In Arms We Trust

Part Two of Five

by Vasilis Adams Afxentiou

 [It is the eve of The Games of Peace for the rest of humanity. Athens shines in splendor, glory and light once more. If only the pledge of truce intrinsic to the Great Idea were here to be affiliated today, too.

For me it is a time of doubt, of an approaching tempest, or, a resplendence of never before that draws near. I don't know which.

In a bout with myself, I initially think of my years of work: To have it all finally come to the point of this text? I next think of my children and the brightening of their faces at the soft patter of little feet, the chatter and murmur of wee voices of their own children in their puerile simple playing.

And I ask. What's to become of them?

And I know.

I know thoroughly the future these little babes I bounce on my knee -- the morrow, I want them to live in.

And it's nothing like the present.

Therefore, I don't wish the manuscript I have found to decay into a futile-fated Cassandran affair if it must not. I want it to be used -- to be as strong a testimonial as ever -- to save the children. To rid us of this my-federation-first and my-standards-first, my-ideals-first and my-brand-first, my-faith-first and my-way-of-life-first, this dog-eat-dog power plague. And not a word uttered concerning the balance of our future -- about the sobriety of our offspring.

For this reason I rummage ruthlessly, all over the world for affirmation, tendencies and trends, modicums even, of spoors of why what has fallen upon us has done so, to use these as arguments of support for betterment. This belief of hope that things can be altered even today, slightly even, is what impels me on.

I warn where I can using good reason and healthy logic, and, where need calls for, by foreboding and illation grounded on religious confirmations and civil principles, rooted in civic-institution, true pride, and established by political, but humane, deontology -- no matter the ideology. Anything, and all, to sidetrack this malison of head-stooping mindlessness on one end, and all-out belligerence on the other that is draining us. Which, after finishing infecting our children and the whole of Earth, will surely bound up and blast out, and contaminate stars and galaxies.

I wrangle tactfully with governments.

I come to grips with social orders.

I try disputing cleverly with the high and mighty of the business, political and secular world. I strive all the while to put in my two cents worth so as to mitigate the greed of gain, the greed of jurisdiction and proselytization -- the very circumstances the time capsule's chronicle, this fantastic and urging, but prophetic, manifesto, points to that have led up to a divided Earth and an intolerable way of life.

Why oppose, play tag and peril with the professional killers and sophisticated assassins of SIA, venture in harm's way of today's nobility, aristocratic oligarchy, armed to the teeth?

Hand the bloody manuscript over to them, you might say, don't search for proofs or truths ... and be done with it!

And I ask, What fate will it have?

Integrity, fidelity, as history has shown, have second place to self-interest. Not I, nor the story I have undug, can change this. Can stand a chance.

Lamentable?

Indeed.

But, principles, ethics, morality have all been made it appears relative and plasmatic, suspended -- by us -- by man. They have been translated so, so that they could be tampered with it seems, compromised perhaps, then suffused in their slanted, tainted cast throughout. Hans Morgenthau had once said:

"Universal moral principles, such as justice or equality, are capable of guiding political action only to the extent that they have been given concrete content and have been related to political situations by society."

And to my thinking whisper those other words uttered perhaps in less resound, not any less than two-and-a-half millennia before: "The four chief virtues of the soul are wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance."

Then occurs the concrete content that comes from unveiling more of Plato. From the society-related political situations of The Republic. A content that transcends by exceeding the confines of a purely political treatise: Plato believes one cannot soberly institute a political theory without first instituting a study of truth for it to rest upon (and profiteering at the expense of the poor man's purse, the third world's pouch, is not a study of truth, by anyone's interpretation, but a cogitation on an alliance -- indeed a conspiracy -- with the Seven Cardinal Sins). Here, in Plato, we find not only a map of human life as it ought to be lived -- in harmony with nature -- but also of the human soul and the Universe it dwells in. Plato's major aim is a moral or practical one. This is shown by the Seventh Epistle, but as well is indicated by the fact that the capping achievement of his prime and old age, the Republic and the Laws, both essentially deal with practical matters: Virtue is knowledge, he says, not merely an abstract, academic knowledge, but a concrete, pragmatic knowledge -- not disregarding theory of course.

And to my thinking then, as well, occurs the concrete content that comes from the Symposium of Plato: Love and Truth are as indivisible of Virtue as the body is of its blood. As inseparable as the intellect is of its soul. Love and Truth, that unity of duality, is as uncompromisable as a single and common Universal, Creation-Formed Mainstream -- the least common denominator of Reality -- and above man-made law, higher than any further dichotomy or interpretation by law, for its essence of purpose is to mature into, harmonize with, the Whole.

Offhand, it seems theories of ethics and relativities of ethics confront and convey such meaninglessness in the tiny sphere of man- or nation-made rectitudes, ideals, uprightness and standards of conduct, that they appear glaringly vague and prominently Lilliputian against, let's say, the wisp of a nova or the blaring whisk of a supernova, or to that of confronting at ground zero a nuclear meltdown, or living directly under an ozone hole.

Nature can so easily conclude us, one might say. As it has just as effortlessly conceived us. No matter the quality or degree of our scruples. One only, of several moderate size meteors silently plunging toward and into our biosphere -- as those that had once plummeted into Jupiter's -- will do it.

Who would be able to deny a whist of fancy of Creation, to subtly brighten a star-lit sky above another world's posterity, light-years beyond, with the detonation and cindering of our own solar system? What Law or God of the Christians, the Moslems, or the Hebrews -- or Gods of any living entity -- can prevent another star of Bethlehem from happening? Arise from our own sun's swan's song. To guide other Wise Men on Earths of other galaxies to their own Christ?

With all our flaws and morals, greeds and principles, selfishnesses and ethics, what's preventing our own radiation poisoning, our own pollution contagion today? Man's extinction from man's own hand-effaced hand-scuttled, smog-swaddled planet this minute?

So, what 'remains'? 'Lives in hope'?

How about a vision, dream-like and deeply-felt, of emulating (perfectly simulating) in the thrift of a hypo-second all that eternity may be ... and then some? And in a wink of an eye for our mortal brain to grasp, to cut through the Gordian Knot of limits and mediocrity, our ephemeral emotions to savor, to share with an infinity, the very source and spore of splendor, share with an eternity the identical crux of endowment the seed of Creation has shot up from -- be there no second blink? For, do not all five, Virtue, Love, Truth, Learning and Creation praise acclaim to the preexistent, the transcendental, the mystique -- exalt life's awareness as the pinnacle, and not death's oblivious annulment of life? P.P.]

***

It took Chickbrow less than an hour and forty minutes to drive to the shaft.

Only one figure stood at its damp bottom next to the vault door, which was easily big enough to crush a tank. The figure below him fidgeted impatiently. Beads of sweat covered half the man's face and baldness, the other half a hand with a white handkerchief. The man waited, was restless when the elevator ramp lowered down into the vault, then started to approach.

"Sifted you said? Piped?" There was the snap of 'gotsya!' in Abe Fagan's words. He halted his quick short walks back and forth at the shaft's nadir and did not suppress his growing uneasiness. Was the man before him being so vague on purpose? Or was it the loss of sleep? Fagan couldn't decide.

The other didn't reply, but stared. Abe Fagan didn't say much after that either. Instead, he surveyed Chickbrow's appearance as Chickbrow seemed to study him too, unheeded, in the gloom of the surrounding wet walls of the cavern.

An acrid smell of musk and soggy dirt hung heavy all around. It was uncharacteristic of the former astronaut not to be explicit, or to wear an untrimmed beard. Seen up close, his hair was ragged, unkempt. The man had been always clean shaven; he had trimmed his hair once a month, every month -- his file said so, even under the nerve-breaking conditions of interplanetary space expeditions. Maybe the strain had gleaned some manners from his conduct.

"Exactly," said Chickbrow, finally, startling the man. The square features of the face were set like ice, red ice.

With this man, Chickbrow thought, there would be little room for humor and finesse, his favorite jiggling tools.

Abe Fagan, the man from the government, drilled on, growing pink-faced. He turned, almost brushed by the other, and kept on walking away. "The debris, Mr. Chickbrow," he called back, a hollow echo trailing him.

Chickbrow buffed a little. "First ... "

Chickbrow followed after him.

Fagan's eyes squeezed together to cut through the sparsely-lit tunnel and locate the maze of piping.

" ... the bore's fill is sifted for precious elements, then piped underground," Chickbrow continued. He offered Fagan what seemed to be a gracious smile this time. For some reason he enjoyed watching the other.

"Mr. Fagan," Chickbrow's tone fell half an octave as he approached, and what remained of a smile waned some. "Any idea why Council-Senator West killed himself?"

Fagan dithered.

"Didn't want to get left behind, Mr. Chickbrow."

"That's no reason to run smack into a beacon shadow."

Fagan frowned.

"Beacons must have been the popular thing before being band," said Chickbrow.

In a year, two at most, the whole of Earth would know; of something that went terribly wrong with this planet. And Fagan had just these few months to work out a colossal number of details so a huge count of people could be rescued and saved.

"When several thousand people just decide to stop being via the beacon shadow," Chickbrow said, "it's simply because they don't want to get left behind -- from death?"

"Not death. 'Immortal Light', 'Living Light'." Fagan's voice went throaty. There was a touch of dread in it. He did not like sociable deliveries, not under these circumstances. "It's what the Senator once said. Satisfied, Mr. Chickbrow?"

He already told this man too much.

Chickbrow was on a need-to-know clearance. So was himself. He at once felt a rash craving to be enlightened as well. He speculated if Chickbrow would be as unselfish as he with information.

Chickbrow shook his head in the twilight of the tunnel. Glittering highlights trickled from his thick red-black tufts and beard, coruscated with luster as they fell. Smeared on his cheeks and bare neck from passing through the Carlsbad Foundry above were twenty-four carat gold specks and hair-thin slivers of unalloyed silver mixed with sweat. The shaft floor around them was littered with minute shavings the vents sucked in and brought down, forming a glistening carpet of dust -- a few million dollars worth of lint.

Fagan closed his eyes for a moment. "Ant-mites don't do that -- the separating?" He switched to his former tone. That 'gotsya!' echo didn't go away.

"That too, Mr. Fagan." Chickbrow swallowed any further remarks and impartially recounted, shining the flashlight at the rows of one-inch pipe running over their heads and into the depth of the shaft. Probably Fagan already thought of him as his property.

"The ant-mites first remove all crystals or sediment of viable worth, and the remaining rubble they carry cross-state to miscellaneous industrial, manufacturing and construction sites. The tubing is there for their protection only. And for reasons of expediency of course."

"Of course," said Fagan, his timbre augmenting and crackling just. He removed his wire-rimmed glasses and exhaled on the lenses. He wiped them clean of the gold and silver with his white folded handkerchief then dabbed his round face and spangling baldness of his head. "And once they've reached their destination they -- "

" -- they double back for more, till there's not a fragment of grain left. Very efficient little workers. We're not holding back evolution, Mr. Fagan. We enhance it," commended Chickbrow. "The air in the pipe network is continuously recycled. The atmosphere is quite to their liking: not too dry or humid, slightly more oxygenated and glucose-vapored. The ant-mites must love it."

"They must, now." Fagan's uneasiness returned. Disinclined, and with misgivings, he began to toss around a question in his head, and settled at being provoked at Chickbrow's gleam. And somewhere along this enhancement, he thought, industry and technology let loose ... the guts of Pandora's Box ... the start that soon will wipe out civilization.

