But for how long? Chickbrow considered with a wry smile, what else had the once enterprising West -- the world for that matter -- learned from old Despotism? Oligarchy, perhaps? Aristocracy, maybe? 

***

  At the threshold of 2000 the maxim had been, 'Don't ask embarrassing questions because they'll be ignored. Broaden NATO ... '

The ushering era.

The precursor.

Both continents on either side of the Atlantic stormed like two horses with blinkers. No one knew who held the reins. Why it was brought about. Where they were heading. Till the blind galloping chargers plunged into the bog, dragging behind them a confused and disoriented humanity.

Producer and consumer paid the tab. No acting and celebrities here. No advertisements and splendoring in Hollywoodian glitter and eclat. Only an injured world. The sin: Waste. Barbarous, reckless devastation. The punishment: Deprivation. Crime. Exploitation. A prisoner in one's own home. Lawbreakers no longer mugged. They killed. And so did law keepers.

The interim, undefined and epoch-of-no-reason had befallen upon the unsuspecting, like snow on a quiet wintry night. Only, come daybreak ... it felt more like a bone-crushing right hook. Earth responded. She reacted with violent earthquakes, furious floods, vicious temperature fluctuations and with uncanny and unexplainable phenomena that nobody could clarify or account for scientifically.

The Athens's incident being the most extraordinary.

A mind-numbing occurrence. Talk about it, in the confined but select circle Chickbrow was part of, contested, and at instances reference to it overshadowed, even that of the most important project humanity had ever undertaken: The emulation of the fringe by the fringe minor.

Earth was severely wounded, and Earth retaliated.

Modern man had finally finished destroying what took mankind, history and the planet billions of years of nurturing to ripen into maturity. NovaMan had fully completed slaughtering what civilizations had built with sweat and reason over incalculable hours of hard toil; over the shedding of inestimable hot salty tears, over the spilling of extremely precious and immeasurable hot human blood, and untold calamities.

"The Scourge," Chickbrow huffed loudly.

"Produce! Consume!" cries that would bring the world together.

Internationalism.

Universalism.

Homogeneity.

Regal words.

Words that could cover almost well the wounds of an exhausted world. A tired planet tenanted by tired peoples -- most hungry and empty of hope. Words that had been taken in eagerly as poultice of wisdom. First World locutions that honeyed the suicide pill. Undermined purpose by squandering clear judgment.

"Produce! Consume!"

The sprig of malignancy had thus lodged deeply in. The fever -- a bush fire now through dry savanna.

Nobody had time. Too drained from soaking up the blows of competition to care -- to see if constitutional institutions had been elbowed aside.

With bloated bellies bloated the wallets of a few.

The Soviet Union had had its elite in the Kremlin. The World Confederation had them in The World Federal Reserves and Administration Centers in the North and South Pole.

The Under-ice and underground Shangri-La's were controlled by one Xenon. Once a medical computer-programming student. He had managed through his medical experience and fancy Wall Street misplay to crash the market, then crush it on his behalf; and from the acquired billions to promote world-dependent, 'cancer-healing', drug-induced, detoxification-enhancing, computer time-sharing into a personal monopoly.

Later on, with the continued aid of drugs and computers, he developed his churches-strongholds into a fast growing fundamentalist drug-digital religion to mollify and appease, pacify and control the floundering illiterate, the groping uninformed and the multitudes of the frenetic and hysterical unemployed, the unstable and the malcontent and neurotic that feared to step outside their home's front door and locked themselves in, for months at a time. His scheme had been to supplement first, then engulf and devour all religions and governments. One of his platforms in the quandary that prevailed had been: guarantied security by CPs and safe passage to life havens when the world ended. He became, instantly, a lighthouse in the dun, dismal confusion that reigned the better half of the globe at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

'Where there is power there's corruption,' was never displayed as lucidly as in the start of the third millennium. Governments had closed their eyes to venality. Making room for hostile powers to step in, unchecked, impose their way of life -- a cold and relentless, a harsh, militaristic and brutal way of life -- and slowly take over.

Dialectical materialism had not ceased, people were discovering, but had only changed hands.

"Nothing must interfere with 'free enterprise' and the manner of and right to worship," people cried out everywhere. "Drugs included," put in wedge-wise Glixxon.

Capitalism was considered an inappropriate term, ruled by Xenon's Intranational Council to be a "bigoted word", like Marxism, socialism, nationalism and imperialism, communism and constitutionalism and slavery.

"The Divine Word, the Arms and Wrath of The Lord our God, the Bible, is the only constitution we need in these heathen, blasphemous, treacherous times," Xenon's favorite retort. "Citizens must be protected from their own weak inclinations by God's Armed Angels-Protectors, by our righteous Citizen Protectors ... " as the story goes.

NATO continued to expand and intervene, to intrude, meddle and clash ...

Arms, Armament, Armies became the password to matriculating into NewEra. Into beyond 2000 AD. EU and NovaAmerica rivaled cruelly in the race for Arms production. And their weapons' placements in Central and South America, Central Asia and newly- massively-accessed Africa -- till they began yielding more than what they were winning, and finally affiliated in 2020.

