The Prisoners' Wall (the entire novel 2006)

The Prisoners’ Wall - by Sam Hollands

 

 

 

Introduction

There had been war for nearly two thousand years. As well as three major continental wars there had been countless civil wars, land wars, sea wars, the war of vanity, and the prolonged and terrifying war of technology. The psychological dissonance of conflict had crept with varying degrees of subtlety into every home. War constituted the strongest thread of meaning for two thousand years. One of the poets of this world had described these two millennia as a “love affair with mortality” and the people loved him for pulling off that age-old trick of supplying a glib phrase to allow everyone to be wry and wise about something truly and incomprehensibly terrible.

 

Then mankind achieved peace. Worldwide unity of purpose, an end to the unsightly carnage that had been their heritage for so many jarring years. It had begun with a piece of legislation called “The Universal Bill of Conservation” which later became known as “The Black Book”, this was a law designed to protect the limited natural resources of the world. A major power, for a short time, became dominant using weapons technology far beyond anything previously experienced. In order to retain their monopoly, without disturbing the delicate diplomatic balance they invented and enforced a conservation law.

 

By intimidating all countries into protecting the limited resources of the world they hoped to secure their superiority indefinitely. An international law needed an infrastructure and (as they had known would happen) the concept called forth passionate supporters from every community. The first global organization was born, however, and quickly developed its own agenda’s and learnt to capitalize on its unique position.

 

A slightly uncomfortable time period followed as “The Black Book” disentangled itself from the waning national power that had conceived it. It then worked its way into the various and complex fabrics of the world. They worked hard to become part of the scenery, to be as unobtrusive as possible in order to achieve their noble aims while drawing as little attention to themselves as possible. In this way and by judicious misrepresentation of everyone to everyone (this was their most important and effective strategy) they created a pervasive horror of abusing the planet. This achievement alone significantly reduced the destructiveness of warfare.

 

By unifying all nations in one piece of policy they had created a launch pad for far loftier ambitions. They began to collect vast archives of information, from fanciful legends to weighty histories running into thousands of volumes. They pooled ideas and philosophies and plundered ancient schools of poetry for resonant groups of words. Initiates were trained in the arts of sifting and evaluating ideas and grew old in their endeavors.  Generations came and went as The Black Book began steadily to accumulate the apparatus of genuine power, maneuvering ever closer to its ultimate, sacred, goal… world peace.

 

Chapter One

Marten felt again the sensation of having a limb missing. It was a kind of panic and he was ashamed to see his hands trembling slightly. He wrestled briefly with the desire to check himself and then looked around the breakfast table. Of all the small fears he had started to harbor, as he grew older, the fear of being ridiculous to his children was the most potent. They had not noticed his discomfort.

 

The truth is, he thought, they have lost interest in me anyway. He tried again to think of something to say to capture their interest, to lift the three small heads from their absorption in sugary cereals. But they were not interested in genetic science and he knewfrom previous forays that they had each in their own way, at their own time, lost the faculty of amazement and their sophisticated curiosity was no longer his to satisfy.

 

Marten was not a person to begin attributing blame and he merely felt sad. Was this the missing limb? It was a tidy thought but he knew that the sensation always defied easy definition.

 

He kissed his wife as she slept, she made soft affectionate noises but did not wake. He always hoped, each morning, that she would wake up as she had very beautiful eyes and he was a romantic who would have worked contentedly after having gazed into his wife’s eyes in the morning. Not that he was discontented at work but he felt it would add to his contentment.

 

Marten did not think about the peace everyday. It was more than sixty years old and he had never known anything different. World Government had always promised that, one day, everyone would take peace for granted. Films about war were always the old films, humanity had healed the wounds and moved on to other things. Humanity had no need of violence, the ancient proverb had proved true. It was not surprising to Marten that World Government had delivered on all of its promises. This was because of the principle of genuine unobtrusive power. Marten had studied the foundations of society with conscientious care and had a good understanding of how everything worked. He was happy to live in a world without war, exploitation, rampant consumerism and ineffective democracies. He was happy… he was happy.

 

When Marten did think about the peace his thoughts drifted to Edouard Shing or General Edouard Shing as he called himself. The controversial exile from the world, the man who was not happy. He was interested in him for two reasons; General Shing was almost 120 years old and was one of very few modern examples of unnatural longevity, Marten was a geneticist and he was a dreamer, also Edouard Shing was a famous and influential writer, his contribution to “The invisible machinery of peace” was voluminous and he had had two awards for contributions to Cultural Progress, one of only four others to achieve that distinction. He had turned down inclusion in The Hundred Worthwhile Books and a few years after had disowned his entire body of work in a dramatic break with world government that had ended with his choosing a tiny coastal island to be exiled to. Marten was a romantic and he also had a recurrent missing limb.

 

Marten pretended to himself that it wasn’t important that the General’s island was only five hours drive from his own home and he also pretended that his best friend, Jerart’s, recent appointment as the Generals liaison was not interesting to him at all. He was not at all clear on why he should be so cautious but he was sure it was for the best.

 

The children had left for school when he returned to the kitchen and the mail had arrived. Among the Notices of community arrangements he saw a letter from Jerart, the address hand written in flowing script, as was Jerart’s custom. He opened it and Jerart, as was also his custom, launched into something with no preamble whatsoever, this time it was his book:

 

Clouds boiled up from the southeastern quarter of the sky. An uneasy wind drove the sea into restlessness. The messenger gazed out to the unsightly bulk of the island and its ancient fort brooding with stark permanence on the misted horizon. As steel rods of rain began to fret the cold muscles of the sea the messenger climbed down from the balcony that clung like a blister to the smooth white skin of the lighthouse that was his home.

 

He walked quickly down the steps to the jetty and climbed into the waiting boat. He carried only a tatty document case a few slim volumes and a bottle of strong drink. Every forty days he made the same pilgrimage. What difference he made to the life of the strange old general he could not say. But he knew he would remain at his post a watchman into the past. A past most people wanted to forget.

 

He knew that somewhere in the clutter of the old mans mind, buried deep in the confusion of his memories there was something lost that should be found, some faint and distant strand of forgotten humanity that should be recovered and understood.

 

And so the little boat nosed its way through the boisterous waves. The General waited on the huge stone quay wrapped like a paper parcel in his old brown coat. The messenger, greeting him, stepped ashore and together they walked the rocky steps up to the bleak sinister mass of the fortress, a relic of a distant age.

 

Jerart’s letter continued:

So Marten this is my dramatic entrance to the narrative and as always your honesty will be of more use to me than your flattery. The word “little” jars somewhat but what else is there? The boat is little. You see the kind of help I need. I hope you understand I want to write a good book. I find writing relaxing but I would like to make something of it. I would like to make some contribution to the world and I think a good tale is something I could comfortably sell.

 

I have enclosed some of his own writings. You will find it very different from everything else of his that you’ve read. He has a strange pace but it’s an interesting story. See what you think. Also, old friend, I need a favour. Pavel is quite an obscure person and Shing’s first wife died before the census. Could you please do a little discreet digging for me? Anything on them or their families would be useful, thank you.

 

I’m thinking of making a link between his tragic marriage and his reaction to the reform. It will give the whole thing more poetic momentum and provide a more, shall we say, acceptable motive for his behavior in some later incidents (I’ll show you more of his writings when you come to stay). His conversation gives a lot more detail than is here. He is more comfortable talking about some things than writing about them.