Still ... live insects ... guided by the pipe ... to go cross-state and through hundreds of miles of routing, carrying their grain of load before returning to start the journey again ...

A queer meager smile surfaced on Fagan's face, but his voice came out pungent, pitted with disdain. "Why must they love it, Mr. Chickbrow?" he finally asked. He raised a set of bushy, stray brows.

Chickbrow didn't know it but he was the first man in years to see Fagan break a simile of a smile.

"Because they're made to, Mr. Fagan," he returned, with a broad friendly grin.

***

When she woke that morning her mouth and throat felt like the Sahara. As well something nibbled at her thoughts, but she blinked annoyed and shook her head.

Today she had other things to think about. A few made sense, most did not.

What was a classical guitarist doing in Athens without a job? What did she loose that she was searching for in a country only vaguely familiar to her?

Memories. Ah yes. And endless stories: Great-grandparents who uprooted themselves from this land, many years back, to find a sure job and a decent life across the Atlantic ...

A short while later the warm water made her tingle chasing the thoughts away. Nothing like two minutes under the shower in the morning to put the day right, she mused. She closed her eyes, leaned back and opened her mouth. She spat out the refreshing stuff several times as the troubled night faded in lieu of what the day had to promise.

But what did it promise?

Minutes later, she glimpsed across the roundabout for her bus. There was no sign of it. The appointment was for ten.

As most days, summer or winter, the sun was hot and bright enhancing the illusion that spring comes after summer.

She rattled the correct change in her hand. It was still there. Only the bus remains to come, she consoled. The interview at ten with Mr. Alexiou is still possible.

Amanda abhorred such things. She was not made for them. Her constitution lacked the backing of strong ambition and the aggressive stamina it called for. Her background in music studies along with talent seemed enough in the past.

Nervous since morning she tried to place the importance of the job into proper perspective. But all she got in return was: You don't get it, you don't eat.

Her anxiety played tricks on her senses. Besides her fingertips itching, the green appeared intensely brighter this day. She could swear she saw needles of light come off the dew drops on the leaves and blades of grass in the roundabout's central green. The birds, too. She could hear them chirping loud enough and their wings flutter as if they were next to her ear.

She paced the terminal of bus 208 a number of times.

Her mind tried to get stock of how she managed to find herself in such a spot. She did this by recollecting an ambiguously uncommon past with emphasis on certain disturbing aspects. There was no other way that she knew of to rescue what was worth salvaging. Learn from her mistakes. It's so difficult accepting them, making them part of one's identity, she thought. But she was attempting just that, this blistering day, already five minutes late for a live-or-starve appointment.

Jobs for classical guitarists were unobtainable. Teaching English was the next best life jacket.

It petrified her.

She could not as much as face an audience of one or two, not to say a class-full of English-learning children.

***

Taking another look at her watch she contemplated on a dubious future; probably a short-lived one with embarrassment to spare. The adolescents will have a lot to laugh at. Would she be able to limit it to only mischievous smirks and bearable teenage wisecracks? My God, am I in terror, she thought.

The revving engine of the old bus downshifting reached her. It appeared beyond the roundabout and approached with the roar of thunder before coming to a screeching full stop. She looked at her watch. This time it said ten past ten. And five more minutes for the bus ride -- oh well, nothing more unusual than her old self. The story of her life, always a latecomer.

She boarded the blue and white clattering vehicle and looked around for a seat. Finding one next to a window she took it.

They began to move. She glanced at the green once more discovering that the sprinkler system was on. That much for dew drops. But the flutter of wings was still there, all around, getting stronger ...

... They were not flutters ...

She winced.

" ... No!"

It came out of nowhere. A blunt ringing inside her head. Instinctively she turned to see if anyone had taken notice. The plump middle-aged lady sitting across the aisle from her was staring out the window. The seven or eight others in the bus seemed not particularly interested in her either.

" ... Not here -- damn it..!" she grunted under her breath. Panic-stricken, she got up.

The bus picked up speed and she did not know what to do. Her color drained.

Soon ... It's coming too fast ... it'll be here soon, she repeated silently.

She sat down, tried to manage till they reached the bus stop. Her breathing came in gasps now and her heart pounded inside her chest. She felt constricted, helpless, wanted to cry out to release the storm that was gathering and blocked inside her. Instead, she locked her jaw, and with her every fiber of strength rose a second time and hastened to the front of the bus.

She reached the driver. She made a gestured for him to stop. The bell inside her head started tolling rabidly ... approached like a crashing locomotive.

She jumped off as soon as the door opened not concerned any more at the other passengers. She could feel the blows of their stares behind her neck, the singe of their whispers and see the surprise and wonder on their faces at her storming exit. But this was no time to think about etiquette.

She ran.

The belling and clunking was almost fully upon her. Shortly, she knew, it would cover her brain. Its booming and gonging, and a heavy blood-curtain would blind her. She would not be capable of running. She would be blinded by pain.

The alley had always been there. She passed it a number of times. But it was heavenly sent today. She implored to be out of sight when she wholly lost check. Already her legs began to flounder under her. But she pushed through the quicksand of her mind and into the narrow lane.

"A little longer ... " she pleaded, her eyes turning up.

Desperately she groped, tottering, for a niche to hide, away from the stares of any passer-by. Strangely, part of her sanity was still occupied, to the extend it could, with the loss of the appointment.

"Why now?" she grunted. " Why not after?"

The hard rubber aid she had already placed in her mouth, to guard from biting her tongue and breaking her teeth, and was struggling to secure the band around her head. Just ahead she could barely make out some stairs leading down bellow street level.

"You won't make it ... " she panted.

She did not remember climbing down the steps ... a bomb burst at the base of her skull.

The curse struck.

This time, unlike ever before, with only a hint of warning.

Faraway, where a modicum of consciousness persisted, futile, to fight oblivion, through a receding aperture of light and awareness, she perceived her body laboring to its limits ... ultimately to surrender under the ebbing of her strength. She crumbled on the pavement to her knees. Quickly the hurt stunned even this slight contact with herself and reality, and mercifully severed it.

***

In his early fifties, Dr. Lovesigh was not what one would tag, a practicing religious man. He found for himself after thirty-two years of professionally dealing with the unknown, that there was both good and bad in people, and that it had very little to do with the Universe at large. Its birth and life, as physical cosmology and he saw it, rested on laws which good and bad had affected inconsequentially.

He did not ignore faith.

He admired and respected those who possessed it.

But he often made a sour face and would screw up his eyes in the presence of those who said that they did, and yet lead a life that said they did not.

Dr. Lovesigh did not have to pretend about his own life and work. He could not. His endeavor involved the exact sciences. The very exact sciences. Any deviation from observed fact, and physical law could annul an experiment. And his experiments, at this stage, were a matter of life and death -- to unthinkably many.

From every faith.

The focus in essence was coming through it all, even to those skeptical, or devoid, of faith. His vocation, however, was one of those jobs which could not be blessed or be graced with the privilege of forgiveness or the luxury of repentance. The Cosmos was beautifully unforgiving and ruthless. Beautiful in that it had uncompromising principles and axioms that forged a guarantee of imperishability. Ruthless in that once these were ignored or put aside -- you were not forgiven. But turned to powdery dust or fine fertilizer. The law of nature separated at one point from the other two laws. Hiked -- and operated -- above the law of man and the law of God.

There was no mercy in a cosmologist's Universe. Only cause and effect, action and reaction, and the only absolutes were very few.

The speed of light.

Absolute zero.

And that gravity always attracts.

Those others that did not deal with such utter extremes could perhaps indulge, even lavishly, in the art of rationale or reason; even dabble some in showmanship and in drama whenever pertinent, or propelling, to their profession or calling.

Politicians could thus use diplomacy and tact, and dispense euphemisms liberally. Businessmen could engage themselves in profiteering and investing to their hearts content. And the clergy could endeavor in trying to save as many souls as possible.

But saving a world, was much somber work.

The Universe, unlike the majority of human nature, did not run on rationale and reason, but on mathematical logic. In short, the Universe was the biggest computer around: unfeeling, but mathematically righteous. Humankind was only a hint of a mote in it. A condemned mote. Lovesigh had to save that mote. And he had to do it, if time let him, almost single handedly.

He wondered often why cosmologists and physicists were so far from God, whereas mathematicians, as statistics showed, so near to Him. Did not both deal with 'utter lack' and 'uncompromising profusion' as the symbols 'zero' and 'infinity' attributed?

The creed he had inherited from his Texan parents was Episcopalian. But he could just as well have been a Buddhist, a Hindu or Sikh. Creed was not a cause to preoccupy him. In the midst of the twenty-first century the church was not what it had once been: belief in 'the ol' time religion'. Over the decades, due to the absence of 'miracles' in the province of religion, but the plethora of such in high technology, the new generations -- mostly of what once had been considered western civilization, or capital-oriented societies -- directed both their belief and money to institutions like Computer Medicine and Meditation International, Euphorics, Inc., Glixxon Savings, Loans and Stocks, Mite Industry, Medical and Space Research. Most of all to Third World Investment Ventures, S.A. The government remaining the greatest beneficiary.

Curious, Lovesigh thought. The more people a country has the less democratic it becomes. The less identity remains important. And this axiom had not proven to be any less applicable to an entire planet. The eighteen billion of the world, thanks to the upsurge(300%) of untreatable cancers over the last half century -- otherwise it would have been close to fifty--, are more concerned with a quota of clean water and preservative-purged food than any symbolic nowadays ballot, and its nominal escorting promises. No wonder the half million moon colonists don't want to budge from their underground gardens. Plenty of microbe-free H2O there. Thaw it and drink it. Mars, even more. Enough permafrost to last them millennia. Simple as that. And no debts! Maybe I should have been up there with'em, he wondered.

***

" ... I listen to the weak wisp of whimper of the countless dying-suferingly in Plush-World countries," the teacher goes on to say, and I note this as well in my little tidy notebook. "I heed the aware perishing of people from drugs and alcohol, boredom and brutality, of abuse-defunct brains and tedium- and anxiety-induced obesity.

"I am attentive to the innumerable people who unawarely are being vanquished homogeneously like little identical peas in their run-down-pods-of-lodgings in their shanty neighborhoods by the saturated fatigue accumulated through decades of their very sub-existence.

"I am intent to all who are deceived into debt by a blundering, messed up system of world administration because it has bungled it. Because it continues to ignore to flag the point where Consumer Society stops and Squandering Culture begins. Because it has mismanaged things for so long that redundancy, destitution and bankruptcy have infiltrated deep into becoming a way of life, a way of no-choice. A culture that has traded off healthy production and investment for rash and rampant, runaway wastefulness and wastrels.

"And all this while peoples are being deluged relentlessly, peoples' brains scuttled, their souls mercilessly raped, in the name of 'free' enterprise. Has nobody told them that NOTHING in this life is 'free' -- as the obvious, the dubious and precarious stock-market trends steadily warn? And peoples' spirit, mind and heart are thus ravaged, then demolished by a killing mass media that stuffs illusions into them in place of down to earth purpose and goal; one that rams into them prettified cute-isms and impossible dreams, instead of humanly reachable hopes and palpable horizons -- down to earth and above-board goals ... " the teacher writes.

But no one's the wiser. No one will care.

No one to bother telling them back then and us today that: The guarantee of the simple folks' security and welfare -- a debt-inducing, ambiguous security and welfare at that -- is in itself the groundwork of all of our undoing. That: Perhaps it should have to be guaranteed in the 1800's, yes. That: It should have to be guaranteed in the 1900's, yes.