New targets now were the rest of the Carabean Islands, the Indies, the Middle East, the left-overs of the Balkans, East Asia, and a mélange of lesser and overpopulated and hunger-struck, the poorest of, nations.

It was unthinkable to be a country, a city, a family, an individual sans Arms. And the West built on this. It built an empire that idolized quick-war and quick-kill: a day-(or night-)limited, full-scale, attack on one's rival country/company/citizen to inflict as much damage as one could, without repercussions or consequences from overlooking overlords/authorities.

Most of all, it was inconceivable -- a big no no -- to buck the 'big boys'.

The word greed was kicked around by cynics. Was sported about in romp and gambol. Greed for power had never in history occupied a more fertile platform from which to play the field.

Lascivious greed.

Almost ... religious, divine greed.

Chickbrow nodded warily.

His eyes shifted. His head moved from side to side. His belly growled from taut, stressed nerves and muscles.

The 2000's had been the kickoff of the estrangement process of peoples from their own preservation. Governments endorsed beehive assembly lines. Hoarded construction projects in world wide animal havens, sanctuaries and rain forests. Proclaimed that building and fabrication, planet-wide industrialization, would open jobs for the millions of unemployed, the burnt out and the rehabilitating ex-drug users throughout the globe.

Central and South America came first. Africa second. Then Scandinavia and Siberia. Tartary and Mongolia -- Asia next. Vast areas of countries as those of north and central Asia, and Asia Minor that harbored the richest most virginal life-giving natural endowments upon the planet were mutilated and burned down to make living room for factories and production plants. Extensive emigrations of legions of people from their part of the world to this other had begun, pushing the native denizens south. Arming them first and then displacing them so as to pressure and intimidate these vast-numbering peoples to become once more storming nomads and aggressive hordes against their southerly neighbors -- so as to clear more room for fresh arrivals from the civilized West. In the meantime, the Black Sea, Caspian Sea oil deposits and the raw, the gold- and diamond-rich, lands to the north were slowly being commandeered and impounded by throngs of fresh western newcomers; the same concoction of capitalizers that had once invaded Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait, before the petrol went dry, and thenceforth discarded these countries to have them become world ghettos and beggaries, the world's dump-yards.

The assisting promise to accommodate all this hustling: more sophisticated arms and a new generation of Hi-Tech, refined but extremely addictable drug-digital blends. Or, those that wished it: a costy contract of agreement of drug-digital abstention and one's reparation.

UN personnel assisted this global surge of imperialism/colonization by the industrious West. Backed by what had once been NATO. What now became a leviathan of raw military force. A world constabulary of territory- and population-shifting management mercenaries, combatants and medicos -- riffraff, dregs of the barrel, as commonly known. The new name was PATOS: Panworld Armament Treaty for Order and Security.

Ample and mighty words, smirked Chickbrow, that people bought with their pound of flesh of liberty, their peace of mind. Words that throttled and sanctioned the squandering of Earth and dissipation of Respect, Independence and Autonomous Thought.

"Never has there been free enterprise in man's reign without some form of expropriation and subjugation on the stand-by. Free, David, is a very fragil word; enterprise is not." The mockery darkened his face. The voice inside him of the old man had spoken the truth ever since he could remember. Truth, cynicism, irony, sarcasm: they all mean the same today. Lost they have their proper perspective, their leaning, Chickbrow ruminated.

Not only did the new marshaling hail Hi-Tech productivity to be the long sought-after solution to international redundancy -- as new macro-economics texts asserted --, but extolled total alienation.

A schism from old values as: sense of national origin and roots -- ROOTS, a very dear word to Chickbrow -- national belonging, history, consciousness and language: 'NewSay for NewStates' was these days the modish, Orwellian logo. INGSOC and newspeak were, however, refrained from.

But, on the other hand, this new order proclaimed support of and avowal to full 'normality' of all nations collectively: be a gear of support, among the many, to the upcoming 'global plural union'; have the right to choose drug-digitals or detoxicating or both; hail the establishment of a primary de-emphasis on promoting any culture or interests by any one nation or federation. Collectively, yes. With government approval.

"It's a single world, we need a single language, a single consciousness, a single culture of rule. The rest is superfluous disruptive trash to the Big Belief," Xenon's Congress and Senate of the new class-elite, his NovaOrder chorus of lackeys and hustlers of social nobility-strain, echoed.

Chickbrow's foot pressed hard on the accelerator pedal. 

***

  The single, 'God-fearing' young man, a computer buff not twenty years of age yet, had promoted and built all this from scratch: The technocrat-cleric, an astute businessman, had managed to identify the exact moment -- the precise instant that chaos would reign over the world -- to inject the decisive instrument of that singular first indication of his will to dominate on a planetary scale. To thrust that primal ploy-of-a-'Commandment' into all people's Drug-Digital Holy Book and not have it obstructed:

  "I shall slay the Millennium Bug, upon payment."

  Addiction dues.

'An annual church tax.'

"A faith tariff," he called it.