I know you are a bit twitchy about the idea and I’m pleased that you are worried about me but really there is nothing to worry about, where the cynic would be vulnerable the realist is not.

 

I have also enclosed his medical profile. There are some queries but as far as I can see none of the basics have been tampered with. I think the reason he has lived so long is that his body just didn’t realize that it was time to die. I don’t think there’s anything to it Marten. Some people just live longer than others.

 

Please come and visit soon. The views are amazing, the lighthouse has an excellent cellar of fine old booze and I pine for some sensible company. Write and let me know.

There is more material I want to discuss with you over a few glasses so do not delay.

 

Your friend

Jerart

 

The envelope contained several pages of photocopied handwritten text. The text was loose and chaotic but quite readable. Marten quickly calculated how much time he would save if he drove to work instead of riding his bike and settled down with another cup of coffee to read, only a little alarmed at how quickly his caution could be overridden.

 

[From General Edouard Shing’s writings. AE 1167]

 

I do not like the phrase “I did everything I could”. It is an arrogant phrase. I like it when people do not pretend to a knowledge that they do not have. Then I want to help them even though I do not have that knowledge either. I have shared my confusion to more effect than my wisdom. Which is not to say that I enjoy ignorance, only that I prefer it to the pointless effort of endlessly creating a reality in which everything is all right. After so many years I get sick of the sound of my voice in my head stating and restating my tired beliefs.

 

The purpose of writing these notes is for me to comfort myself with things I know to be true. To associate myself with truth to warm myself near it. All old men want comforts of one sort or another and mine is clarity. I make no apology for it.

 

I was twenty-five and working in a city law firm in a job obtained for me by my father. I was sent to an old valley farm with an order of some sort. I remember I was dressed in a city suit and a black leather trench coat that was hugely expensive but which I tried to wear as if it was cheap. As I talked to the farmer I wished that the business in hand had been of a more serious nature, serious enough perhaps to impress the pretty girl who brought us in a drink.  She asked me why was I wearing sunglasses indoors and then she and her father laughed at me. That was how I met my first wife.

In remembering her I always remember an earlier incident from my school days. It was a boy whose grandparents were country people. He brought in a birds egg. Pure white and unblemished apart from two tiny holes in either end where the contents had been blown out. I could not believe that it was real, that is to say natural. I was convinced it was plastic. I asked if I could hold it and I was amazed at how light it was and fragile. I was a particularly suspicious child and although I felt that it was indeed a bird’s egg I had to put it to the proof. I closed my fist over it and examined the fragments as the boy shouted and cried. My wife always gave me that same feeling of almost unreal purity the more precious for being natural.

As time went on I learned more and more to rely on the simple truth of my love for her. I moved to the farm and her father told me that I was the worst labourer who had ever worked for him. I began to feel healthy and strong. For the first time my mind felt clear even useful.

Two years later she died giving birth to our son who died a few hours after. Her father and I buried them and over the grave he said a poem that he had written when she was born. Walking back to the house he leant on my arm and told me to go back to my family. I wish I had said something then that would have let me stay. I had become aware that I was disintegrating that part of me had crumbled and the rest would quickly follow. Their death was part of my own, part of the worlds. I have never been able to see it differently and I never will.

On my return I told my father I wanted to join the army. He sorted me out with a commission and special privileges. That day he told me that life must go on. Such an easy thing to say, I hated him and called him a fool and said, didn't he know life was already over. Two weeks later as a gesture he saw me off and said jokingly that he had never been able to control me, which I thought a stupid way of assessing our relationship.

I proceeded from then on the principle of the hollow man. I worked to fill the space. As an undistracted soldier I was always going to do well. By the age of 31 I had been a key man in several successful territorial campaigns and was given command of a regiment. At the age of 42 I was promoted again when General Murga retired during the five years peace AE 1102-1107. I was his replacement at the head of the Ninth & Sixth Home armies in time to command them during the War of Peace. I held the north-eastern front with only a few minor breaches for the entire seven years of the war. Ironically the Global Unity Movement gave me an award in AE 1113 for the general most economical with the lives of men on both sides.

I have little to say of my time as a soldier. I did not serve my country as some men do. I was not looking for the rewards that the material world offers. I wanted to walk the frayed edge of humanity that war creates. Where through the tears and rents you seek the thing beyond. All I found were the tragic depths of truths I already knew. And one important fact; that man cannot make certain things true by wishing or by any device no matter how clever.

He can move the furniture around and even change the way he sees reality to make it easier but the perimeter fence will always be there. Still as high and still as impenetrable.

I had never taken The Global Unity Movement seriously, though I read their brochures. I assumed that everyone would be as cynical as I was about them. I thought that world organisation was a foolish dream and I realized later that I was more or less alone in my indifference to their technology. When the war ended and all credit was given to The Global Unity Movements diplomatic spadework I was again pretty much alone in being deeply suspicious of them. In the next few years along with many other old soldiers I was showered with what was called the support of a grateful people, a job on an important committee, a beautiful home in a picturesque village, a smart modern road car and so on. All of which confused me somewhat and made me deeply uncomfortable.

Most of my contemporaries seemed to have been prepared for this strange materialistic, self-congratulatory plateau. The change from war to peace was very smooth. Except for me. I remember sitting in a corner of my new living room facing the flat black square of the MediaCom screen. I had been encouraged by the Global Unity representative to turn it on and familiarize myself with the system. But I did not. I was expected to access my committee’s forum at some point and introduce myself. It must have been quite high level as the wage was very healthy and the objectives were of world relevance. But I was misplaced.

I think the problem was that The Global Unity Movement on behalf of the newly minted World Government were working hard to make sure that no one was left feeling obsolete after the armies and national rule were disbanded. Everyone, it was assumed, would need a niche in the new world. However I had never felt myself a part of the old world. So this life, which was carefully crafted to accommodate a fifty-year-old General, was meaningless to me.

They responded quickly to the problem in the shape of Horg Pavel, the village administrator. He was responsible for community issues and had, even at that early time, earned a reputation for working tirelessly in the interests of Obah village and the surrounding farms and vineyards. But he must have had other less mundane duties, as his authority seemed flexible enough to encounter the problems I caused.

The first time he visited me in my house he was very understanding. He would try he said to understand my reservations. He appreciated that the new system might be difficult to adjust to at first and he hoped he could help. During that initial interview I felt a powerful dislike of him developing in my heart. His manner was personable, his attitude friendly and helpful. But it was exactly this competent handling that unnerved me. Also his eyes had a strange flatness about them, a sort of blank coldness. He talked smoothly and encouragingly but no emotion of any kind showed in those eyes. I had seen men’s eyes blank and listless from exhaustion or disillusionment but never had I come across this weird contradiction with his manner. Before and after the end of the war I have found most Global Unity workers to be sincere and hard working, if a little fanatical. Pavel was unusual. I had a sensation around him of something lurking, something kept in check, of dark unpleasant places.

He told me that World Government were eager to accept my input on the committee but if I needed time to adjust that was fine. But I should remember that the efficacy of their decisions relied on as wide a range of views as possible and that although it was World Governments policy to assess and redefine itself constantly they would like everyone to get on board as quickly as possible. If the problem was more deeply rooted counsellors were available to talk things through and work out a recovery schedule. It seemed that what ever the matter was, a solution was ready to hand.