But security and welfare -- humanity -- should not have to be guaranteed in the 2000's.

It should be there in the 2000's!

No one had rushed fast enough, shouted loud enough back then in the early 2000's to open people's eyes. Cry out to them that this same kind of security-and-guarantee syndrome, this ruse and sortie, this ploy and stratagem, of perfunctoriness of the elite, of slovenliness and bedraggledness of the downtrodden had been the accommodation -- the machination -- that sheltered and fattened the Eloi before the Morlock feasts.

" ... Who corrals and stuffs today's 'livestocks', our confused self-admiring rich ... our lost self-defacing poor," the teacher goes on to ask, "with a 'darling compendium' of pre-cooked 'cured' dinners, genetically violated productions of vegetables, meats, fruits, 'processed' canned staples, tampered with potable bottled water and 'plastic food'; a 'medley of precious' vintage and readily available artificial wines, synthetic liqueurs and whiskies, attractive six-packs of chemically treated beers and malt liquors; advertisers hustling cigarettes, cigars and cigarillos, chewing tobacco; endorsers drug-dealing uppers and downers, pills for reducing, pills for fattening, for sterility and pills for erection -- drugs and narcotics of all kinds that any kid or kid-minded adult can get hold of with the least bit of hard sweat, and commence experimenting on themselves and others ... while the government man and the company man, the soldier man and the tax man, the credit man and the doctor man, while the priest man and the funeral man lurk and prowl behind one big vague establishment, steal quick officious peeks, then rub hands and salivate at flocks of people too mindless, too gorged up with tablets and capsules, dope, drink, nicotine, anxieties and consternations, and embellished trash for food to fend after themselves, or, to focus on an immediate and clear thought?

"Who coops up and pens in its citizens and warns against slamming their foot down and once in their life say 'No! No, this is not democracy!' to the despots of a corrupt law and police establishment, to a political sewer and a military cesspool they bow down to, to a religion-turned-enterprise they are ashamed of and disgusted with, to a crime-riddled, gun- and drug-run, pervert-infested society they are terrified of?

"Who hems in and incarcerates its voters and alerts them against pitching and placing a well-aimed response? Is against its citizens refusing to be branded or becoming titles of ownership as if they were products of property, routed by duress and deceit to become 'patriots' and jingoists solely due to their eternal and un-alleviatable debits? Who incapacitates, undermines and sabotages these same citizens from thrusting a loud 'Stop!' to catch 22, to the supposed-propriety of the system? An out-of-control, out-of-date monstrous system that can gobble them up in the wink of an eye ... and no questions asked? Cancel them out -- crush them like so many bad bed bugs quick-like and be done with -- discredit them first, then the whole treatment: blot them out from the annals of a self, a family, a city, a country ... from humankind, with not as much as a hint of awareness, without a sniffle of a protest or acknowledgment thereof by anyone. Simply and plainly because they've stood up and disagreed?

("How this reminds me," the teacher says, "of a dark and dismal, a dim and dirty, witch-hunting decade called 'the McCarthian fifties', a reticent and dreary decade that spread like a contagion of Dark-Ages-locust throughout the Western, the 'enlightened', 'civilized' world.)

" ... Thus the hordes of these herds remain doped and stupefied, with their heads in the sand or in the clouds, rummaging through sugarcoated illusions for thoughts. Without resistance, without protest this hunt of sheep comes to be perpetually sacrificed at the altar of perpetual promises. The promises of proverbial dreams to come, of great ideas and an imperial order of things to arrive and which 'shall for ever and ever' reign in glory. The Oz to land. The Fantasia to appear. The Shangri-La to manifest ... of promises a sheep-herding kulak would not bite into ... "

Here, I begin to find scrapings of fact, of genuine tendencies germane, to buttress my toil.

I find half the world's societies today forced into becoming progressively and congestively more and more insular and snug, while the other half more and more muddled and groping in a day-to-day struggle to keep from starving to death. Both having total disregard of this apparently eternal and indestructible gap that widens day-by-day, this chasm of estrangement process within the world, that is day-by-day cutting half of this planet from its other half. Both having total disregard for the sweating dynamite, the ripening bomb, the pending tab at man's doorstep: Global Hunger Warfare.

What further extent of injustice and inequality is there needed to be given "concrete content" I ask of Hans Morgenthau, and is indeed needed to be further "related to political situations by [any] society", so as to constitute "Universal moral principles" and thus allow starving peoples to survive, to launch agenda of "guiding political action such as justice or equality" to take place: The physical outbreak of a War for A Full Belly?

" ... I grow wearier still," the teacher continues, "of conjectures of headless living Frankensteins and Taluses, Cyclopses and Cyborgs. Of genetically engineered children shackled in deep dark dungeons, of more -- and dramatically more dangerous -- covertly-cultivated population-controlling AIDS-concoctions, of Huxleyan master races and new Reichs bred in clandestine government recluse laboratories, of inculcated stainless steel implants carkened onto a live, warm body, and graftings subtly spot-welded through the manifolds of our brains. I have apparitions of an Inferno Found inherited by us from a Paradise Lost. I wince and grovel back from teeming creatures, monsters of soul-dead cybernetic men, children and women cropping up among us from Daedalean labyrinths or Dantean Hell holes, of nightmares and eerie horrors untold.

"I grow spent at being prompted to imagine, in a palliate mode, what manner freak clone, poor beast, may lie further on the production-line of the womb, unaware that it is to contribute, by relinquishing its vital organs, to you and to me. And ask: These brain-less pieces of living meat, breathing flesh and blood, these sons and daughters of man produced solely to be butchered away so as to replace our worn bodily parts, and to replenish from them pieces for our inherited unusable and defunct ones, are they exempt from the pain of the encephalic- thinking-living?.."

Here I retrieve from Emily Dickinson how more tender, kind and responsive, more Samaritan, we once had been:

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

***

[Given the wavering and dearth of consensus among Earth's current citizens over the contents of these common but basic values, I read and search through my tomes again, and the good Professor Lovesigh comes then to mind and that spirited discourse we once had had, ... and I wonder, a second time, at Morgenthau's conclusion concerning Universal ethics as applied to men and nations:

 "The appeal to moral principles in the international sphere has no concrete universal meaning. It is either so vague as to have no concrete meaning that could provide rational guidance for political action, or it will be nothing but the reflection of the moral preconceptions of a particular nation and will by the same token be unable to gain the universal recognition it pretends to deserve."

It is then I see -- an epiphany of a sorts -- that persistence perhaps, tenacity too, just might ... might "appeal" and salvage what's left of our "moral principles". And if not "appeal" to moral principles of noble human instinct, then perhaps 'appeal' to crude concrete and chilling -- the other side, the dark side of -- 'Universal Truth': to our primordial survival aggregate, our bestial survivors-of-instincts, to our basic leverage of the mighty reflectionless adroid-scavenger and deft fear-rearing savage, the primate, the estivating Gestapo humanoid, in us all, and his sub-ape-reflex sensibilities.

The teacher's Chronicle motif is:

To exhort.

This is my premise and aim:

To caution.

To prevent.

To wear a high head, and pick-and-pick at one point over-and-over, again-and-again at a single spot, until out of sheer limitation it gives way. Gives way more to sensibility and less to inflexibility.

A gnat can get through, make a lion listen to its feeble scratchings, if it manages to trek to a gnats-reach of the lion's eardrum.

Imperia, planetarchies and incumbencies (political, business or clerical) are simply bigger, not necessarily more mature. They are merely a fiercer breed of lions. Their might and show of strength alone however, do not make them honorable and kindly lords, kings or virtuous and valiant leaders.

A king stripped of wisdom is a river barren of banks. A leader stripped of prudence is a river heedless of course.

"The latter part of a man's life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former," Jonathan Swift says. It is no different with nations, businesses or religions. Yet we have yet to attain such maturity. History has taught man that all -- the Universe itself -- is contained in the cycle of birth-maturity-death.

And yet, we ignore everything ... and think we will live for ever.

But the point is also another.

I propose not the overthrow of any ascendancy, or challenge its tradition or rendition of ripeness or boldness. Or arrogance for that matter. Even that lowlife tool of conceit and egotism is at times needed, called upon to banish something lower than itself.

I only want to deposit a veto.

I only want the brow to lower, and the ear to heed.

Heed that which Robert A. Heinlein had hollered in 1940 -- more than a century ago -- and for a century nobody heeded! Its from a writing of his entitled IF THIS GOES ON:

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything -- you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

History will not tolerate artificial or technical, diplomatic or tactical, premeditated or deliberate blunders. Regression, in other words. Because it no longer can. The making of present and future history will no longer tolerate violent intervention, another Persian, Roman, Ottoman, Aryan, Slavic, Anglo-Saxon -- no matter the label -- Empire whether it be in the name of economics, politics, or religions. Stock market forces, armed forces, church forces, police forces, partisan forces, covert forces and terrorism forces are now -- this instant -- becoming obsolete.

Because man knows too much.

Covert and clandestine, secret and surreptitious forces can exist for precious little time today. Because man has the terminology and technology to permit him, to provide access to him, to learn, in essence, all that there is to know, on all vital issues, and in next to no time.

Ostrich-type escapism is no longer sanctioned, no longer available.

Man cannot avoid now to become responsible for his own actions; for, man, himself.

And not use or be goaded, be driven, hustled, pushed and shoved by these Twentieth Century, Second Millennium, barbarous forces and placebos, cure-all elixirs and panacea so a few can enforce a unilateral will, a one-sided dominance. People of Earth are too close together now, are too intimate and immediate to each other, to have the luxury of anonymity any more, anonymity that so far has provided the cover for the partial, asymmetrical and selfish use of these forces.

To have the terrorist's fantasy any longer defeats its purpose of stealth, the element of surprise and shock, consequentially, its existence. That's all terrorists, soldiers-of-fortune and policemen-of-fortune, spies and operatives are becoming: a passing fad, pulp fiction. Never as romantically affective and effective as they had once been. They are fading despondently and desperately, but invariably, into past epochs of more swaggering, braggadocio and melodramatic cloak-and-dagger fiction. Into a redneck and K.K.K.-like denouement. This is the last curtain call for political parties as we have known them and fundumentalists, regimentalists and racists. Reciclists of empire-builders and feudalism, blind discipleship and mob coterie. All have failed to produce what man seeks, all have failed the test of time, here, today in 2052.

Young people once respected, but no longer idolize Persian, Roman, Aryan or Ottoman, Slavic or Anglo-Saxon or Oriental superiority, the self-sacrificing fundamentalist Arabian terrorist or the superior Nibelugenlied-vintage ruler, the Galahad-classic Crusader-knight smashing all else in his way in his Quest of the Holy Grail, the Capone-gangster or lone-cowboy or fighting-GI Joe and their law of violence and of the firearm, a paranoid-Stalin or a psychotic-McCarthy, red-blooded Communism or blue-blooded Imperialism or yellow-blooded Capitalism, an Il Duce Nationalism or Jihad Fundamentalism.

Young people today couldn't care less about martyrs and dying-for-a-cause murderers, terrorists, heroes and champions of this and that system of 'predominating authority' or 'unequivocal standard' or 'incontestable model'.

Young people of the 2000s want elbow space.

They want SIA and 'Government Men' and 'Citizen Protectors' done away with, retire. Young people want the attrition of old generations, or, for them to go away to another planet. Young people want guidance not dominance. And they want to be -- be left alone with their own young and tender thoughts ... if no one is capable of understanding, of helping.