A world levy. No one could do without their PCs. Europe was at a crucial point in its financial, political and defense union -- and so was a computer-addicted world.

His anti-bug bug restored, automatically, the unhintered and continuous correct-functioning of PC, main-frame and network computer inset-calendars, past the 'damnation date'.

The digi-dopers, the strategic and tactical defense commands, the bankers and financiers of the world, recovered, bowed down to him unobjectionably, admissibly and unexceptionably. Reconciled at a loss, on a zero basis. They set the example others followed.

Besides this seemingly innocent and noble church impost being annual, it was retroactive. But provided continuous and spontaneous protection only if renewed before the end of each coming year. Or, it seemed ... one was damned, both, by other newly-discovered, vastly more deadly Millennium-Bug-type viruses and ... and their compounding spawn, the ultimate: Glixxon's 'Hallelujah Virus'.

At the end of the twenty years, and into the grueling lives of most of the then ten billion lost souls upon Earth of The Dawn of Tyranny, in the year of 2020, a 'warm and promising' ray of hope then seemed to appear, to issue forth in an otherwise glum and grim human condition. Glixxon's primary of more 'religious Commandments' to come:

I shall worship the Faith of my Belief in all manner.

The small writing on this contract of promise was too small to take notice of. Thus, hope, soon, transmogrified into anathema, then madness:

" ... In the 'manner' of Arms, Drug and Information Alliances, Economy and World Confederate Concessions led by bogus Composites of Companies, by the method of Sanctioning Drug-Digital and Capital Amalgamations, Ratifying Coercion Acts and Bank Mergers, in the fashion of consenting to Praetorian and Fundamental Combines supporting the NewTime Religion, by endorsing Colonial and Imperial Revival Corporations to spread the Faith ... justified Holy Interrogation included. But through Slavery, no. A big, loud 'No!' to Slavery and to feudalistic takeovers ... " the underground at the time had described it.

Glixxon's God seem to need all the help Glixxon could muster. 

***

 [Counsel. The chronicle I have undug proposes, that by invoking upon and analyzing what will bring about the full closure to this disintegration, conditions can perhaps be remedied slowly but steadily back to health, by us, the people of 2052.

For this matter, the text of manuscript I carry with me (along with the little tidy binder of my own recorded notes regarding it, as this that you read) is the instigator of all my new and most recent inconstancies. When I think I'm through with one ordeal only yesterday ... I confront right anew, afresh, another today.

My dilemmas are of huge proportions as well. For the fringe minor is now complete, as the good Professor had taken me into his confidence and had informed me -- before his rather abrupt departure. And the flawed hedron of the hexahedron, just recently, affirmed that the built toroid -- the fringe emulator -- can be used for temporal displacement, as well as spatial, to journey back through years, decades, centuries, millennia, eons even -- to the very tiny startling blip of time, if I wanted. But we still do not know what tampering with the past will do to the present.

Or the future.

And that leaves me with the other:

How does one dare present to Heads of State, officials, to my, but mostly, to other governments, to this torn world for that matter of 2052 -- my mentor had so amply and completely anticipated -- their foretold and utter undoing?

How does one go about submitting to world leaders a prophecy -- more than a prophecy: an exactitude derived from years of this teacher's mathematical research -- that had tolled the bell of warning fifty years back?

Had it been a milder shock that which somehow had been interpolated, deduced and permutated back then -- has been prowling and in wait -- in ambush for us ever since, I would not hesitate. I would walk straight into our Parliament, to the Chairing President's desk, and lay flat on it my find.

But what anticipates, since my find is indeed genuine, has no kindness to it; not a hint of gentleness indigenous to itself and the two camps the world has turned into. And may be misconstrued by its curt and blunt honesty and straight-forwardness as a direct act of instigated anticonformism -- may be misinterpreted by the oppressor as an express accost for insurgence. Not within our own country -- for we, as a few other small countries, remain staunchly firm and continue to respect Constitutional Democracy -- but to the other half the world's, our world's, present ailing state of affairs of militant and drug- and digital-swayed theocratic 'universalism'.

Further, it exposes wounds, from which others -- mightier, but less moderate than us -- nourish upon, that must be brought to light so as to be seen and therefore healed. Something the stronger, but less tolerant, would not take kindly to today -- and whom my little, but free, country cannot chance by itself to intimidate, nor challenge, by proposing any reform, any referendum of review on issues impending global 'clear and present danger'. I look before me upon an old paper I once had written with the help of the good professor and his wife and now have dug up on 'morality and the international community', in which Raymond Aaron says:

"No prince is entitled to make his nation the Christ among nations. A nation which seeks to live, hence which asserts a will to power among nations, is not thereby immoral."

I nod in pensive thought.
I nod silent at the state of plight man can fall down to.
I hear then ancient voices of ancestors and forefathers. But one above all:

"We are lovers of the beautiful,
yet simple in our tastes, and we
cultivate the mind without loss
of manliness."

And Thucydides becomes my sin of boast ... and guide.