The media had been rounded up some time before the end of the war. Local papers and V stations had sold out wholesale to the world peace initiative. Global Unity Workers quickly coordinated them and the World Media was born. I would think a fair amount of money changed hands along the way also. In spite of everything, I don’t believe in total information control now and I didn’t believe in it then but the media were handed an agenda back then and they’ve stuck to it ever since. Later I was to learn what this involved but I make no criticism; there is really not much to be gained in blaming the tool. The message at that time was uniform, unqualified praise of World Government strategies.

The idea was simple enough: convince everyone that they are really all on the same side. The old organizations were reconstructed according to a new global format. The WG economic system spread prosperity evenly across the globe, we were told, at one stroke cancelling out poverty and seriously reducing crime. They had a policy of welcoming all opinion, criticism and suggestion. The fiercest critics would find themselves with a long-term consultation contract to a major committee. Creativity and individuality were encouraged as valid contributions to the pursuit of humanity. Their objectives were noble their vision beautiful. I won’t say I didn’t believe what I read and saw but I did feel thoroughly unsettled and ill at ease.

Some of my feeling, at that time, was based on what I had read of BE history. Having been born into a very wealthy family I had access to some pretty exclusive archives and was unusually interested in ancient writings. And so I was familiar with the idea of paranoid government. With my naturally suspicious inclinations I felt that it was only a matter of time until an unpleasant underbelly revealed itself. Added to this, my resentment of Pavel was growing.

Marten laid the pages aside and quietly considered what he had read. It jarred him to read something written by the General without the subtly reassuring authorial voice that pervaded all of Edouard Shing’s books that he had read.  He felt uncomfortable with what he had read because it was written from outside his world. Here is a man; a little voice formulated the thought in his head, who might, who probably does, talk against world peace. This was the clause that would allow Marten to not think about the fact that some of his own thoughts were reflected in the Generals notes.

Marten was alarmed, he was annoyed with Jerart for being so glib about the whole thing and he determined to take up his invitation to visit that weekend and talk it out.

Chapter Two

“I've had endless discussion with him Marten and I am unchanged as I hope you will have perceived.”

Jerart lounged in an ornate armchair that he had dragged out onto the balcony of the living room in his lighthouse. He cradled a crystal goblet and idly swirled the exquisite vintage it contained with imperceptible movements of his hands.

“The problem is not you Jerart but what your General represents. I worry that his personality however tamed by your writing will provide some sort of rallying point for dysfunctionals. And take it from me, World Government will not like to be reminded at this point that anyone is beyond their help.”

“Oh please! Do you really take it that seriously? He's just a confused old man who doesn't have the wit to understand…”

Marten interrupted Jerart angrily.

“Stop juggling arguments; either he has hidden depths or he's just a confused old man.”

“Ok, I should say harmless old man. But listen World Government have proved their point years ago. No sensible person wants to question them anymore. Shing’s story is an interesting sidelight on the past and it functions well as a cautionary tale. At least it will.”

“You’re making more sense now but just remember you're walking a fine line. I wouldn't use any of his own thoughts.”

“I wouldn't dream of it. In fact I've invented a pretty much new character for him “the honest man struggling with reality and his own limitations” it’s basically him without the self belief.”

Marten relaxed and sat back.

“Fine fine. I think maybe reading his notes shook me up a bit. His perspective is quite alien really. You have to kind of balance his thinking while you're reading.”

“Have another drink. Yes he thinks he’s a philosopher but he's really just fundamentally lost… tell me what do you think of the view?”

Below them the broad sweep of coastline glinted like a notched scimitar blade as the moonlight caught in the restless surf.

“Breathtaking…

...Can you tell me the kind of things you talk about together or...”?

“Oh yes I have a free hand more or less. The documentation committee finished with him long ago. The volatile areas were all defined during his trial and no-ones really worried as long as he doesn't get into print again. Which leaves me free to wander where I will as it were. You know I think you'd really enjoy his arguments. I probably shouldn't say this but it's quite exhilarating debating with some one who simply cannot compromise. He sees things with the most childish clarity.”

“What sort of debate exactly?”

“Well I guide him here and there, you know, probing for some kind of variance in his principles. But mostly we discuss literature. He's actually very well read and some of his speculations are shockingly irreverent. You would not believe his views on Syro and the truth about Roban....”

Jerart’s sense of the dramatic required him to take a long pull at his drink.

“...Well...”

“He's convinced that Arcus wrote “The Balloon Father” and the “Seven liberating truths”.

“What!”

“And his argument boils down to; “it's what feels true.””

“Is he just being contentious?”

“Oh no I mean convinced”

“Well...You know I'd like to hear his reasoning however poorly supported.”

“I think I might be able to bend the rules a little to accommodate my oldest buddy. Although he has this habit of trying to scare up your soul so try not to be too sensitive about your mortality.”

“Are you sure you want to do this. I don't want to get you into trouble over what is basically idle curiosity.”

“Oh Marten you’re such a good person. Do not worry, I have discretional powers over this exile although Shing doesn't know it or he'd give me no rest. I’ll approve you on artistic grounds as my companion for one visit. Tell me have you ever heard of something called “The locked box”?”

“Vaguely. It sounds like a metaphysical gambit.”

“Oh it definitely is something of a philosopher’s plaything. There was at one time a lot of myths and stories connected with the idea, you know; quests, adventures, epics and so on,all allegorical, the box being the undiscovered self. Then a few late eleventh century thinkers picked it up and turned it into the theory of the infinite mind.”

“Ah yes that I have heard of, wasn't it discredited rather thoroughly?”

“Yes well the “Liberating Truths” were just starting to really gain momentum about then and they eclipsed the infinite mind completely. However the point is, Shing thinks it’s real.”

“What!”

“The box. He thinks it’s a literal box and what's more he's convinced that he's seen it.”

“Could it be?”

“Oh no it's completely impossible. See what I mean though? He perceives things like a child.”

-----------------------

[From the first chapter of  “The story of Roban & Arcus” by Syro. AE 1023.]

Roban & Arcus

Roban and Arcus were two poets who went to the same school at a time when the world was run by kings. They both were good poets and they were friends. In time they both were appointed to be poets to two kings Milkart and Janus. Roban wrote poems for Milkart and Arcus wrote poems for Janus. This was good for both of them but they now lived far apart. However they wrote to each other often and whenever one wrote a good poem he would send it to the other.

In time the kings were beset with many troubles. Food became scarce and there were many poor wanting the help of the kings. Both kings thought on dire solutions but a powerful man needs better reasons than his own fear and both the poets were given a terrible task. A poem was to be written that men would read and in their hearts it would help them forgive the king and to forgive themselves.

The poem was written and to this day no one knows which of the two young poets wrote it. It was called “The Balloon Father”, a tragedy. A family forced to flee their country because of a plague that was ravaging beast and man. They make their escape in an old air balloon but as they approach the mountains that are the natural border of the land they start to lose height. They quickly discard all their belongings but still they lose height. The father looks at his family of five boys terrified at the choices before him.