Leave them be, to enjoy their youth, their own youthful dream and freshness of vision, and their immaculately own and pristinely personal interpretations of goodness and love, friendship and non-fear, for a change, unadulteratedly.

Young Arabs and Jews, young Yanks, Ruskies and Limies, Europeans and Asians, young Blacks and Yellows and Reds and Whities want out. Want out of this Dog's World. This paradox we call World that we, their officious, puritanical and strait-laced ancestry, have so carefully or carelessly manipulated to successfully mess up. They want out because their common sense is put to work, tested, every minute of the day.

Because their criteria are being challenged retroactively and spontaneously, perpetually and relentlessly.

Today's generation is the only one in history that cannot be hoodwinked, as we have been. The only one that is learning so quickly and aptly from its own parents' blunders and bungles, is so aware of not making the same ones again, that it categorically refuses to tread where their elders have rushed in.

And these youths rambunctiously and loudly, objectively and impassionately stomp their foot down and demand their inherent, legitimate and fair place and term of life allotted to them:

"Enough!" they cry out. "We are not the cast in Lord of The Flies!" And, "Enough with Cesarean plots, Machiavellian Conspiracies!"

Why? Because intrigues cannot be justified, supported, encouraged due to an 'internationally lagging mass media' or 'an information hysterisis' -- due to Ignorance -- any more.

Old excuses and stupidity are just that, Anachronistic. People may die due to lack of food today, in the 2000's, people may die due to lack of human rights today, but not due to lack of up-to-the-minute news, knowledge and 'wisdom'.

They want Socrates, Jesus and Marx -- the poor man's Trinity -- to join together, be brothers-in-arms against arms, not antagonists.

Not a brave new world.

But.

HARMONY is what the Young want.

So.

I interpose my interdiction here. Lest relapsing into worse-than-past follies. I strive to suggest the unhindered teaching of common sense in a Common-World in place of bravado. I labor to avoid a feudalistic and totalitarian, an oligarchic and a despotic Warmachen Fourth Reich destiny. Whether it comes from the continent of Asia, Europe or the Americas.

For dissolution is directly proportional to power. Any power.

For:

Contrary to what the likes of Glixxon say, where there is raw or sophisticated power snowballing, there also lies the spawn of subtle Feudal masters and Fuehrers, quests for Lebensraum by freshly ascending Attilas, and, therefore, Slavery. They may call into play a number of new-fangled and seemingly noble, fashionable and skillfully legitimate terms like " ... globalization, democracy and communism, coherence, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Amnesty International, egalitarianism, partnership for peace, politically correct, socialism and suchlike fiats and caveats ... "

But scratch off the makeup ... and there brood, there you find bribable, neo-nazi and sly politicians, a mercenary and sinister military, the sadistic pervert and underhanded policeman, faithless and depraved man of the cloth, nefarious and notorious spies and businessmen, warped and fickled terrorists dictating.

You find tyranny.

No matter the flavor.

And not citizens exercising civil and civic testimony, liberty and the supremacy of popular outcry and institutions of constitutionality and ecumenicity.

One needs Courage and Virtue to acquire and maintain a Democracy. One needs a ballanced and a measured constitution, as my land's people have learned and proven, over-and-over. Not arms and money. As Oliver Wendell Holmes puts it: Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust. But, you live by the sword, you die by the sword.

Walter Savage Landor had once said, "The spirit of Greece, passing through and ascending above the world, hath so animated universal nature, that the very rocks and woods, the very torrents and wilds burst forth with it." The spirit of Hellas is not, behind, sacrificed on the alter of, money and arms but freedom through/and accomplishment. You can not buy either of these. They can only be earned through a long, long history that tempers the steel of faith. That matures. Matures faith in one's self and into the never-ending hard honorable work of The Games. Faith that smiths raw restless and reckless daring into the sapient and noble courage of Peace.

If ever there be a time to evoke upon and test again this axiom ... it is indeed today, in the 2000's. For, this tiny land called Hellas to date retains its time-tested and honored wisdom, its tenacity and facility to endure through and overcome all the gamuts of tyranny invented by man or nature -- and then some --, by its indelible free faith, liberty and clear thinking. Through its diaphanous ethics and unprecedented valor, most of the world saw fit to adopt. This minute -- but big in heart, spirit and mind -- peace of free earth still has, still thrums and pulses with, colossal ensembles of lessons and precepts, principles and applied, pragmatic think-experiences to offer to, and benefit still further, the whole of Earth. The preeminent of which is the lesson in, and practice of, PEACE. We call it THE OLYMPIC IDEAL. Because before Democracy first must come non-violence, PEACE. Countries that believe in amassing arms do no believe in peace, but, in using arms.

And it is this that impels me on, to toil on, with the learnedness, tact and subtlety of an Aristotle where I can.

With the shrewd and calculated, the sensible and aware courage of an Odysseus where I cannot.

To refresh in my fellow colleagues' and worthy opponents' -- my admirable co-sapients' -- heart and mind the thousand examples in history of power gone astray.

Because of its one or thousand shiny victories, or over a much coveted greed/prize of attainment. Or because of the drunkenness the defeat in achievement of a rival contender brings to our head.

We deal now not with conventional and cold wars simply. But with global warmings and weather freaks. Intercontinental amalgamations and alienations. Cybercrashes and stock market-meltdowns. With militarized and drugged societies, nations and confederations of countries. Each unforgiving.

We become high and mighty tech pushers of all commodities and services, accommodations and processes today, including our own flaws, our scale of brazenness and audacity too. And in so doing we grow dissident and distant, willfully deaf and blind to the chain-reaction that will rush upon our loved ones tomorrow:

Will it come even more brashly, or, hopefully, more benignly?

The understanding of such leaps -- by this organic brain's capacity to capably assimilate and appropriately grasp, or so much as fantasize about such Cosmic Megatherian events -- amounts to no more than the significance of comparing the diameter of a mote-speck to that of the Universe's bounds.

But, the fear of attacks of rashness and storms of imperiousness lies there still. More than I fear the ignorant, bloody and savage strike of the terrorist that will kill and mame the few innocent, I fear incredibly more the War-game-whims wallowing in our 'civilized', educated and 'cultured' modern-day emperor's skull that kill the few thousand innocent, and perhaps untold more, 'leagally' ... and which whimsies skulk and prowl there too, fertively, not obscurely, but resolutely.

That lie in lurk.

Frosty shadows behind the heart.

Pitiless.

Inhumane.

Personal.

Ruthless.

That Haunt and ... Daunt and Daunt.

Along with the buried text's author I too invoke my daring vision, that maybe I shall not have to continue trekking all over. That, just maybe, the answers are closer at hand. Inside me. You. Everyone.

But need a little spurring to surface.

Conceivably the answers I seek are like the codes our genes keep hidden -- this eternal flame of living acting Grace in overcoming our past flaws -- but with diligent and hard work can be decoded and brought to light.

And then I wonder boldly perhaps, without ulterior motive or design, but in utter, earnest, honesty:

Haven't we depended or pretended to depend -- shed our burden of liability, our social responsibility -- on a compendium of World Leaders, Saviors and Emperors, Prophets and Messiahs, on an anthology of Gods, or God, enough?

Have we not ladened enough those Respected and Divine shoulders with our pesty-pettite responsibilities and our very own glaring-gross irresponsibilities?

Our flurry and flaws?

Haven't we burdened the Almighty unreasonably and unabashedly over the millennia with incredibly inhuman trust and attributes; on machinations of an incredibly unashamed human making and nature; connivance and subterfuge even, that ought dare not carry -- or hint, indeed, at -- the impression of anything Sanctified or Hallowed?

Has, finally, that time not come to pluck up our courage, accept the consequences and at last pull our own weight, and attribute not only just punishment to man, but due praise as well?

Instead of that Supreme Fellow doing it all, why not pull down finally from the cross Christ, and raise upon it a third man? For, has man as well not been crucified a thousand times in the name of Caesars, Planetarchs and Glixxons and a plethora of 'genuine' Gods? And in the name of that 'one true Prophet' and that 'one true God' and that 'one true ideology, doctrine or dogma'?

Has not Man risen a thousand times in the name of Better Man?

Is it not time 'In Harmony We Trust'?

Haven't we trusted in Crusades in the different names of God(s), Lores and in the different names of Codes of Arms enough?

Have we not earned to finally deserve: In Man We Trust and not In Arms We Trust? Is it not as yet a certainty or at least evident by our history, attitude and predicament today that 'In God We Trust' and 'In Arms We Trust' don't hold water anymore?

For, the teacher's text says more. Of good things to arrive, too. After the bad.

Of people having faith in their people. In all people. In animals and plants. In blue seas and rain forests. In the deep and shallow past. In a living, trusty, history and in strong, honorable roots. In Balance and Insight. In the near -- very near -- and also in a far-reaching galactic future.

"In the independence and sovereignty, autonomy and testimony of identity."

These last are the manuscript's and the teacher's hopeful and caring comments.

Remarks of a benevolent epoch within ... a gnat's-reach.

Trustingly, they appear to warrant to overpower the care and misgiving, concern and worry that pervades and tinges throughout this educator's 'manifesto' of a writ.

So much for the positive or negative effect of my usage and misusage of my second language, English.

For, the science of diplomacy as that of pedantry are dominated by the cerebral argot. And lamentably award distinction on whoever emulates the undeviating and theoretical lingua. Nevertheless, the sweeping zeal to swagger in that arty-crafty way seems to be the archenemy of late. And although my field at times calls upon such rhetoric and stuffiness, it does so in the line of duty and protocall, good will and faith, and nothing else.

I am not the spinner of yarns or teller of tales as such. But what follows -- is indeed well in progress this very minute, could not have carried the character that does it justice if it were to be rendered in a form other than that of a documented and annotation-supported exposition. A descriptive story-like narrative moving through, and thus involving all of, our lives.

For there are instances and particulars for which I had to penetrate deep into my peoples' minds and lives, and speculate what their unsaid thoughts, emotions and pasts, their unseen sensitivities and moods and tempers must or could have been to react as they have. I had to conjecture, conjure up even, what their private hopes and fears, beliefs and dreads, loves and imaginings had to be, or effected as being, like an audience has to do, in order to grasp and therefore share in the characters' circumstances upon the stage that bring about their heroes' trend of behavior and drama of change. Sometimes we have to dramatize the incredible to make it credible. The reverse I think is not necessary here. I intervene where I feel the reader will benefit by it.

So, lay your laurel by the marble threshold of the Athens Games. Have true dreams. And cast some seeds of love to that dove you see.

As for me, I grow restless by the day at this Glixxon Contagion, this Planetarch Syndrome. I am ill at ease as long as there is this hot flame of a document in my hand still, shouting to be released; and this other, this Starseed thing to be further dealt with, and -- and there are hopefully remarkably wondrous things then to come ... if only you are true to you. P.P./Chronicle of Affairs/Athens Olympics/Athens, Hellas/15 August 2052]

Chapter 4

  She stopped before the apartment door haggard looking, wiped her eyes dry and inserted the key into the lock. Things still wavered before her like they were made of water. When she got inside she slipped her shoes off, undid her trousers and let them fall. She dragged her shirt over her head and went under the bed covers. The curse had never before attacked when others were around. She shook with shivers, weary, till a dense passing cloud took her with it. 

***

  The distant ringing of the phone found her curled up to one side of the bed. As she stirred the sound came nearer till she reached over and picked up the receiver.