My sole sin of honor is what the past has confirmed: that my nation has the wisdom to live, for it is proven a veteran of surviving. And that it is a pupil not a prince, a disciple not a Christ. And wishes not to commandeer, command or power, but only coexist among nations in harmony. Entitled simply to peacefully be.

But I will cite, not from my countrymen, but, from another as to this clause 'which asserts a will to power among nations':

"Except the blind forces of Nature,
nothing moves in this world which
is not Greek in its origin."

-- Sir Henry James Main

Moreover, my find echoes naked cries of one, perhaps, visionary spokesman for a few sensitive, but alert and sensible teachers.

Why teachers?

Because teachers deal in breadth and depth with the spawn of our future. Because pedagogues are on a day-to-day basis of transaction and responsibility, of rapport, consequence and accountability with what's to become, hopefully, a more sane, judicious and modest generation of citizen's in the world tomorrow.

Educators had been protesting for rudimentary points back then.

Matters which had been ignored ignobly then, to become the blunt crux and issue of human shame today. Points that echo ire and shock, in fact, against a callous and cruel path a lost and desperate humanity of children has been led to take ...

... And the start of it all had been back then ...

... When Arms did their dance of hate, had begun their Gatling jig in the still-tender hands of tiny tots ...

My find, therefore, hollers words and arguments. Establishes premises and grounds. Forwards questions, doubts and controversies most of the world of 2052 -- my world -- is not allowed to even think about, no less assume, report and support freely, vocally and publicly.

Most of all, the text resounds liberty, equity and common sense, the word of courage, virtue and the heart. Above all, the word of the heart: humanity. It does so as only the purity of an unadulterated child in its infinite wisdom of innocence would dare to utter: With sincerity and brilliance, ease and candor, guilelessness and profundity. Martin Wight had once stated, "the political morality is different from the personal morality, as the moral duties of a trustee are different from those of one who acts on his own behalf." I state now, that the teacher and I act as one Trustee of our generation's and our next generation's children. And this action leadens personal weight, a world's future weight, upon our own shoulders.

So, for what it's worth, I search cautiously about and within myself in these last seven months for further evidence and greater proof, and strength. In some way to verify to an indisputable degree the accuracy and pertinence of the mentionings of the weighty archive-text the teacher had interred; and how to reconcile with or even alleviate this tragedy of egomania that has beset and is smothering our world ... along with this other, this shifting-through of vital, but horrendously volumous documented and historical records gathered and contained by an alien machine gone amok. I do this with the prospect that by finding the ontological, societal and ecological affliction's subtler cause, we who care can discover its inferred remedy ... and then together strive to let a suffocating planet breathe again. P.P.] 

***

  Lukas T. Mettropoulos at times thought he saw the face of God.

Was able to touch It.

He was not alone.

Lovesigh too felt himself in rapport with something almighty. Something deeply stirring that came seemingly from high up, from peaks of Olympian majesty. Something like a silent calling that never ceased, always urging to reach the divine peaks. This craving that was inside him had led him to transcend the sky and penetrate into the deep heavens of the other Creation. The Creation not any less holy or awe-inspiring than that of the Bible or any other Holy Book. For him this communion transpired through stars. He got the stars, the tears of God one might say, spilling into his Alpha net.

Dazzling green peridots and vertiters, soft pink carnelians, deep indigo amethysts ...

Why are stars a cinch to catch? he often wondered. What are they? Where do they come from?

"William Somerset Maugham." Lovesigh nudged his questions aside.

Michael obliged with a vibrant voice, "Popular dramatist, novelist, and short story writer, English but born in Paris in 1874."

"An excerpt now, from another."

Michael thought a moment.

"'In resolution, he plunged himself so deeply in his reading of these books, as he spent many times in the lecture of them whole days and nights; and in the end, through his little sleep and much reading, he dried up his brains in such sort as he lost wholly his judgment. His fantasy was filled with those things that he read, of enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, tempests, and other impossible follies.'"

Michael cleared his throat looking over his spectacles.

"'And these toys did so firmly possess his imagination with an infallible opinion that all that machina of dreamed inventions which he read was true, as he accounted no history in the world to be so certain and sincere as they were -- '"

"Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra ... Don Quixote --"

"Yes?"

" -- born in Alcala', Spain in 1547."

Lovesigh was a bibliophile and a literati, among other things -- to the extent his tired body and eyes would permit it. His den, as he liked to call his study, crawled with discolored and stained primitive volumes. A foxed tome with the rubric Shakespeare, another with Old and New Testament, others included Mozart, Aristotle, Michelangelo, Einstein, Tolstoy ...

"Lucritius, Michael?"

"Roman poet and philosopher," Michael responded. "Wrote a long poem, On the Nature of Things, arguing that the human mind and soul can be explained by the laws of atomic structure."

To Professor Anthony G. Lovesigh in Las Cruces, the universe presented less of a problem than the subterfuge of his body. In better days he was a brawny six-two. Graying sandy disheveled hair even now refused to stay in place drooping down over a tall forehead and dipping into a sharp, narrow face with steel-blue eyes.