Before he says anything his oldest son stands forward says farewell to his brothers and his parents and courageously throws himself from the balloon. The father is torn between pride and grief. As their precarious journey continues his next three sons make the same terrible sacrifice until only the youngest son a ten year-old is left. The father then makes a long and eloquent speech in praise of his dead sons conferring the pride and dignity of the family on to his youngest. He then takes his wife and together they throw themselves to the rocks below. With their weight gone the balloon soars above the final peak and carries the boy to a new land where he founds a strong and noble family to the memory of the one he lost.  

The poem was written in an ancient style, very dramatic and deeply passionate. When the kings read the poem they were both greatly moved. It gave them great heart, as it seemed to ennoble a dreadful task. They had the poem printed and sent out among the people. They had it read aloud in the marketplaces and lastly they sent a copy to each soldier in their armies. Then the soldiers went into the lands and whoever would volunteer would die to found the new generation.

The kings were satisfied and they rewarded the poets with lands and wealth. But the poets were not happy, they were bitter in their hearts. Arcus wrote to Roban that he no longer wanted to live having shaped the deaths of so many and a pact was made between them that on a certain day they would burn all their writings and then take their own lives. When the day came Arcus did not hesitate to fulfil the pact. But Roban awoke that day with a new understanding in his heart that if their words had caused great harm they could be made to cause great good and he resolved not to die until this was achieved. He mourned long over his friend but a new task was before him and he did not shrink from it.

Chapter 3 

Jerart’s representation of the General in his conversation with Marten was based on another conversation that took place several weeks earlier while he was visiting the General in his rooms in the old fort.

“I don't see why you should object to Syro after all his style is very similar to yours.”

“Except that I don't have a style.”

“Excuse me General but everyone has a style. It’s shockingly vain to claim otherwise.”

“Then perhaps I mean that I am not conscious of having a style. I don't object to his writing so much as his representation of the facts. The “History of the purges” may not have been a popular book but its lack of popular appeal goes some way to supporting the validity of its facts. Who really believes that people volunteered to die? It's only what people want to believe. That’s why Syro earned a place in the “Hundred worthwhile books” and   not the fire which is where I would have put him.”

Beyond the old, heavily leaded, windows of the Generals study the weather was driving itself into more and more dramatic expressions of fear and anxiety using all the wind and rain it could muster. With a good fire and a bottle of the local spirits, Jerart noticed it only to relish the contrast.

“It's a terrible arrogance to dismiss the importance of what people want to be true. You certainly rush to award yourself powers anyone else would be cautious of. The truth men have made is the force that has conquered the world. To dismiss it is surely not wise.”

“Would you rather be wise or right?”

“If I think I'm wise then I'll naturally think I'm right as well. I can't do better than that within the boundaries of my own perceptions. So where is the choice?”

The General gazed out of the window with the air of a man about to face his ancient enemy. He turned to face Jerart.

“Well in Syro's case, it was the choice between accuracy and popularity. His motive poisons the value of his story because it is no longer truth.”

“Oh such dramatic language! Perhaps we should examine the motives that poison your argument? You hate World Government...”

“Not hate Jerart, mistrust”

“Mistrust then. So that mistrust influences your view of their policies many of which are based on Roban’s “Seven Liberating Truths” which Syro simplified and made popular and what’s more Syro's masterful and judicious handling of the past not only helped people face the past but also provides an almost exact template of World Governments Information strategy today. Hence you don't like Syro. Arguing with you is always just a case of hunting down your biases.”

“I admit I think Syro among others has caused a lot of trouble. But it is the principle of dishonesty that I object to regardless of the propagator. Syro didn’t just handle the past he altered it brazenly. I have no doubt that many of his readers knew the truth about the purges but they preferred Syro's version. It made them comfortable with the awful nature of their history. But you're wrong. He didn't help them face the past; he created a past they could face and established a precedent of moral dishonesty. And that is the contradiction that has put the world out of joint.”

      “You only think the world is out of joint, General, because your personal morality is too rigidly defined. However this is a circular argument on an issue we have discussed many times before.”

“And you believe do you that your children will carry part of you into the future? Or perhaps your achievements? Whatever they may be.”

“What?”

“Believe me Jerart. The future will forget you as quickly as you are willing to forget the past.”

“You have no idea who I am or what I've done and will yet do.”

“I know that you will die.

([As the past asserts itself through emotions, which assemble words to the purpose] the day was a bright one, the brightness made the men feel sore. It was the rumour of fighting. It was the expectation of pain; they could smell it in the new grass. They were banded in this fear lying in the damp riverbed like lizards close to the wet soil. The boy was their captain; their courageous fool, their bound lives in his trembling hands. He had been thinking “we will find the enemy” but now it was day and there was only fear. And then it seemed that those men he had lost were returning, running under fire, three of the five. The men shouted them on knowing this was their release, their honourable retreat. He imagined he could hide them with his will as they ran on over the terrifying ground. Then one fell dead. And they all wanted them to leave him and they did leave him. The two ran on, out of range now maybe, their faces hungry. Stumbling at last they made the riverbed and the men cheered. Then he saw the bullet holes in their clothes, many but no blood. Then, impossible, safe among their friends, their brothers. The two, their faces now strange beyond understanding, on their feet again back to back their guns in their hands. Again the rapid relentless noise cutting down men until they were cut down. The two that had seemed to return. He had watched the wounds being cleaned, the strange continents of dried blood on the pale bellies, the little holes. One of the strangers had lived long enough to curse him, an awful pointless fire in his eyes.)                              

But don't get irate there's enough left in the bottle to effect a reconciliation.

I'm sorry Jerart you must forgive me if I interpret the committees choice of keeper for me as a kind of challenge.”

“Oh well, thank goodness you're not getting personal!”

[The beginning of chapter 2 from Jerart’s Book based on the life of General Shing]

He was a young man, in his early twenties. Straight and tall, with hair so black it almost had a bluish sheen. His dark sullen eyes flickered nervously over the verdant countryside that to him was so strange. His sleek road-car and expensive city clothes made a contrast with the half wild valleys and fields that he passed with negligent speed. Checking his map he made a sharp turn dangerously fast up an old track overhung with trees laden with first-quarter blossoms. This was the place he was sure, the only farm for miles, fruit orchards, cereals and livestock as well as a small vineyard on the south-facing hills. The whole thing reeked of earthy goodness. He fully expected a wind weathered, rosy cheeked old man to appear carrying a pail of something or other.

 

Abruptly the avenue of trees swung into a wide drive in front of an ancient but respectable looking red brick building with tall windows and a good many gables, attics and chimneys. It seemed to sprawl in several directions out at the back and the young man felt an urge to explore.

 

He climbed out of his road-car lifting his document case from the passenger seat. In a small sun-garden at the side of the house he caught sight of a girl reading. He remained still and did not call her as he felt a need to examine her a little. There was something in her posture, something slight but profound; it seemed to eclipse him, to cancel him out as if he had never been. The thought shook him deeply as a barb, in that instant, caught in his heart. He looked at the long rich brown hair as something alien from him, the tanned forearms and idle fingers turning the pages as distant, eternally distant. There seemed nothing incongruous between her and the sky and the delicate garden trees or the sweet luxurious sunlight. He wanted this, to move in this world to hide himself away here. The shape of her face was refined and held in it a sensitive response to whatever it was she was reading. He wished it could have been something written by him.  Then she noticed him.

 

“I'm so sorry. I didn't see you waiting. I thought you would go straight in. Father is ready for you this time although I don't think I've met you before.”