"Yes?"

"Miss Rhodes?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry to bother you. I waited till ten-thirty then I left. Is there anything wrong?"

"Oh -- I'm terribly sorry. I had an accident." She tried to clear her head, and soon recognized the voice.

"Something serious?"

"Something unavoidable, Mr. Alexiou."

"Miss Rhodes, I do need someone of your level for the Proficiency classes."

"I understand."

"Yes, of course. Would the day after be OK?"

"Quite fine, Miss Rhodes."

She replaced the phone on its cradle and fell back on the pillow. She looked at her old timepiece; it showed ten-twelve. The crystal was cracked and her wrist bruised. Uncovering her legs she saw the knees were scraped and her left ankle slightly swollen. Her back ached with stiffness and the muscles in her neck and jaw felt raw.

Before, the attacks left her time. They gave her enough time to leave, or excuse herself if in the presence of others, to find a place to be alone. More than anything, she did not want anyone to see her.

No one knew but her. Her sickness, she was sure, condemned her life to isolation. It was when she realized this, that she could not be normal, marry and have a family that fear was superimposed by a kind of disappointment, a resignation to the hard games fate plays. Her only wish then had been to just survive.

She couldn't recall how she found her way back to the flat. Only that she was drained ... and so very humiliated. If somebody had seen her ...

"Oh God!" she shuddered.

Today the curse had swooped upon her. It just stormed into the bus and pounced on her. So quickly and unsuspectingly.

Lethargically she got up from bed and limping walked to the shower. After, she attended to her wounds. She spread a creamy white ointment over the injured areas and later took from a drawer another watch to wear. Her father's.

***

***

  Eight months after the accident the family had moved. The insurance policy had paid for a down payment on a new house and the rest had been put into a trust for the children's education. Frank, Amanda had seen sporadically since they were no longer neighbors. She missed him.

Though he was older by one year, they had few communication problems. It was in him to protect and to listen to what one had to say.

"What are you going to be?" Amanda had once asked him.

"A journalist, like your father. I like finding the real reasons behind things," he had replied.

She believed him. He was always asking questions and investigating events on his own, never taking anybody's word about anything. Except hers.

"I don't think you want to lie, Amanda," he had said once. "You can, but you don't see reasons for it. And you can keep a secret. It's hard to do both, but you do it."

It was complementing Amanda for things she could and could not do which others did not think important that made them friends. It was their trust that developed the friendship into a lasting one, a necessity. Though she had left the old neighborhood she called him often.

As she passed into her teens they both sought each other out and dated when they could. He headed the school periodical and Amanda often performed with the school orchestra.

It was on one such date, a Saturday evening, that they went to see the flat-screen oldie, The Exorcist. The picture did funny things to her thoughts, and it was later that night as Frank drove to the more elite and safe east side of the city that they struck up a conversation about the film. She felt uneasy when it came to such subjects as they stirred her own inexplicable side. Yet, she was aware that she only fooled herself by not wanting to know.

Frank, on the other hand, wanted to probe deeper. But sensed her compunction.

"Amanda," he said, "since your father died you're not yourself. You seem frightened ... all the time."

How could she account for the unexplainable aspects of herself without lying to him? She could not tell him what she avoided to think about, or at least, postponed to reckon with at some indefinite future time. "I've just changed," she said simply. "So have you."

He took her hand then and held it, something for the first time. "I know, but it was nice then. Everything was good to us, don't you think?"

"It was nice then," she had repeated looking at their hands and holding on to him. "I don't understand a lot of things, Frank. I feel like a stranger to myself and it scares me."

Unconsciously she tightened her hold wanting to somehow prod him in eliciting all the strangeness in her soul and body. "I feel you know me better than anyone else -- like father. When he past away I was terribly alone. Everybody tried helping, but I just wouldn't let them. I wanted it that way and ... I can't explain why -- "

"Amanda, don't try," Frank said then. "I stopped. Somebody said a silly thing to me once. He said 'wait when you can't do anything about something, time will sort it out'. I thought about it, and now see that he made sense. There are things we just don't know, or not know enough about, and have to wait for knowledge to catch up. I've got so many questions in my own head I never believed could fit in there. Many, being honest, are about you ... "

He brought his other hand behind her head and drew her to his lips. " ... and I don't mean about the 'tricks'," he whispered and brought lightly his lips to hers.

She closed her eyes and afterwards whispered back, "Are we making love?"

"Yes."

  June Talbott, registered nurse, could easily have passed for an ex-ballerina. She was smallish and delicate with light brown hair and fine, almost fragile, orbital bones. The first time they had made love Abe had been afraid he'd hurt her; that he'd crush her.

"I'll see that you don't," had been her reply.

Nevertheless, he commenced to explore her gingerly, attentively--

"There're many ways to make love, my Abe," she had whispered, and climbed on him like cool ivy. She had calmed him and he relaxed, until her movement and touch soared his guardedness into ardor, then emancipated passion.

Later, the sultry and warm scent of clean body sweat hovered over them as June weakly lowered herself next to his moist side.

"I almost forgot what it's like," she whispered, cuddling closer.

"That long?"

"Yes, that long."

He took hold of one end of the rumpled sheet and dabbed her forehead and neck.

"Join the club." He pressed her to him. "I thought I'd qualify for celibacy."

"That's not what I'd want. It would be outright unfair, Abe Fagan -- a sin if you asked me."

"You're a sin, June Talbott," he grunted. "One hell of a sin, lady. You've bestirred the beast in me -- and the man, and what life and living are all about."

She kissed him then and he saw her eyes glisten in the low light. "Abe, I want us to see each other again. You brought an awful lot to me."

His kiss lingered longer.

"M' lady would dub me thy champion?" he breathed to her ear, and had pulled her to him not waiting for a reply.

It had been the first time he slept with her. After ten years new horizons made their epiphany.

Other women? He took a swig of the flat beer. There hadn't been that many, and mostly incidental.

He didn't postulate womanizing to be the barometer of masculinity. Bunny bouts in the sack and comparing penises and testicles were not the sole testimonials to the tenure of his own gender. Family for one proved sound manly backbone. Another, was survival in this upside-down, suited-ape-jungle where grit was gauged by grinding corporate regimentality; where you didn't like doing what you did, but did it anyway. And June was the kind of woman that believed in a man being aspired by reality rather than by ego. 

***

  With time their relationship matured into a diode of communion. June had come to speak more openly about her life. Tania and Sonia, her twin daughters, were in college. She had married while still in her first year at the university where her husband had been finishing med. school.

"We had this crazy dream, Abe," she had said, nuzzled next to him. "Pete just couldn't take too much of being around people -- physically healthy people, I mean. Tell'im you don't feel well and he'd burn the midnight candle by your side. I guess he figured that the healthy ones could take care of themselves. But he loved the outdoors and rambling about the country on four wheels."

Abe had listened like a small boy being told a yarn.

"We wanted to travel. So we began that summer, the day after Peter had graduated. Times weren't that bad back then. People weren't afraid of their shadow, like they are today. Crime wasn't so rampant, and CP's didn't outright kill you when they saw you loitering around in the streets -- they really protected you then. So, we were going to be doing back-packing hikes in the desert and climbing a few low mountains and tenting there by the Pecos River under raw starlight. Free as ferrets!

"Off we were. It took us the good part of a week and there we were crossing New Mexico, leaving Socorro behind in a whirl of dust, lingered only for a few stop signs in El Paso, crossed the Rio Grande after paying a dollar, and ate tortijas at a place full of flies in Juarez, Mexico. That, Abe, had been the first time either of us had visited a foreign country. And in those days we were in a hell of a hurry."

Abe felt himself wanting to beat the dust off his clothes and swat the flies buzzing around his food.

On the other hand, he and Fab had not trekked across the country, did not slog through deserts, or scale up mountains. The closest they had approached to rambling over raw nature had been weekend skitters to near-by Chesapeake Bay.

At dusk the porgies would bite. Abe would light a fire from dry driftwood and ferns while Fab pulled in more catch. He'd then clean what they caught, split and salt it, and throw it on a grate. By that time the fire had turned the wood into a rich hearth of glowing amber coal. They'd sit around it, watch the fish sizzle, and garnish their plastic plates with added grubs.

The stars cast ample light over those pristine nights. Enough to see by when the coals turned to cinder and ash. Enough to etch the occasions in his memory.

"Why in heaven did you divorce?"

"I've asked my self," June had said, "a hundred times."

"And?"

"I've asked him too."

"Well?"

"He doesn't know, Abe. Neither do I." 

***

  The 'bloody edibles', Michael's clan would have aptly put it, and the 'blimey puddle-sap' they called water gave Lovesigh all that he carried. Cancers of every category and sub-category. Eating him up slowly, tenaciously, like grubs feasting on so much red meat.

He turned now, repelled at his decay.

"They teach us how to read and write, how to have sex and give birth, to arrive, try to teach us how to live. But not a word on how to depart."

His eyes riveted on her.

"And to think knights once quested for incorruptible truth and noble cause. What came of all that searching? Lost from memory? Ignored? Or found, had they, that truth was not incorruptible? Discovered, had they, that cause was not always noble? Had that been the end of it all? That being the inglorious finale? Plus many, many dead for, and in, crusades that had no yield to common sense? To moral sanity? Humanity?"

Lovesigh had read about the children's crusades. In moments of ladening agony he pitied his own kind. He imagined himself feeling all the scorn of a John the Baptist, an angry Christ at the Temple, a vengeful God of Israel -- all that he had read in his libraries of books. But from all the knowledge that was his, one question stood utterly solid. Like the tip of a berg. 'Why does man refuse to believe in Man, decides instead on the Gods of a Babylon, or the Gods of an Egypt, or Rome, or in a stranger, unfamiliar God?'

A drop of salty sweat trickled between his dry broken lips.

His shoulders heaved as he thought of something and was attacked by a spell of coughing. He exhaled and the sweat droplets sprayed out from his mouth along with tiny tints of crimson.

"Politics? Now there's religion, Penelope. One you can really nuzzle up to. Get rapt in without as much as uttering a single 'hallelujah!'."

He was overwhelmed by a tickling in his throat. An overpowering urge.

A squeaking cough came out.

"Yeap. Foster yourself posh-like without having to transcend or relinquish any earthly gains or trek up Golgotha." Impartial as he was to denomination, Professor Anthony Gildersleeve Lovesigh stalwartly disapproved all form of politicking.

"There hasn't been an honest politician since the dawn of mankind ... " he told Penelope, and looked in the direction of the door to see if Michael would be standing there. He had enough drugs for one day. But he knew there would be more. " ... Or since The Collapse, at least."

2020, The Anniversary.

The Collapse, The Tyranny, as the underground called it.

July 22, the rumble of the tanks in the streets of Washington DC, New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Melbourne, Paris, London ... all of North America, of most Europe, parts of Asia and South Africa, before the break of dawn, as the Earth turns -- the greatest coordinated world conspiracy in the history of recorded mankind. The radio and TV blaring marches and booming martial music all day long. The Generals interrupting programs every ten minutes trying to pacify a confused public:

"Do not panic. Stay in your homes or place of work. A new order has arisen." The MM blared out boot-camp fashion. "A new federation, a new world order is rising from the ashes of old, corrupt nations. From the phoenix's ashes a new, purified confederation of republics has emerged. You have been liberated by the new world order and the world's enlightened Generals, the vigilant guardians ... "

Lovesigh shivered as he remembered the callous, regimental tone.