He sat humped in his wheelchair and took respite. Taking a deep breath he tried to summon his strength for another day.

"It's been uphill, has it not, sir?" Michael asked, in a kind, feeling voice.

Lovesigh nodded, meagerly.

He saw by the look of utter lack of surprise on Michael's face that he must be in fact a gruesome display. Unruly and drawn. His face bleached. An antique of a man perched on a day-to-day tight-rope. Right on the brink of collapse. Michael, however, gave no sign of being aware of any of this.

Huffing and heaving Lovesigh tried to quench his ailing lungs. Even the keyboard. Plugging at it bankrupt him. The work-spells got shorter by the week because he grew so weary. They called it Parasympathetic Diaclonisis. He called it ParaDi.

"Marco Polo."

"If I may inquire, sir -- " Michael hesitated.

Lovesigh nodded. He closed his stinging lids to rid of the windows' glass glare.

"Sir, how did 'ParaDi' come about?"

Michael stood perfectly straight and motionless next to the wheelchair and a mite in back of his employer, waiting to retrieve the empty medicine glass. In his present bearing he considerably resembled a Doric column, bedecked in crisp black attire, which as well spoke flawless Queen's English with a touch of Scot.

Behind the marble sheen and dignified veneer, grief overwhelmed Michael's heart. He assented with a nod absently, then shook his head again at something inassimilable to his own experience.

Oh, the affliction was not all-consuming. His employer could chew his food and managed in an awkward fashion to lift a forkful of food to his mouth without spilling it.

Three months ago the Professor had been able to stand unassisted by him, and take a few steps in the morning with his crooked rosewood cane. Go to the toilet and take baths alone.

But now, most of the time he lingered like an empty crumpled sack in the steel wheelchair. For his tendons and ligaments had withered, and heeded him feebly.

Michael's station and standards, however, would not allow him to exhume all that abided inside him. Other than comport solace and approbation through fidelity and fellowship, expressly at onerous times such as of late, Michael's presence seldom vaunted notice.

There was a lag before Lovesigh answered Michael, and when he spoke, there was an indication of immense effort in his voice.

"The purpose of exercising, maintaining a good diet and enhancing a mind to be alert at all time is to keep the equilibrium scale on health," Lovesigh said. "I had not missed a day from these good disciplines."

Michael nodded, fingering the gold watch chain that hung from his vest.

Lovesigh arranged himself in the chair.

"If that balance is knocked off kilter, the first things that would happen would be insufficient stamina and atonality. Then comes depletion, exhaustion. Finally, emptiness."

Lovesigh's limbs began to ache. "And it befell on me." He hurt as though he had just finished running a marathon. "The last man on earth that it could happen to, I thought at the time. I used to be the healthiest bloke (you Brits would say) around."

Lovesigh's eyes flicked over to the mainframe, dismissing it, settled on the desk next to it.

At that moment he struggled with all in himself, and with all the elements outside, it seemed. Death -- they -- had taken whatever meant something, almost his reason for being.

He turned to the one friend that remained.

"Be it a Christian, a Hebrew or a Moslem God," he whispered to him, "it's man's birthright to defend what's his. The most notorious butcher of them all, behold Michael: nature's programming. Imposed, subjugating, lethal, carved in us, upon our feeble genome."

He gulped some more of the noxious drug Michael had handed him.

"Is not the Universe -- Eternity, big enough -- to accommodate God -- and man? Yes, man, this mote, a hint longer?.." Lovesigh stopped. His voice faded, lips moved only.

He sipped some more of the stuff.

He moaned a little.

Felt rage bound to a wheelchair. Shame at his cruel demonstration of his loquaciousness. Arrogance and audacity he had no right to catapult in Michael's presence. His rudeness was insufferable, to himself as well. The man next to him was the closest thing to a saint -- a good Samaritan through and through ...

He felt subdued.

The idea of an impending death tormented. He combated it. Shut his brain to it. To part like a blown candle.

He paused, appalled.

(Other than her, Michael was the only soul Lovesigh comforted to.)

He shut his eyelids.

"A year before you came ... "

He grimaced as he took another swig of medication.

" ... four years ago, ParaDi made its debut."

He grunted, galled.

"Tremor of the lower limbs first. Then, augmented organ behavior. Fluctuation in enzyme and hormone consistencies, dyspepsia, hepatic and pancreatic exoncomata ... "

Lovesigh lifted an eyebrow at Michael, but continued his stare elsewhere; at a point perhaps of another place another time. There was a further little silence. His eyes watered. He gagged some. He thought for a moment that he had gone too far.

Michael bit his lip. "I wish -- " He groped for words. He glanced down, and away. Everything this man was telling him was so utterly foreign to his own experience. But to enter the other man's world ... he had only to look. To lock eyes with him. "I wish, sir, I could do something ... " he just said, after a moment.

A crushed tired look forged on Lovesigh's face.

He sighed.

Treatment, even by the best around, wasn't all that nice either. It was in these therapy sessions that Lovesigh actively weighed life and death. More often listing towards the later. Lately it was as it had never been before. His doubts about the timely construction of the fringe were not any fewer.