 

The young man tried to focus. She had seemed to run up to him in a way that was friendly and interested. She smiled at him abundantly like a shower of sun; her eyes seemed so unguarded and free. His calm self-sufficiency left him as he stood. He felt like a lump of useless dull empty stuff. His clothes, which normally made him feel lithe and chic suddenly, seemed shabby and pointless. He panicked as to whether or not to take off his sunglasses, they were an unwanted barrier but they also seemed to retain his last shred of composure.

 

“Edouard Shing”

 

He said, pushing out his hand, the sunglasses staying where they were.

 

“And I am pleased to meet you…?”

 

“Erian Faberen. I am pleased to meet you too Mr. Shing. Shall I call my Father?”

 

He became aware of moments beginning to end, of time relentlessly passing. He wanted to remain and take root in this small space in front of her. To be an incidental feature in her life, something she passed maybe even touched every now and again. Some of the Shing pride began to seep back into his consciousness though and he assumed a brusque air to disguise her powerful fascination for him.

 

“If you would. I'm late already as it is.”

 

It was an artless attempt and she only smiled all the more. He had the unpleasant feeling that his trusty facade had gone suddenly transparent.

“Of course. If you'd like to step into his study I'll run and find him.”

 

She showed him into a shadowy untidy room with a large leather topped desk in the center. Two comfortable looking armchairs were placed to one side around a small empty fireplace. She left him contemplating the thought of her and the shattering effect she had had on him. She could not be more than eighteen or nineteen but he had never felt so inadequate, so feeble in front of a woman before. Her unqualified acceptance of him did not presuppose him but seemed to leave plenty of space for him to explain himself. Everyone else he knew had elaborate defenses even his friends were guarded toward him as he was toward them. It had always seemed the sensible thing. This was something new and fearful but he felt something unwinding in himself, a kind of painful release and he wondered whether to embrace this feeling or destroy it.

 

“Hello, hello, please have a seat. Can I offer you something to drink?”

 

Her father was not rosy cheeked or wind weathered. He had a narrow angular face and deep-set pale blue eyes. Edouard was surprised to see that he wore an excellently tailored morning suit of a superb lightweight charcoal coloured material and not some sort of smock as he had been expecting.

 

“Ah hello Mr Faberen. Coffee please.”

“Erian. If you would my dear.”

 

Edouard held his breath as she left the room. She had run to get her father to see him. He examined the thought with satisfaction. And now she was getting a drink for him. Her own air of modest attentiveness gave her actions a natural friendly quality. He felt that this was of great and rare value. He felt refreshed by her.

 

“Now to business Mr. Shing. The Adjustments to my trust arrangements, I presume you have the redrafted documents.”

 

“Right here. If you would like to check them through and sign them and then we're done.”

 

The old man took the papers from him and settled down to a thorough scrutiny. For once he did not find the silence awkward but he settled back in the armchair, which was indeed comfortable, and examined the room around him. There were piles of books and papers here and there on the desk and the floor. One wall was shelved from floor to ceiling. The shelves held more books and scattered artifacts, fossils, animal skulls, carvings and so on. He imagined himself in an old study like this surrounded by his own interests and artifacts, a sort of reliable and unassuming catalogue of a long and satisfying life.

He wallowed in the sense of ease that the room and the old man himself generated.

 

When she returned she carried a tray of fresh coffee and thin almond biscuits. The aroma reached him first like a smooth luxurious wave. She put the tray down and poured him a cup handing it to him she looked into his face.

 

“Why are you still wearing your sunglasses inside?”

 

The old man looked up and gave a short bark of laughter and the girl laughed with him. Edouard felt exposed for an exquisite painful instant and then laughed himself. He lifted the glasses and smiled at them both.

 

“We young lawyers are taught to hide our eyes until we have them properly trained.”

 

The old farmer laughed again and resumed his scrutiny of the documents. The girl held Edouard’s gaze, her smile subtly changing in its emphasis as if she were starting to like him as one not too far from her in age, as an ally of some sort. Not as other girls had done with a kind of false intimacy, as if he were a kind of fellow conspirator but with an honest interest as if there might be things about him she could value.

He felt himself starting to relax but the power of her presence was undiminished. The fear that had shaken him at the start was slowly being replaced by a lazy warm freedom of movement. The farmer and his daughter seemed to create around them an uncritical space in which he could be known without fear. The potential of this thought made him almost drunk with excitement. He felt an urge to spread his self before them and consult with them over whom he was, to speak of things precious only to him.

 

“How would you like to stay for lunch with us?”

 

It seemed to him like some statement of profound truth and he realized that his reaction to this intoxicating scenario was raging out of control. The truth was that he had other commitments to fulfill that day and part of him demanded the security of reality or at least a reality that he understood. He felt an urge to flee the house as if his subconscious was alerting him to a hidden danger disguised by his longings. He looked at the girl again and she seemed aware of his confusion.

 

Chapter Four

Returning to the conversation between Jerart and the General. After several glasses of spirits Jerart’s memory of it was hazy and uncertain but he did remember thinking that he was particularly eloquent.

“You see Jerart what upsets me is not so much that I cannot be reconciled to your world but that your world is so damaging to humanity. Before you object please let me explain; the principle of control by media may seem liberated but it compromises people’s free will as surely as any ancient dictatorship ever did. For most people time no longer passes, they fall into a process of reconstructing the present constantly with their image, their possessions, relationships and so on. No one develops anymore as it is much more convenient to conform to a stereotype and then present yourself complete to the world. That is what you mean when you talk about adults, some kind of consummate durable machine. But that is an illusion fuelled by the unspoken fear of death. A mechanism to save time without acknowledging that it is finite for us. The voice you do not listen to, that you cannot at any cost listen to, is the voice of the obsolete that will one day be your voice.”

“What you have just described is the only sensible way of handling reality. World Government has eliminated poverty and crime; today’s children don't know what the word “war” means. Can you imagine what the world would be like now without their reform schedules? There would have been another corporate revolution only this time on a much larger scale. Unscrupulous greedy magnates would practically own the weak governments bankrupted by war and exploitation would run amok. But oh no! It’s not good enough for the sanctimonious General. What do you want, for everyone to join hands and tremble in fear together?”

“I understand your point and to some extent I respect the good will that has motivated most world government policy. But have you really considered all the implications? Society is defined in tiers, a new class system based on intellect. You for instance are a naturally intelligent person so a carefully designed niche awaits you along with certain privileges which you are taught belong to all as gifted as you. What if those privileges actually function as an elaborate kind of blackmail?”

“This is getting a little far fetched don't you think?”

“Just hear me out Jerart. Who will be willing to question a system that has defined validated and rewarded them? No one. It works all the way through; the masses are controlled by a handful of media generated stereotypes. Did you know that I worked on the non-conformist image? We cancelled out the “dark man” and other extreme forms of dysfunction by making it fashionable and therefore controllable.”

“I read up on that. It was a neat piece of work for the time.”

“Well I hated myself for my part in it. But do you really think that the form changes the higher up the intellectual echelons you go. Your belief in your superiority keeps you firmly in line. I don't condemn these structures because I think society shouldn't have a structure but because its foundation is dishonest. In the absence of certain truths they have invented a makeshift value system, which now passes for reality. So people stop looking for truth and ultimately they loose their ability to face the unknown.”

“But World Government encourages philosophy and new ideas.”