"What else will we have to suffer through," he whispered, "before we grow up, straighten our act and stop groping at extremes?"

He glanced around and temporarily regretted his frivolity. Talking to her was one thing. Antagonizing with the Generals another. More precisely, with those behind them. The ones truly responsible for organizing the coup. The elite group nobody checked.

Did not dare to.

The reign within reigns. The SIA. The Secretaries of Interior Affairs.

  Astoria, Long Island, had not been the ideal place for stochastic philosophy in the '20s. And the son of immigrants had a lot to worry about besides such scholarship. Yet, it was these stirrings that had kept him in one piece and clean. The neighborhood, or ghetto, was a hive of junkies, hookers and vicious gangs. Early in life he had learned that his brain and tongue could defend him just as competently as his muscles and grit. He used knowledge acquired from voracious reading and bold probing to placate even the most hostile of the gangs' roughians. Soon, he won their esteem, even protection, by trading knowledgeable enlightenment and returning with practical advice.

"Lukas, aghori mou (my son), it's too late to do the shopping tonight," his mother would say.

"Mama, just because it's night doesn't mean we're not going to eat. Nobody's going to hurt me," his reply would reassure the frightened mother.

"I am so unhappy your father is not with us, God rest his soul, to see you. You are so much like him, my little Lukas."

Many anight he shed tears as he lay in bed. He had been three when they found Thomas Mettropoulos stabbed on the house steps, his pockets empty. Graffiti written with his father's blood smeared the cold, gray concrete, fighete piso (go back), it had said. The old country he meant, where family and relatives were in abundance and where such nightmares did not come to pass.

Pride and Thomas's grave at the crowded local cemetery had kept them from abandoning this tough land. That and Mrs. Mettropoulos's duty and word given to her husband before he was found slain. Lukas's future. Only NovaAmerica, beset even with her new form of Government ... this Enlightened Dictatorship ... could provide the best in education for the promising young boy. She knew this. No matter how lonely and frightened she had been for the both of them, she had known. And they had not gone back. 

***

  " ... two fingers, Lukas, ... that's right. Look in the mirror ... "

***

  Princeton had accepted him in the '30s on a full scholarship as had Seminary College. The drain on his meager finances was inversely proportional to that of his mental resources. The University had provided the finest and most up-to-date facilities. His new endeavors were particle physics and philosophical cosmology. Glixxon and his rough riders, hard as they had tried, could not pad lock or fundumentalize schools. The closest they got was to insert a government word here and their. Parents could be pushed only so far ... past that ... it wasn't going to be just a simple and shoddy range war -- and Glixxon did not want to find out any more than he had to on that. So he let sleeping dogs lie. He too, once, had parents that had given their last cent so he could have a fitting chance at education.

Deep-set within Lukas's thinking a marriage had been taking place. A matrimony of Spirit and Matter. Encompassing space and time, embracing knowledge, life and death -- perhaps in a universe upheld by faith fields -- the Force of Creation lived.

He longed to glimpse into It.

He dreamed for this with a mighty thirst transcending description. Not out aspiration or blasphemy, but out of philanthropy, he urged himself to tread into realms where divine and universal met, merged and confirmed.

He knew no better path than the one his 'guide' had pointed to, and he, himself, had chosen to follow.

At twenty-four, in the '40s, he received his second Ph.D. A year after, the Pope in Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople (The two Churches had re-united in the face of the Xenon Glixxon threat) bestowed Archbishopship upon him.

When his diatribe was read and analyzed at NASA's MIT laboratories on "The Discrete Fringe Theory" he was nominated candidate for the Nobel.

(Sweden, as well as Israel, seven Balkan countries, Scotland, Wales, Ireland [united], Hellas [the name by which the Hellenes call their country since the 2004 Olympics], Sicily, Cyprus [unoccupied], Malta, Portugal and several other countries in the vicinity of southern Europe and the Mediterranean, mostly small and less affluent ones, managed to keep themselves out of Glixxon's world confederation, and out of the away of WORaCTS: World Order Reform and Confederate Territory Standardization).

The essence of Lukas's theory was rudimentary. It took off were physical cosmology ended -- and leaped outside the Universe, into the void.

After much research and thought Father Lukas came to the conclusion that trifle little had been done on a subject of piquing, if not provoking, preoccupation.

Since the universe was finite and expanding, as the scientific community upheld, there was a region -- a mathematical concept/topos -- beyond into which it was expanding. Thus, the Priest reasoned, we have a universe on one hand and on the other an uncharted frontier (a separate medium) through and into which it is dilating. Separating the two a boundary.

This hypothetical boundary he called fringe.

The fringe must then consist of, and share both, the characteristics of the Universe and those of the medium (void/vacuum) beyond. But the Universe was governed by observable physical laws intrinsic to itself; abided by codes itself had created, yet capable of relaying these outward and onto a 'blank carte', the medium. Then, information (for nature's laws and codes are information) had not only the inherent quality, the inadvertent trait, of self propagation, but as well the ability to prepare and create ambiance. In other words, the fringe, the edge of the universe, the threshold of 'is' and 'is not', was a stupendous information converter -- as its counterpart, the black hole. Only, a black hole withheld information avariciously, whereas the fringe dispelled it bounteously.

The priest, using the set theory of mathematics concerning parity of analogous systems, proved two things. First, that entropy is not the prevailing tendency in the scheme of things. Since the medium, the 'blanc carte', is de-void of order, and the universe imparts order to it (definite laws and codes -- the Big Bang itself -- communicate information and uniformity by way of the the fringe), it can not follow that entropy governs the Cosmos wholly. But, a form of isotropy, or counter-entropy, also.

Second, the information or essence black holes, any black holes (beacons included) or similar singularities, consume is proximately equal to that which the fringe restores onto the vacuum of the medium. Stellar observations and particle acceleration experiments using 'Titanos', the new cyclotron circumventing Earth eighty miles above the Equator, verified all that his equations forecast. Additionally, as by-products came two long-awaited proofs: The Conservation of Information Theorem and The Theory of A Convoluting (rather than a uniformly expanding) Universe.

A move similar to that of the elite scientific circle took place that same year by the United Church Council for the Peace Prize Nobel.

Finally, after the eternal ceremonies, the titular and accustomed proprieties of protocol, pomp and circumstance, Father Lukas withdrew to Cambridge, Massachusetts and to a nominal size Hellenic Orthodox parish near MIT's NASA facilities. He taught, researched, studied and acquired more Ph.D.s, and meditated there in acceptable tenure and quiet seclusion for ten years.

But Abe Fagan was to end all that. 

***

  Father Lukas did not hear the guiding voice from within since 2029. It was not there to steer him in difficult times. Now, twenty-two years after, it seemed unreal that it had ever happened. He was vacant of the voice, but the gift was there. Ever-present, ever-mysterious, tumbling the laws of man and nature, defying the Scriptures, challenging His Law. Because of it, he followed the avenue of the Church. The voice had at the time also counseled him to further in the study of sciences.

He did not know any more about it now than when it had first come to him that morning's awakening. A whispering first. Then an echo. There had risen a spark of hope in him. And he had listened very attentively to the intonation and inflection, the articulation and the signature of traces of accent in the voice; it had been imbedded in his mind. But he could not be sure, he could not tell. He barely remembered his father. To remember his voice was too much to ask, even of a prodigy child.

In that one session the voice further illuminated upon procedures of using this ability with delicate, mostly electronic, equipment to replicate on them, through the sense of touch, the workings that took place in his reasoning mind. He merely needed to feel the apparatus and a circuit was completed. At once, a link was initiated and a port of communication subordinate to total control by him. He could then use the instrument as if it were a tool -- an inanimate but innate member of his body and brain. 

***

  When he had spoken it to his mother, she had first looked at him with an examining stare that probed deep into his eyes, his soul. Then, as women know these things when they see them, a glow came over her face.

"You are chosen, my son," she had said. "The Holy Grace is upon you. Do not speak of it to anyone," she had whispered then piously. "They will not understand. It is your own chosen Gift."

He was nine then.

In the years that followed, he had gone through Seminary College taking up all courses that could conceivably shed light on that which was happening to him. Before his acceptance at Seminary College he had read up passionately on religion.

All religions on Earth.

Philosophy, philology, history and metaphysics succeeded. Parallel to The Old and New Testaments, the Koran and the cabbalah beliefs, he investigated and delved acutely into biology, psychology and medicine, ensued by digital chemistry, mathematics of artificial intelligence and physics of computer and cyborg theory and design.

But searching ... merely compounded his search.

  Abe showered and got into fresh smelling clothes. Dantea called then and said that she'd be home in a couple of hours. All the better, he thought, it would give him time to work out how he'd put it to her. Divorce was a touchy subject with daughters. He supposed that Fab would have been expecting it, sooner or later. Though she had not brought up the matter.

"I need to think things through," she had said, suitcases packed. "Our lives are going nowhere, Abe. I don't want to grow old thinking that's all there is from here on."

The farewell had been a clipped one.

Three years had gone by quickly.

Then another seven.

Fab called once in a while to inquire about their well-being. Dantea had gone to Washington state every Thanksgiving. Fab did not come to visit, and he never thought of going there.

He tossed the two hollow beer cans in the garbage on his way out.

He was sure of what he didn't want: the emptiness his life had taken. June was there; approachable, real, solid as a pledge. And the day was as good as any to broach the subject of marriage.

That evening, almost a year after their affair had begun, they sat at Dandy's Bar and Grill on California Avenue. It was early yet and not cold so they chose the garden tables fenced in in the back of the premises. The red and white plaid table-cloths, the cascading waters of the Rococo fountain near by imparted a Continental and light atmosphere, a mien removed from the prospect of autumn chill and the coming wintry restraint.

"Happy Birthday," he said and clinked glasses. The bubbly stuff made his nose itch.

June downed the first serving in two swallows. She was thirsty.

"Don't spread it around, but forty-two feels more like twenty-two than twenty-two did." She tittered.

They had more to drink and June nibbled at the souffles and crepes. Abe was not surprised. June never attacked food. She left as much on the plate as she consumed.

"I saw Peter this morning. He came by the clinic with a red rose and wished me many more years." She laid her knife on her plate.

"How is he?" Abe helped himself to some scaloppini.

"He went to New Haven last week to see the girls," she toyed now with her fork. "They're thinking of applying to UCLA for grad studies next year. I'll miss'em ... "

Dantea would be finishing her internship in May, too, he thought. Who knows where they'd send her off to. Hospitals were becoming targets of addict attacks along with pharmacies and medicine depots and warehouses. He didn't like her choice of careers. He feared for her. Taking care of emergencies all nights, exposed to the injured of dragnets, line-ups, scalawags and rapscallions to contend with, all the dregs of the dark. The drug mobs' tentacles reached everywhere, hospitals more than ever. She'd be watching the hurt and injured -- Abe Fagan twitched -- who'd be watching her? 

***

  Dantea had had a way of developing their bond. She had been, was, the one thing solid their union had produced.

He had considered, only a while ago driving to pick June up, how his daughter consciously or not symbolized staying power. There was a classic physical principle he recalled to mind just then, from his college science days, called entropy. It stated that the Universe inadvertently progressed from order to less order. That in all activity this law prevailed, human arrangements included. At present entropy suggested a meek modicum of wisdom to chew on.

Hope on the other hand and belief that her family was better off constituted Dantea's only alternate reality to that dominating her pain- and violence-ridden career: that no matter what went askew in her own home there were examples out there manifold worse and utterly unsalvageable. Entropy to Dantea, Abe reflected, was still a long way off. In the meantime, she did what she thought best to qualify the assets of her situation.