"You do help," he said, finally.

Michael thought he sensed comfort in that voice. 

***

  Lovesigh glanced at the old grandfather clock that stood between the two windows across from him.

He pushed himself up into a more straight sitting position in the low wheelchair, and leaned forward, struggling against the intrinsic inclination of his bones to crouch, until he could swing himself towards her.

He saw Michael attending him.

Michael always helped. He didn't even have to say anything. Simply knowing that Michael was there, that someone was aware and responsive. It was sufficient for Lovesigh.

Past the anguish of terminality, was the affront of the disease to Lovesigh's humanity.

He shook his head. He looked back at Michael.

He was just too close to quit breathing just yet.

"Sputtering, but alive," he wanted to tell Michael.

He fought not to be indulging, to be silent and not abusive. He buttress himself some more. He gulped down the last of the poison. The sickle-hauler was going to have to earn this demise, he thought, stubbornly.

Lovesigh would have to take his courage and mold it into life. For her.

He leaned against the safety belt of the wheelchair. He reached frontward to a live sparkling monitor. His weak arm rose and a finger pointed to juxtaposed flickering specks in front of the Orion spiral of the Milky Way, at the top center of the screen.

There, that one there ...

Michael saw Lovesigh pitch up front against the belt, eyes immovable on touching and radiant pin-points. Lovesigh was barely smiling, drawn to them. The expression in his blue eyes was stronger, more eager, almost a voracity. Michael looked back at the screen, pondering, what the other really saw in it. He bowed across the desk, along Lovesigh's awkward twisted figure, to fine tune the monitor's controls.

Lovesigh's face caricatured. He began to ache, but he tried to ignore it.

Michael glanced at him, a fleeting disquiet in his face. He ran his fingers across the panel, trying for the right settings.

The heavens in the screen gyrated clockwise. Then counterclockwise. They settled resolved, and magnified a certain sector of the galaxy's spiral. The screen cleared some more. It recreated the group, that had been at the uppermost before, in its geometric center. Unfamiliar but sharply defined traces slowly became spheres of loud colors and faultless distillate blackness. The double star, due to the utter emptiness it circled, filled the screen and made all else drab by comparison.

There. Somehow...she's there.

"Stop!" Lovesigh expelled at Michael, recovering from his trance.

"What is it, sir?"

"Something that's utterly missing," Lovesigh said.

He settled back in his chair his eyes filled with the other side of faraway.

"A comforting dilemma of absence, is it not Michael?" He stared at the overhead monitor.

Michael stepped aside. He made more room for the other's scanning eyes. But at a blink of an eye he found himself disoriented and dazed, engulfed by the hologrammatic aspect of the projector; by blazing configurations that just hung hovering, time-suspended explosions in vast sacraments of color-clashing-color. To his right, next to the tip of his elbow, were utter inky blotches edged with the luster of a dawn's silvery fringe.

Lovesigh was now feeding his own data into the system. His fingers, clumsily, moved quickly on the remote keyboard in his lap. He was superimposing on the images.

Lovesigh himself, Michael observed, sat poised to be both man and angel. A nebulous but visible cast covered his form by the brighter outpouring light of the hologram. Michael drew back slowly. He could feel the Galaxy shrink them. It flooded the large room, encompassing and submerging them. The imperial distances they were part of only expanded lavishly to send themselves forth, farther over the august space of which fabric they consumed. He savored and venerated the splendor of its grace. It seemed to want to release Michael's soul. At the same time his instincts struck out. His sanity yanked at his body and reason. His astonishment, his awe, daunted. It intimidated havoc with his senses, and fears, and wonderment, his very essence.

Lovesigh saw. He grew conscious of Michael regarding in an odd way. He labored to find appropriate words.

"Makes motes of us all, doesn't it?" His spent voice only a hint, an intruder in Creation's archipelago.

Michael consented. A lingering minute later he registered his full nod of agreement.

Lovesigh's tone was only slight, a betrayer's whisper. His tenor carried intensity and distress far more desperate than Michael had ever before heard.

There spread, along with the Galaxy before them an uncanny, dynamic quiet. Michael wanted to say more, but didn't find articulation seemly just then. He instead looked directly at Lovesigh. He stepped closer to him and saw that the man's eyes were wrought with wary, and drawn. Lovesigh's face appeared to shift to woodenly pallid amid the harsh and soft chromatic radiances of the Galaxy. "Profound," he sighed simply. Shook his head slightly, almost unsure.

Lovesigh already could feel the pressure grip at his body, knotting the tormented muscles in his thighs and shoulders, the torture in his gut, clawing up his chest and backbone...he shuddered.

"Sublime!" Lovesigh managed.

His voice came out deep and stirred now. He swiveled his chair to search the lit countenance. For a moment he reached out, laid his fingers gently upon her face. His fingers were very lean, and very cold; they traced a line along Penelope's cheeks and nose.

Michael did not blink. He did not waver his look from this extraordinary sight of union, did not move toward or away. The silence reached out between them, bridged what otherwise manly words try but fail to bridge between two men.