“Oh yes I know and it's a clever policy too. Nothing takes the wind out of critic’s sails more than telling him he's got a good point. But when I talk of searching for truth I don't mean speculation from an accepted body of fact. I mean, what is man? We both know the rights and entitlements of a citizen of the world and we can estimate his value according to his contribution to culture or science but what is man? What is his ultimate significance? I have seen enough in my life to know that we are not meaningless machines. I have felt things deeper than the fear of death so what does that mean? I don't know but I do know that these questions will never be answered as long as we allow ourselves to be distracted by this false reality.”

“Stirring words general. I don't mind telling you I do find your life fascinating. But what about making the best of what we have? Isn't that really our guiding principle? Surely moral dishonesty, as you call it, is a means justified by the ends.”

“I would rather take a longer route to a better solution. I don't like to think of people’s potential being stifled by all these comfortable delusions. Truth should never be sacrificed to facilitate reform. I'm getting tired Jerart. You know you can bed down here if you don't want to make the crossing in the dark. The officers’ bunks are quite comfortable and I can make one up in no time if you'd like.”

“Thank you general but I prefer my own eyrie in the lighthouse.”

“Ah the dawn view of the coast from your balcony eh? Well thank you for your time my friend.”

That had been weeks earlier and Jerart had enjoyed the conversation because it had felt dangerous. He was an intellectual and he liked to believe that he could walk the perimeter of acceptable thought while remaining unaffected. He was glad that Marten had come because now there would be someone to appreciate how unaffected he was. Marten was also a good friend and one of the few that Jerart truly valued.

Marten was reading the next episode from the Generals notes over a late breakfast.

[From the Generals writings. AE 1167]

I wish I could be proud of my behavior. The idea of a general has always seemed to go along with a kind of nobility, which has always eluded me personally; perhaps if I had had it I would have kept my composure.

I started in small ways. I did not live in the house and I did not use the car. I did not call on friends and I avoided officialdom like the plague. My neighbors became uncomfortable because I slept in the garden, and complained to Pavel of my eccentric behavior. He made a point of telling me that he had quieted their fears on that score. He hoped that I would repay his good faith even though he had failed to make a friend of me. I set fire to the house and to the car, which exploded.

 

The man himself arrived very quickly accompanied by two armed police (something unheard of in our quiet rural retreat). I was restrained quietly but efficiently and was led away.

 

In Pavel’s office a truly bizarre scene unfolded, which I have made little sense of since. First of all I recognized one of the policemen as an old guard from my personal staff. What was strange was that he also recognized me but gave no sign to his companions; he looked at me with sympathy but said not a word.

 

Pavel looked at me with feigned pity as if I was a rather foolish child. My actions he said were regrettable as the fire and the explosion would of course be open to various interpretations, the house and the car were my own property so I would not be charged on that score however the disruption caused in the community was a more serious matter. If I had a reasonable explanation for my behavior he would do his best to smooth things over.

 

It was like he was following some ancient formal process and I wondered again at the emptiness in his eyes. I realized for the first time how much younger than me he was, I would say at least twenty years if not more. I laughed to myself at this thought.

 

I am not exactly sure how he interpreted this but his reaction was not favorable. He seemed to snap, his normally dead eyes flashed with anger.

 

“General. In spite of the respect I have for your former position and for the potential worth to world government which some believe you to have. I am afraid I must act to prevent any damage to this community.”

 

He paused, glancing at the guards.

 

“Your own actions will, I think, justify my conclusion that your sanity is suspect.”

 

He was sweating by now, his strange pallid face glistening. His words were strung with a strange intensity and his eyes lit with the most profound hatred. This was another odd thought, what could have inspired such hatred? The situation proceeded to get still more bizarre.

 

“You will remove your clothes.”

 

I made no move to obey. Pavel began writing something, his head bowed over his desk as if he had said nothing. After a minute or so he looked up and made an irritated gesture to the guards to take off my clothes. I fought the instinct to defend myself and wracked my brains to understand what Pavel was trying to achieve, as the guards quickly and silently stripped me naked. They folded my clothes neatly and laid them to one side and then stood back. I wondered if this strange procedure was familiar to them or whether they were simply conditioned to obey. Pavel continued writing and I stood naked in the middle of the room.

 

Nakedness is an experience as much as a state, according to the various circumstances in which we find ourselves naked. At this point I felt a number of different things but somehow the prevailing emotion became self-pity, I wondered why I wasn’t angry and outraged. I wouldn’t claim to have been a glorious creature even in my youth; I always seem to have had more limbs than muscles to cover them. This, however, was the nakedness of a middle-aged man, my nakedness. I stood in that utilitarian little office with my three captors and felt sorry for myself.

Whatever Pavel had meant to achieve this is what had happened; I was now there, I was in the room because nakedness is real. He had forced me from my isolation.

 

He looked at me for a few moments, his eyes restored to their former blankness.

 

“Go into the room through the door to my left and wait.”

 

The door was behind him. A plain wooden door, of a light pine, mellow golden in color like honey. For some strange reason I imagined a tiny room beyond just large enough to squeeze inside, paneled with the same golden wood. I imagined crawling inside it and shutting myself in, in the dark, surrounded by warm pinewood. Along with the self-pity I also had a sensation of having spilled out of myself, of having fallen in a heap. I found myself obeying Pavel’s disinterested command like a sleepy child. Two, three steps toward the door. As I drew parallel with him I turned to look at him, just in time to catch him glance at one of the guards with a mean twist of a triumphant smirk on his pale face. It was enough.

 

I swung my right arm around and caught Pavel by the back of his neck and smashed his face down onto his desk. His arms sprawled out under him as I brought his head down a second time. All the time I was waiting for the guards to pin me and drag me off him. But the guard who had been on my staff was restraining his companion and shouting something at me at the same time. I grabbed Pavel’s flailing left arm and pushed it hard up his back, he grunted in pain, I shoved his chair forward until his body was jammed against the desk and relinquished my grip on his neck. Then I broke three of his fingers one after the other, the little finger to the middle finger, I have no idea why. But they snapped with an unnatural ease as if the bones were dry and porous. At this point Pavel fainted and lay inert. I pulled his chair away and he slid like a rag to the floor.

 

I looked at the bundle of bones and skin that had seemed to embody so much poison only a few moments before. I felt a deep pang of guilt; I realized that Pavel had really been no less pathetic conscious than he was now. I had allowed myself to be manipulated, to react and worse, I had hurt him with a kind of cold fascination. I felt sick with myself. I wanted a long shower. I walked up to the guards who had ceased to struggle with one another and were gaping at the prone form of Pavel lying under the desk. I caught the eye of my old staff officer and silently thanked him; I still wonder today what explanation he gave for his behavior. His colleague continued to stare. I waited a moment to see what they would do. I dressed unhurriedly, made a halfhearted quip about the problem of being on the run from a world government, and left the building into the joyous, clean night air.  

Chapter Five

[From “Falling stars” By Syro. An explanation of “The Seven Liberating Truths”]

 

The Seven Liberating Truths. 

(Published by Orlan, Groff and Burlemfein in the coronation year BE187) 

The past has truly gone.

We are not our forefathers.

Life and death are the inside and outside of a circle.

We have no need of violence.

Everything is to be gained by reasoned debate.

Art is its own justification.

The more we learn the less we know

 

The Seven Liberating Truths.