While Abe sat across from June, interloping through his own maze of skepticism, June was talking about Peter's change of occupation.

"He finally got out of his shell," she said. "I couldn't believe it, but it's true. People change at the darnest time of their lives. Who would have expected nature-loving, people-shy Peter would side up with the system?"

"People change ... " reverberated in his mind.

His own eyes had been starting to get shortsighted for some time now. His left ear buzzed more frequently these days and sounds seemed to coalesce at times to indistinguishable dins. His right arm join stiffened with changes in the weather, and his back clawed at his hip and leg in the mornings. He was still strong and durable, but each day that passed appeared a little more demanding of him.

He wondered, Did Pete feel similar harbingers herald changes in his life as well? Peter was a doctor, yet he must have held compunctions against it. Abe wondered at the man's idiosyncrasy: unsociable but compassionate, nature-loving yet had delved with imperfection on a daily basis, and today -- to put all that behind him and pursue a most earthy of professions!

He found himself conceding to 'practical skepticism', a sorts of Occam's Razor. It cut through circumlocutions to the gist. Fab, he realized, had changed, in fact ten years ago, when she had left her past behind to mold by herself a future. And inadvertently brought his own change, idiolectal or otherwise.

"His practice?" Abe asked, unhitching from his private cogitation.

"You won't believe it -- he gave it up."

"It's hard to."

"He really did. What's more, he's driving his old clientele around showing and selling them safe-homes and secure-condos. Simms, Folley and Jarvis are about to make him junior partner." June's eyes glowed with nothing less than admiration. 

***

  After leaving June at her home, he drove alone on the Parkway towards Maryland.

June did not want to continue the evening together.

"I'll call you," she had said, kissing him before exiting the car. "It was a wonderful birthday, Abe. Thank you."

Then, "Abe, Peter asked me to get together for a drink. I said yes. He wants, first chance, when the kids can break loose from school, all the family to have diner together. I said yes to that too."

Abe nodded.

When they had left the restaurant there was a kind of hope in her eyes. Regret too.

Around him breathed people who wanted to mend their lives. Contrary to the law of entropy they expanded energy to revive their family -- rekindle that from which they drew a propitious kind of sense and continuum in life.

Abe was compelled now to confront events and facts afresh; re-assess his own life's journey.

No one had forced him to choose Fab for his wife. Fab had left him, but he never sought the real reasons behind it.

And Fab's own choice?

Whereas he had made his, to marry her, Fab had made two, to marry and later to leave him. Had he not tried to stop her perhaps because he as well felt that she too found out that after all these years her own decisions might have been wrong? As wrong as his?

"All this is so academic -- " he muttered to the windshield in front of him and to the oncoming traffic, "--neither has asked for divorce!"

Then, there was that intimate discerning of course, even friendship, that developed through the years. The bond of sharing difficult and happy times. Could June ever replace, if nothing else, the years of seasoning and companionship he and Fab shared? Could he be more than Peter's understudy for June, and June a facsimile for Fab?

He caught himself nodding again as he drove. He wasn't honestly happy, but glad for June and her daughters. Curiously enough, for Peter too.

He swallowed hard. A pinch of constriction squeezed at his Adam's apple at that moment. 

***

  When he got home that night after dropping June off, he found Dantea sitting in the Whistler's chair leafing through an old family album. He approached his daughter and gave her a peck on the cheek. He wanted to sit next to her, place his arm around her and tell her that the woman he had been seeing, the woman he was having an affair with and was planning to marry -- he would not. Dantea knew nothing about June, and never would. But the idea, enacted mutely as it did and solely in his thoughts, brought him peace. Was he being sentimental thus losing a second chance?

Maybe, he mused. But there was really no future in it, was there?

There was no future ... period.

He sniggered halfheartedly at the irony of this breakthrough.

A long respite maybe, but no long-wearing promise. Was this then, this incident of an affair, an interlude that gave people like him and June the much needed occasion to discover that they could fall in love, or simply love, again?

He detected then another perspective to their lives; one just as necessary as fantasizing about the coming of something better; not one of desertion but of discovery. It involved the insecurities that assaulted marriage then, in these hard and merciless times; vicissitudes involving complexities no other epoch in human history had shouldered. Enough to stymie and threaten one's very identity, even at fifty-five.

A break, whether in the form of an affair, separation, or a good and long car ride, could do wonders in sifting through the remnants, and begin reconstructing.

Was Dantea on to this as well? Her own generation's message of non-default? Maybe she, as June, just wanted her family back again. A family for Dantea.

He sat then next to her, put his arm around her shoulders, and started speaking to Dantea about a coming and different Thanksgiving weekend.  

***

  "Looks like an ordinary small rusty ant, the kind you find in deserts ... head is large though ... those are sizable -- what did you call them?" Abe Fagan frowned, and bent his glossy head over so as to scrutinized the eighth-inch insect. A powerful magnifying glass helped. Dantea and he had returned from Washington state two days before. It had been the first time all three of them had eaten together after ten years. Fab had said that she'd try to come over to DC the following year. Sooner maybe.

"Pincers," said Chickbrow, noting the rosy look on the other's face.

"Ah, pincers."

Fagan prodded the little creature in the petri dish, as he was told to. With the sharp end of his pencil. It at once turned its head with the powerful looking jaws, 'sniffed' at the lead point, and snapped it clear off.

Fagan flinched back, jerking the point-less pencil away. He blinked his eyes in frank surprise.

"It's the lead it's after," Chickbrow reassured him. "The wood part doesn't interest it."

"What'll happen if I place it back in?" Fagan mopped a perspiring forehead with his handkerchief.

"Try it."

Gingerly Fagan lowered the antique blunt pencil into the petri.

The ant-mite dropped the lead point it carried at one end of the dish and scurried to the source. It's jaws attacked the remaining lead at the surface of the wooden stylus gnawing and worrying away at it. Once it had a pincer-full of tiny lead shaves, it scuttled to where it had left the pencil point and deposited its load next to it. And returned to the source for more.

It took fifteen minutes for it to clear a hollow shaft in the pencil.

Fagan now, finally, straightened, feeling a bit unsteady on his feet. He reached for a surgical scalpel and cut the empty wood length-wise. His eyes widened. There wasn't a scratch on the inside!

He turned and looked up at Chickbrow who was leaning over him. "It didn't as much as rasp the wood!"

"Our ant-mites have good manners, Mr. Fagan. They do only what they're told. And this little feller was after lead, nothing else."

"But how do you do it?" Fagan asked, his curiosity getting the better of him.

"It's all there in the patent office, Mr. Fagan. All legal and tidy. But I know you have a hundred questions to ask, at least. Some of which concern the safety of the procedure."

Chickbrow paused. "If you will notice," he indicated with his small finger, "the shaft occupied by the lead is not only empty, but cleaned. Even through a microscope you will not spot traces of lead. The ant-mite used its own enzymes to scour the wooden walls. The enzymes are catalytic, harmless."

The ant-mite, as they talked, continued its frenzied activity. It busied itself with the lead it had collected.

"What's it doing now?"

Chickbrow glimpsed at the dish. "Removing impurities. It can work the process down to a few microns. If we looked in with a microscope we'd see separate little piles of crystals: the impurities that pencil lead contains. Molecular heaps even of other superfluous matter. It's efficient, thorough and non-toxic -- it's benign to any environment, Mr. Fagan. It is adroitly loyal to its genetic programming."

Fagan himself was convinced. But those above him would require more exacting and hard proof. There was going to be as it was plenty of dispute over the feasibility of the project. SIA no doubt would be jabbing its snout into what he was doing before very long, see what acclaim it could slurp up from the occasion, no matter how discreet he was. At any event, to have Chickbrow, accidentally or otherwise, go down into their black roster out of guileless botching would be bidding for the worst-case scenario.

Nevertheless, there was still a world of difference between pencils and people -- and a world at stake. Which included his daughter, and a grandchild on the way. A daughter that was left behind when his wife decided to leave him -- perhaps for a more ambitious mate --

-- No, that isn't Fab's way.

His ego was the one still dictating to him, was getting the better of him, and not rationality. Maybe the turn-out with June had a lot to do with it -- but certainly not Fab. Not of late, anyway.

Fab had mildened.

She was not a tangle of knots any more, as he knew her to be a decade ago. She had softened. There was more to save here than simply a bruised ego. Their daughter. And themselves, in a world that had somewhere along the way gone crazy and was rapidly expiring.

In time, Fagan had learned to be both father and mother to Dantea. But recently, with the death of her husband, even more. He made a vow, never to abandon her, or place another priority higher than her. No, he would never let that happen. Nothing possible could be more important than Dantea, Lukas, Lovesigh, Chickbrow -- in that order. Fab, too.

He somehow concealed his anxiety and excitement, to go through another ten minutes of observing the scampering ant-termite.

Up top, things stayed ceremonious and official. But within, Fagan was slowly and with due precautions recognizing it to be what it really was: a hollow performance by him.

And he knew Chickbrow knew it.

What gnawed and nagged at him this minute was that it would be the first time ever such an attempt would be ventured. The testimonials here had to be indisputable and overlap several layers. There could be no limit to redundancy in this. The operation had to take place, and succeed.

Dantea and her child must live their full lives, Fagan thought with urgency.

"The planet expires on a year-to-year basis, and Lovesigh on a day-to-day one, Mr. Chickbrow." He turned and faced the other man. "We are approaching the day which is about to become our last, sir. Earth is ejecting us like annoying gnats."

Fagan looked more subdued than tired just then. His face registered grim austerity, almost crestfallen.

"Children, the elderly, the able or disabled, the Moon and Mars colonies, which are still dependent on us -- the planet couldn't care less -- and the specie Homo Sapiens will cease to be. The Universe is not God, Mr. Chickbrow. It does not distress or have regard.

"We have cut or burned down more than seven million square kilometers of forests since 2000. We are living on negotiated time on a virtually treeless planet. If it weren't for the cloned sea weed, we wouldn't have enough oxygen to breath. The syndrome will be on us fully in less than two decades, with probable error of give or take two years. By then everybody and their aunt will know.

"Have you ever confronted panic arising from claustrophobia, Mr. Chickbrow? I guess not. If you had, you couldn't have qualified for astronaut."

Chickbrow upraised a finger. "Yes. The guy ripped out almost all loose cable within sight inside the tiny life-saver before we were rescued. He stopped because his fingers were hemorrhaging so badly -- "

"Then, what remains," Fagan cut in, "is a pragmatic maximum of only eighteen years for groundwork. Before the ripping and slashing starts here on Earth ... "

Fagans eyes, Chickbrow noticed just then, were the most round and innocent he had ever come across. They and the felt earnestness in the throaty voice evoked a glistening in his own.

Fagan's life had first begun to shift when he had started to transform from detached and stoical observer to taunting, persnickety faultfinder and nitpicker.

Abraham Edmund Fagan had no idea what Chickbrow thought of him. Had he been aware of it even, he would not have taken it under serious consideration, but merely made a note of it. He was used to being taken like a spurt of lemon in the eye -- except by one. Lukas.

So, there was much pain wherever he showed up. He was not much show. Few were the footlights that shone upon him and little was that which displayed manifest and dazzling top-notch endowments in him in any calling of enterprise.