Michael nodded again, his face naked as the ghost of an expression changed his formal features. He did not let on that what he had seen in the others deep-set eyes just then was not fright, but something greatly more unsettling, undefined. It was sum and substance, the pith of agony...and the repose one finds in reverence.

Lovesigh let his hand fall to his lap. He turned away, then looked at his manservant.

A quick change wavered then over Lovesigh's face.

A strained smirk of exasperation.

Lovesigh at times felt entirely alone and feared it. Despised himself for being so completely crusty. But still, despite his best effort, it happened every time.

Mostly when he saw that man.

He had never understood why.

A deluge of only the most rustic--insolent--words tickled his palate, wanting out. Lovesigh acknowledged this with an awry smile now, and shrugged his shoulder. He need not probe further, although he could still hear the brassiness in his own voice...when he confronted that confounded man mostly.

He broke off, shifting his gaze atop his desk, and the lines of his face dug and etched themselves deeper. Infinity and her lay a mite from his fingertips...and all he could think of was his next sortie with ol' twinkle-top Fagan. 

***

  Chickbrow checked his progress en route. He was still more than fifty kilometers from his destination.

"The place is going to pieces. Who heard of monopolizing petroleum and its derivatives and by-products, transportation and ... the dumping and burning of industrial wastes in The Caspian Sea?" For this, his foster, nation was the world's greatest offender. He tried to shake off a shower of blood-red contemplation.

He fixed his eyes upon the road ahead.

One day he had been orbiting over Tibet. His observation ports lavished with the prominent, clear, frosty peaks of the Himalayas. Unexpectedly, he had been swept by an abrupt, powerful desire to about face outward and shoot away into the stars, far from this place; until all of the Earth was behind and all the Galaxy clearly ahead. He had resisted it, finally to bank down towards Las Vegas Spaceport and land, as he had times before.

This night, as he approached the central facilities through the familiar network complexes, he could not help but notice the lighted Mite Industries symbol blaring back at him atop the Administration and Management Building. It was a triangular, irradiating, chrome, insect head -- that looked more like an inverted pyramid having two dark amber eyes -- with two copper antennae-feelers rising to form an incomplete triangle that enclosed a cast-bronze and sea-green Earth.

Soon, he hoped, he would run through that gap in the antennae triangle that pointed, and gave access, to the expanse of space. And see those distant suns. See them and the worlds that ellipsed around them as he had never seen them before -- up close. He did not realize until then how much he had missed being out there.

When he thought of those who were responsible for his being taken off the space program as active astronaut and placed in this gopher hole -- Chickbrow felt ancient inborn, a redman's, instincts surface, surge out in an uproar. He beheld in his mind's eye images of tightly drawn bow strings and sharp arrows, feathered spears, and streaks of red and black paint on sweaty tense bodies, and listened to tom-tom's beat of great battles to come, to the raucous of stormy dancing around a blazing fire all night long.

Poverty groups were all over. Beggary and abjection had been herding to such degrees so as to make Chickbrow's heart beat madly. People were fed up with the standardization of their lives, of having others choose for them. They were not software, a routine, a program of repetition. They were sentient beings, a humanity conscious and alive. They had initiative and wanted to use this incentive.

He shook his head. Maybe the individual citizen in a world of eighteen billion was a petty subject-matter. So what, if a few million went under?

"They can't manage this planet," he said, loosening his collar. "They've established that much."

He just wanted to sink into himself and come out when it was all over. Nothing was more sorry than a poor act, a performance sans artiste, a doggoned flop of a show.

"You sure made a mess," he heard himself mumble. "You didn't miss a thing -- and people want out. It still doesn't make sense." He tried to figure out what more the government men wanted?

He broke off his soliloquy, left questions unanswered, his heart heavy.

Chickbrow's color had roots, and this didn't let him forget it. He was the native here. All others were immigrants. They were the conquerors, the Caesars. And they screwed up what they had conquered, their imperium.

The conquerors had massacred his kind.

Chickbrow had come from a proud lineage.

He sometimes shrugged it off.

But it was not false pride.

And he was not ashamed of it. He simply made concessions where he had to. But more often than not he became irked with all that he saw go on around him.

At cycles like these he reverted to methods modern society had lost from memory. He journeyed high on a mountain. Above the cloud of smog. He stripped his clothes off. He needed to feel the sun and cold needle his skin, penetrate deep into him; to sense life effervesce within him fighting the heat and cold off -- thus live. He breathed the pure biting-cold oxygen deep inside his lungs. Feel it slowly transfer him into a closeness with all that surrounded him ... up there high. He let the islands of puffy white clouds, a stone's throw above his head, in a deep indigo sky, have him.

After ... he was the calmest man in town. No pills, no alcohol, no nicotine, no gorging himself with trash food. No skull-joy helmet to pacify him, no hologrammic media so as to keep him tucked nice and safe inside ...

Going outside for a stroll was frowned upon in NovaAmerica.

It bucked its motto: Quiet, Order, Security.

He produced a lemony smile and touched some keys on autodrive. He didn't really have to be on a mountain top ... Or be completely naked.