(As they appeared in the Poster and leaflet produced by Arlon Lowhand in the campaign of BE132 against the so called “unfeeling administration”.) 

The present is all that’s real

We are ourselves only.

Life is a pattern within a circle.

We have no need of violence.

By finding the right words we can solve anything

Creativity conceives its own laws

Every door we open reveals seven more.

The Seven Liberating Truths. 

(As published by the Masters of the square the day after Roban’s speech)

The past ended yesterday.

We are not our fathers.

Life is an endless pattern within a circle.

We have no need of violence.

To understand each other is to solve our differences.

To create is personal truth

Wisdom is a key and not a place

 

No one is sure of the exact wording of the truths according to Roban as he announced them at a banquet and dedicated them to the king. Various versions spread by word of mouth so that a number of published truths claimed to be the originals and Roban put his name to several of them. He was content it seems that people had got the general idea. He also offered some explanations of the truths but not as many as one would have expected considering the interest that they generated. Since those times the Truths have fallen into many and varied hands, some irresponsible, some with deep but unpenetrating respect. It is my aim in this work to search through Roban’s meaning and make it as clear as I can for the readers of today. In my eyes the truths have great value not only as personal tokens of belief but also as profound guiding principles in the governing of our world.

------------------------------------

Marten’s reservations about meeting the General were increased after reading more of his writings. Jerart thought perhaps he had made up the story about Pavel because he didn’t like him but Marten doubted this. Jerart had written the scene in Pavel’s office with the General ranting at Pavel that world government could never give him his family back and Pavel earnestly begging him to be patient with them. Followed by the General leaving in an emotional rage and Pavel distressed at not having been able to help him. At this time Jerart was pleased with this particular piece of writing. Marten returned to being unhappy with the idea of the book. That afternoon they visited the General together.

 

“So you’ve come to see me because I am very old”

 

“Actually that is only one of the reasons for my being interested in meeting you. I understand that you have some interesting perspectives on some of the more influential literary works in our history.”

 

“So you’ve come to see me because I’m old and contentious?”

“Yes actually. I hope you don’t mind.”

 

They were sat out on a huge balustrade that was partly converted into a greenhouse for the Generals use. The sun filtered through the greenery. 

 

“Not at all. I am always grateful for a chance to have a discussion and I’m sure Jerart will   be glad for me to irritate someone else for a change. What would you like to disagree with me about this morning?”

 

“Well, I’m very interested in the fact that you think Arcus wrote the “Balloon father” and the “Truths” and I would like to hear your reasoning.”

 

“Can I ask you a question first?”

 

“Please do.”

 

“Why is it important to you to believe that Roban wrote the two works?”

 

“It’s an accepted fact of history.”

 

“And how would my view change things if it were true?”

 

“Well I suppose it would mean that the wrong person had got the credit for writing the world’s most influential philosophical creed.”

The General looked thoughtful then replied,

 

“Not to mention the world’s most notorious piece of destructive propaganda.”

 

“But Roban wrote the “truths” after Arcus’ suicide.”

 

“Roban held all of Arcus’ unpublished works, which, as you will remember, he did not destroy as agreed.”

 

“Are you now suggesting that the “truths” were written before the “Balloon father”?”

 

“Perhaps the original author did not feel that they were as significant as their influence today would suggest.”

 

Marten was getting exasperated.

 

“He announced them at a banquet in the Kings honor and he dedicated them to the King!”

“Ah yes. The noble Roban makes an impressive after dinner speech.”

 

“Why? Why do you think Arcus wrote the truths?” 

“Well. Consider this. Why do you think two poets would write interchangeably, publishing the same works under different names?”

 

“Simple, because it gave both of them twice the output.”

 

“Wrong! Roban and Arcus were notoriously stingy in their published work. Listen, Arcus was sensitive and gifted. He sees a fellow student struggling with the demanding syllabus of the world’s best literary school, he lends a hand. The situation develops until the highly creative Arcus is carrying the sulky lazy Roban who continues to exploit the kindness of his friend into their professional lives.”

 

“General. This is really wild stuff. Am I right in assuming that your reasoning stems from the fact that Arcus was the one that was prepared to kill himself?”

 

“I think that fact is highly significant. And I admit the limited research I have done proceeded from an assumption along those lines. But I did uncover enough supporting evidence to satisfy myself.”

 

“What evidence? If you don’t mind me asking.”

 

“Well perhaps it would be better if I gave you my diary of the years I was studying these things. You see the background of the seven liberating truths for me was searched out concurrently with another important historical theme, the story of the locked box. I think as Jerart is interested in the latter and you the former it would save me some trouble to just let you both read my discoveries about both.”

 

“Thank you General. I’m sure they will be most interesting.”

 

Chapter 6

[From Jerart’s book on the life of the General]

 

The house lay in wracked silence under the vast hollow sky. It was the silence after great pain, a deep vacuum like a vicious puncture wound in the fabric of everything. The two men were wondering what would be left of them after it was over, or if it would ever be over. 

 

Edouard Shing held the edge of the table fighting to distinguish between himself and the air around him. His breath was hot and shallow. Would he let this pain slip into indescribable rage? He imagined rending and tearing with his hands kicking and grinding with his feet, his muscles and bones driving each other into pulp. His mouth stretched silently, his back arched and then his frame seemed to snap and he fell unconscious to the floor.

 

His father in-law stood over him then slid one arm under his legs and the other under his shoulders. Verg Faberen lifted the boy with ease, looking at the slack face, his eyes weary and sad. He carried him into the living room and laid him on a sofa. He found a blanket, laid it over him and left the room. 

 

Two days later they sat at breakfast

“We will bury her and the child today, Edouard, just you and I. There’s an old cherry tree she loved on the east hill. It may be only sentiment but I would like to bury them there.”

 

“Be as sentimental as you like. What difference does it make?”

 

“Think me foolish then, if you will, but love is a pattern that cannot end with death. Her dignity is something that still exists in my heart.”

 

“Well I’m glad for you that you have a nice, neat way of resolving your grief. Forgive me if I don’t join you for drinks afterwards.”

 

The old man let the bitter words evaporate before he spoke again.

 

“Nothing is resolved by this. If you mean to imply that my actions are for my benefit, you are wrong. Man is a wretched, impotent creature in the face of the unknown, but my anger and frustration are between myself and the silence. If I rant and throw myself around I merely underline my impotence. You are a part of my family Edouard and we should bury our dead together.” 

 

The silence eased slightly. Edouard sighed,

 

“I’m sorry. ” He paused, “I suppose I was angry at your composure. Nothing prepared me for this, I was not alive before I met her, I cannot understand being left alive now, do you see?”

 

Verg sat looking at the boy for some time before he answered.

 

“We are very different kinds of men, you and I.  For one thing I’m a fair bit older so I have had some experience of the injustice of death, although I confess I am no wiser as to what it is. And in the country death is a part of life, not an acceptable part, but something familiar nevertheless. Your reaction does you credit, but you must go on living because to submit to it is to compound it. And that is as much as I can say.”

 

The next day the two men carried the bodies of the girl and her son, in a simple wooden box, to the old cherry tree.