He was not what one would say a handsome fellow -- although he had those shockingly exquisite and honest eyes that would not let you look away from them -- nor was he homely. Neither was he remote or detached. On the contrary, there was an aura of energy and nervous stir about the man, always. Fagan was not a trophy winner or even mildly adventurous, and his penetration of mind was neither conspicuous or mysteriously envious in any way. But what he knew, academically, scientifically and otherwise, he kept well hid. It were not the best of times for candor.

The epochs were foxy and wily.

But he did have a way with pruning off the flab and getting to the lean. People had tended to just put up with him because he got the job done, people high up. Fagan took nobody for granted and was steadfast and resolute, a solidly-approved-by-the-government man who knew his valuation fully well. All in all one looking at him could say he had a nettled and severely hardworking life.

"Soon," Fagan continued, "human beings will be all breathing fatal oxides of carbon, sulfur and ethylates, and dropping on the street like drunks." He inflected each word.

"There are infinite preparations in evacuating a planet that is about to be exterminated. There is a civilization to save."

He looked at Chickbrow.

"So, Mr. Chickbrow, can you show me something further up the scale -- something living let's say the mites are involved in?" 

***

  It was a kind of magic.

When she entered the classroom the world outside shut off. The basement of her brain levitated and expanded. Things couldn't go wrong. Things didn't.

It was a tug-o-war: The students yanked to extract knowledge out of her, she in turn pulled and lugged to elicit from them its accurate use. They would test her, sometimes ruthlessly, on minute grammatical points.

"Why plain and not full infinitive, Ms. Rhodes?"

"After what words can we use both gerund and infinitive, Ms. Rhodes?"

She would explain, and quickly sortie challenging them for examples. They would respond with, quivering hands -- all wanting to be favored first -- and she would point, listen, point swiftly to one, and the other, then another, till both sides, overcome by exhilaration, would break out into booming laughter and enthusiastic commentary. The miracle by then had already taken place.

They had learned.

There were times though when the experience was unnerving and no way to explain certain words or expressions. The class would get restless; she would lose them and become disappointed in herself and she'd wish that they had spent some of their taffy-chewing, liquorice-sucking years in NewStates of NovaAmerica. They'd know then what squirrel was and how acorns felt to the touch, whiff the pungent fragrance of dried and wet leaves burning in autumn below towering oaks with rainbows for foliage. They'd savor the crisp, pristine scent of coming spring, listen to the robin chirrup and the squawking of a bluejay, and almost hear the rich grass growing.

Audiovisual aids simply could not do as much.

The bell signaled the end of the school day. She shrugged. Squirrel and acorn can wait their turn to be discovered, after infinitive and gerund, she had decided earlier that evening.

And looked at more shards in her life.  

***

When she had 'run away' from Frank she drilled in keeping busy.

She had found the few old friends she had had from high school, had stopped smoking, and started reading again. There had been an amalgam of thoughts and emotions bottle-necking inside her.

Things like notions about getting helplessly caught in the gears of propriety, and being unable to control any longer your choices. Was that the reason she had left the way she had? Had she lost track, somewhere along the way, of her priorities? Atrophied her alternatives? Was she sucked up by a depleted ego, empty because the preoccupations of parenthood were not there, and with her odd and gruesome problem will never come to pass?

And where was her courage to buttress her all the while it was transpiring? Had she really wanted to break with Frank all along and didn't say so? Was her inaction what ate him up?

I'll never know.

More of her listened to Alison, Trudy and Beth than contributed. She wanted to end her mourning, rejoin the crowd and belong. She sought acceptance for what she was, a woman who had recently lost her man and could not have children.

I'm sore, she admitted to herself, and stick out like a sore thumb. I can't live down my attitude, live up to my role, and make best with a past that's gone.

Yet, with each day that passed, she wished a sort of confrontation. Someone to go in there, unmask the throbbing gash and lay the grief open. But all, Beth even, widowed two years, fell back with the others. "Amanda," she had said, "it'll drive you up the wall if you let it. Now's the time to do the hardest thing: what you always wanted to, but couldn't."

So, she had severed her ties, had not touched a cigarette, and developed a good size library. The books had told her that Waterbury, Connecticut was only a tiny piece of the world. 

***

  Athens had just about the opposite climate of Waterbury, and was a lot less humid. The quakes were frightening in the beginning, but with the years had become, if nothing else, a intractable companion. The seas were less restless and more cyan-blue in this part of the world. Aegean sun and shore, sky and water fringed her Attica enclave. 

***

  She realized as she attempted to sift her emotions into a semblance of ordered thoughts, and prepared to leave school that evening, that her silent onlooker standing by the door had no intention of leaving.

She brightened, "Stavro!"

The boy came up to breast high. Skinny but no push-over. Some of the others in his class towered a good foot and more over him. When provoked he'd start swinging first and then look, usually up, at his contender.

But overriding the I'm-no-soft-touch demeanor was a quality, nesting where it was well protected: a sensitivity which, finding no response, was beginning to mutate into discontent--even aggression. The chestnut pools of his eyes were perpetually ruffled by a look of distress and chagrin. When she had approached him for the first time he sensed, as children can do, her own malaise and had taken to her.

Between sessions he would often come early to class, as he had that day, approach while she put the assignment on the board, and coyly stand near by. She'd smile and show pleased at his company. He'd grin a little, pretend to wait for her to finish, and when the other kids started coming, stroll to his desk and moseyly sit.

"Today we'll read a poem. This poem speaks about courage, hope and perseverance. It is about people who, through struggle and faith, achieve their very own, seemingly unattainable, dreams. Dreams that appear to us, at first sight, difficult to hold on to as soap-bubbles and quicksilver ... "

"What can I do for you, Stavro?" Her attention returned to the waiting boy.

He faltered, "I lost it."

She got up, walked to him, and put a gentle hand on his shoulder. "What did you lose?"

Minding around for others, "The paper with the poem."

"Have you now?"

He nodded.

"I don't have any more copies. Here," she pointed to her desk, "open your notebook. I'll recite while you write."

				When things go wrong
					as they sometimes will,
				When the road you're
					trudging seems all uphill,
				When the funds are low,
					and the debts are high,
				And you want to smile,
					but you have to sigh,
				When care is pressing
					you down a bit, 
				Rest! if you must --
					but never quit.
 				Life is queer,
					with its twists and turns,
				As every one of us
					sometimes learns,
				And many a failure
					turns about
				When he might have won
					if he stuck it out;
				Stick to your task,
					though the pace seems slow --
				You may succeed
					with one more blow.
 				Success is failure
 				            turned inside out --
				The silver tint of
					the clouds of doubt --
				And you never can tell
					how close you are,
				It may be near when
					it seems afar;
				So stick to the fight
					when you're hardest hit -- 
				It's when things seem worst
					that YOU MUSTN'T QUIT.

  Later on he delivered a single nod. Stavro was not one for speaking much, his eyes told all.

"Next session I'll have a copy for you -- to correct your spelling," she managed to put in before he made a little bow with his head, about faced, and scooted out of the office. 

***

  Funny stories have a funny way of making it to serious-story status, if they are funny enough, Frank mused. They get enough laughs from New York newspaper editors, and before you know it you're on to cover them, even if it's at Earth's end.

The New York Star was a serious paper with serious editors and serious readers. Circulation ran into six figures and surprisingly enough none of these fluctuated noticeably. It was as steady as newspapers can be at a time when most of them burst nova-like and disappeared. The thirty-four years of its life had been due to its dull but functional motto, "Nothing in Access."

This kind of philosophy seemed not to present any major threat to SIA. On the contrary, it boosted the image that censorship could be kept at a minimum by responsible and non-exaggerated reporting. So the Star, although founded one year before the invading storm troopers of the 'Collapse', was one of the few non-government-run newspapers that survived.

It did not antagonize Glixxon's world-spread empire nor his power-sustaining guard, the SIA controllers, Citizen-Protector firing squads, that steadily increased and diffused throughout Glixxon's own world confederation. Nor did it intimidate the Generals who were Xenon Glixxon's most rambunctious 'children' of the NewTime Religion. These had been given -- and were purringly content with -- the newest weapons to play with, to try out on living flesh and bone, and given a free reign over insurgence groups popping up like bubbles in boiling tar, flaring out here-and-there over Xenon's global realm.

Frank, appraising this, saw that being conservative in type was by no means conservative in freedom of new assignments or travel. The temperance policy that governed N.Y.S. was very simple and unsophisticated: Factual writing, unquestionable evidence, unequivocal sources.

In the six years he had been with the paper many a reporter had been sacked on what was discreetly labeled, 'speculation indulgence'. None of the 64 reporters remaining on staff turned in spectacular or even ceremonial news, but all had accounted for proofs of factual, not 'story', events.

Paper editor, Ed Smythe, was allergic to compelling policy news. He sneezed, coughed and got runny sinuses every time a good story got below his nose. Perhaps it was an allergy brought on by psychosomatic responses, or, purely, the change in smell of different UPI, GAP and Reuters copy. Frank couldn't decide. When the paroxysms attacked, the staff knew something out-of-the-usual was being considered for next day's edition.

The case was such with Sophocles, a freelance correspondent residing in Athens. His latest essays, short and to the point, were anything but the usual run o'the mill travel articles. Lately a number of -- and he used no-no words here -- 'strange phenomena' occurred in the city. The local and international presses ran away with reports of 'inexplicable' (again a no-no word for N.Y.S.) happenings.

When Ed called him in that morning, Frank had already heard of Sophocles's scoops, but was not prepared for what followed.

"How's your Greek, Frank?" it began.

"Had some Classical Greek -- Hellenic at N.Y.U. And it was the first language I learned under grandma Erato's auspices -- on my mother's side. Why, Ed?"

Smythe spread the double-spaced sheets in front of him, "read'um."

When Frank finished, silence followed. He wondered if his boss waited for him as well to go through the same ritual of the head cold.

"What they tell me, Hellas is quite charming, even this time of the year. No snow, a few showers, mostly sun." He took a fresh Kleenex and rubbed an already worn nose. "Well?"

Frank shrugged, "It could be a hoax."

"It should be, but it's not. Anyway, I want to be a hundred and one per cent sure. That's your job there. Get close to Sophocles and get credible pictures. The Times, both here and Europe, are having a ball with this. It doesn't make sense why they should even have mentioned it."

"Maybe they're running out of good news."

"Not today. There's more than enough thirty hours a day. Something's going on over there, Frank, and it's being blanketed under levity."

© 1999 Vasilis Adams Afxentiou

A short biography. I am an ESL/EFL (English as a Second Language/English as a Foreign Language) teacher in Athens, Greece. I have been teaching English on-and-off since 1968, and full-time for the last fifteen years. Prior to that I worked as a Technical Specifications Writer for seven years and as an Engineer for five years. I was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. I went to university in the United States where I received my degrees. My writing credits include published fiction and non-fiction appearing both in Greece and in the USA. Some stateside publications I have written for are Greek Accent, National Herald (Proini), and Crosscurrents. I have received several Distinctive Certificates from WD Writing Competitions held over the years, and also Honorary Mention in my Greek works(narrative and poetry) here in Athens. In Greece I've been published in 30-Days, Key Travel News, Greece's Weekly, Athena Magazine and had a weekend travel column in a local newspaper. My email address is vafx@hol.gr for your comments. Some other e-zines that have puplished my stories in are The Domain, Ibn Quirtaiba, Cosmic Visions, Dark Planet, Basket Case, BORNmagazine, Aspiring Writer, ThinkB, Appalachians, Newwords, Zine in Time, and a couple dozen more.

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