But it helped. 

***

  " ... I lock horns with myself and ask scores of questions of him. For this thing-to-come does not absolve me," the teacher/author of the text I have uncovered continues. This no longer seems to be an obituary for just a lost son, but an obit for the soul and conscience of a lost worldful of children as well.

"I feel crushed then.

"Driven to the ground.

"So much close to earth is my face that my nostrils flare with the stench that holy mud of dirt-and-sweat, of dirt-and-blood give off.

"Under the bearing weight of little, light and listless bodies I groan and grind the grit in my mouth and conscience because I am pinned beneath as well the staggering weight of my own silence at man's insanity to man. I grunt at that moment and bemoan at my naive wit, at being an uninvolved observer, a head-nodding or head-shaking partaker at others' protest-stands or death-calls and at another's misery. And as though suddenly awaken from a smothering dream, I gasp, breathe in deeply and let out my scorn at my eternal un-participation, and I am appalled both at myself and at this stealthy undertow that's approaching with each day passing. What will this coming, this different-war's Gross National Product be?

"I cringe at my lowliness, my submissiveness and docility for not saying, not doing, not believing enough and sooner.

"I recoil helpless from the sight of memories," the teacher writes, "of a martyrdom that belittles all others; a holier than holy agony made of the mounts of dismembered corpses, the nameless mass-graves of the millions of skeletal victims of dead due to difference.

"The difference to be another human being.

"Of Jews and Poles, of Russians and Americans, of Britons and Germans, French and Italians, Greeks and Yugoslavians and Cypriots, Arabs and Persians and Africans, of Japanese and Native Americans and African-Americans, Koreans and Indians and Pakistanis and Cubans and Armenians, and on, and on, ad infinitum. Oh yes! all the innocence war, any war, silent or cold, hot or loud; and any massacre, obvious in boast or hidden in shame, has robbed us of. Has usurped life and freedom from us and our children by way of our Colonels' and Generals', our economists' and leaders', by way of our spiritual counselors' and religious vanguards' abstention from peace.

"And my eyes ache to cry.

"My lips strain and lisp to utter the fit word.

"That 'keen' expression.

"The 'in thing'.

"To drive through to our young, to thwart this frenetic race to extinction!... "

I break away from the chronicle I have unearthed distrait. I cringe in the effort to re-think of these things, in the peace and reason of my own thought, of my own values, on my own.

This time it is a war we've declared on and have been engaged in against our very own Planet.

Against all odds.

Against our very source of breath.

It is the final war.

So, I entreat myself and the other veterans of peace and reason, to point out to these youths the other route, the 'road less traveled', so as to absolve our generation's guilt, shame, our frustration at a future I see coming like flash fire of apocrypha.

Approaching like a Mosses climbing down from Sinai, tablets of promise in hand and palpitations of hope in heart and ... only to confront his people worshipping the golden calf of obliviousness and insensibleness. I appeal to our children to pardon our arrogant claim of my-way-of-life-first. To forgive our careless and ceaseless -- habitual by now -- abstentions, that gave way to our worship in the golden calf of Arms, Armament and Armies: the by-products of the Euro, the Greenback, the Yen -- of the Glixxon God and Glixxon-way-of-life, of the Glixxon array of pitfalls, this carnage we call consumer society and this mindless means of devastation we call productivity -- that is steadily consuming man's notion of judgment. I pray these children of ill fortune -- our children of mischance and grief -- make peace among themselves and with us, our weary Planet and their own children.

" ... For we of those '60s," says the teacher-author, "sang all too aloofly, thought too loftily, and made love way too carefreely, bled too much too willingly and too oftenly ... while the quiet ones, the coy and shy ones, unawares took the reins in their hands. We were too busy shouting with flower-clenching fists brandishing tall and peace-making symbols flourishing high to stop the wars and strife the silent ones kindled -- perpetuated on...."

I halt my reading altogether and think deeply of this.

Within this recluse process my mind articulates to me, intact and with perspective, of the myriads of bony half-dead African children who will not see another rising of the sun today in 2052. Of the riffle-dragging half-infants that will be shot away before the dusk of nightfall today in 2052. Of the mutilated Asian children whose parents break their bones so as to attract the alms of pity today in 2052. Of the shot Latin American children today in 2052 whose still dry mouths froze, while wearing that hollow echo: "Why!"

And a cry, then, from deep in me calls upon, alludes to, the simply-put wisdom of a William Wordsworth:

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man.

" ... Over and over I hear," continues the text's writer, "the heart-shriveling crying, that heart-baring weeping sob of ex-Soviet Block and Lebanese, ex-Yugoslavian, Albanian, Armenian and Kurdish, Bulgarian and Romanian, Persian and Iraqi, Tibetan, Afganistanian, Philippine and black African and American -- the world's -- orphans, foundlings and castaways, derelict infants and strays, and I want desperately, entreat for it to stop... "

© 1999 Vasilis Adams Afxentiou

Vasilis is from Athens, Greece, and can be contacted at: vaxf@hol.gr

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