 

----------------------------------------

When Marten arrived home that night he felt tired and irrationally irritable. His wife had waited up for him because the children’s school reports had arrived and they were very encouraging. He had been short with her and she had reacted by going to bed. So he was left alone, he felt that reading the General’s scrappy and confusing notes from AE 1115 would be to indulge a huge irrelevancy, to waste precious time. Time… precious time. The thought seemed for an instant like a cliff edge, a jumping off point into an incalculable labyrinth of possibilities. He put the thin sheets of copier paper on the table in front of him and turned his attention to the school reports. He had three children; the reports reminded him, two boys and a girl. They were very intelligent, worked hard, enjoyed sports, interacted well with other children.

His daughter stumbled blearily into the kitchen at this point to get a drink.

 

“Licia. Come here.” Marten’s tone was snappy.

 

She stopped and swayed sleepily in front of him. She was ten years old, the second child, and small. “What?”

 

“This report, it’s very good.” Marten sounded annoyed.

 

“Thanks.” 

 

We have created a world, he thought, where everyone who can speak is capable of sarcasm, even in their sleep.

 

“Well… Do you agree with it?” The question suddenly seemed important. 

Licia stretched her eyelids a few times. “Suppose so.”

“They suggest that you might consider a career in Landscape Regeneration Design.”

 

“And?”

 

Marten paused, wondering what it was he wanted to say.

 

“Wouldn’t you rather climb trees?”

 

“Dad!”

 

It was the, get to the point, can I go now, tone that he hated and feared worst of all. It cowed him.

 

“Yes; you can go now.” He said in low defeated tones, looking away from her as she shuffled off.

 

Is this my kinship with the General, he thought, our mutual irrelevance. He picked up the Generals notes and read with the sense of indulging a huge irrelevance.

[From General Shing’s notes, copied from “Sappo The Just” by Dret (chronicler to Sappo) and his own comments. AE 1115]

“I Sappo have declared it. The people of Remard are to be destroyed; nothing is to be left of their cities and towns. Royal and private treasures are to be handed in to Marcos of my household nothing is to be kept back (may I refer my soldiers to the memory of Alagor Dervin and his brothers). There is no mercy for them. They must accept the consequence of their duplicity. Sappo has given them justice, they may thank him for it but their end is the same. I have heard that they are by nature an ambiguous people and there is confusion even as to life and to death among them; Sappo is not confused, he is aware that they will be no more. Whether they fear this or welcome it is of no interest to Sappo the marauder, he is the king of the restless armies, from him captains and warriors take their pay and feed and none of his own need fear him. I have said nothing will remain and so it will be.”

 

The mighty Sappo addresses his troops at Finama before the destruction of the Remard nation. You will notice that he does not appeal to base notions of honor and greed in his men but rather he inspires through his belief in them and in himself. It is his trademark that he has no interest in argument. After the ensuing sieges and the one or two pitched battles the Remadians were broken and, as the marauder had in his wisdom decided, wiped out. I record this incident here in this volume “Sappo the just” and not in his war diaries “Sappo the mighty” for two reasons, first because the case of the Remadians is unlike any of his other campaigns in that he does not favor such total destruction and this is the only instance of it, secondly because of its importance in revealing the depth and nature of the warlords sense of justice. 

 

It is not a subject on which I have managed to draw the great man into conversation. I do not interpret this as unwillingness on his part to have his decision questioned on account of an uneasy conscience, but rather as evidence that this, of all his exploits, reveals much more of the man behind the sword than he would like to be known. In view of this I will not, as I am only a humble chronicler, attempt to interpret Sappo’s wise actions. But I feel I can rightly hold them up as a warning to those who, in their ignorance, would measure him against tyrants and fools. For is it not clear that principles beyond and above ordinary men run strong and deep in our mighty leader.

 

This is the relevant passage from “Sappo the Just”. Dret reveals himself as always as a miserable little sycophant, but it strikes me that this incident is decidedly unusual. A brief mention in the war diaries brushes over the scale of it, which is odd because, looking at the maps, it seems to have been one of Sappo’s larger ventures. More detail but still sketchy in “Sappo the just”, which is a volume regarded by most historians as empty propaganda, a kind of half hearted attempt to convince the Dignified Nations that he was more than just a barbarian bully. This is the detail that intrigues me in Sappo’s speech; “Sappo has given them justice”. How? Why? By destroying them he felt he was doing them a favor, because of their duplicity. It is not the most convincing case against an entire nation. Was it a specific incident? Did they back out of a deal? Why did he describe them as ambiguous? And why in relation to life and death?

 

I don’t think Dret had the imagination or reason to make this up. Especially as his explanation of it is so weak. I think for once the chronicler in Sappo’s pocket took it on himself to record a fact. He obviously thought it was significant (see phrase “this more than any other campaign reveals the man behind the sword”).

 

All of which leaves me wondering. No reference work has more than a paragraph on theRemadians, usually concerning their destruction at the hands of Sappo. There is only one possibility to explore; the spoils of Sappo. Venger says, “Never trust museums. They only show you what they think they can explain”. What if “ Treasures of a warlord” museum for the people has vaults of unused exhibits? There must be a lot more stuff than they have on display. Venger also says “cataloguing starts approximate and ends up explicit” which I take to mean that their methods are more hit and miss than they would like us to believe. I want to go and see. Are there Remadian artifacts among the spoils of Sappo? 

 

Shing’s Travels

The day that Edouard Shing arrived in Briniveh was bright and sun filled. His heart lifted as he walked under the ancient arches of Sappo’s Principal residence. Its grandiose and essentially elegant self-importance was refreshing. His irritation rose again, however as he entered the museum itself. Thickened glass display cases proliferated with jarring neatness among the decorous but chaotic architecture. All the information displays among the purely representative artifacts made the same assumption about the visitor’s intelligence and depth of interest, offering basic or sensational facts according to what the exhibit allowed. However Sappo had plundered a wide variety of different cultures and communities and Edouard’s interest mounted as countless beautiful and strange objects were presented for his scrutiny.

 

In an airy and sumptuous lounge room overlooking carefully maintained gardens Edouard found the display of Remadian artifacts. To describe them would be difficult, they were elaborate in the extreme, with designs filling every surface of the most mundane article. They looked fragile and very old. The information panel showed where the Remard nation had been and confirmed that nothing remained to show that they had ever existed, commenting briefly on Sappo’s unusual thoroughness. It gave him a strange sensation to look at things made, treasured, bought and sold by people who had been victims of genocide. He felt queasy and ill at ease, suddenly he felt how revolting Sappo had been. Why is this interesting? He thought, as the silence of the objects in front of him began to feel tangible and strangely reproachful. The display, all the phony, whispery respectful people wandering around sparing their few seconds of attention, became unbearable and he walked away to find a quiet place to sit down. The awful sensation created by the mix of profundity and futility made him feel tired and breathless.

 

He wished he could rip away the fabric of neutralizing sterility.

 

He hailed a curator and introduced himself as a student investigating Sappo’s lesser-known campaigns, could he view some of the unused artifacts from Remard?

 

The curator, who was young, tall and coldly intelligent looking, informed him regretfully that of the very few Remadian artifacts that had survived those on display were in the best condition. The vaults contained a few very poor items in various states of decay.

 

Edouard was not feeling up to being demanding and he left the museum to discover that the day had become very hot. He took a room at the top of a quiet building where he opened all the windows to catch the best of the warm breeze and slept uneasily through the afternoon.

 

On his travels he had fallen into various patterns. He kept to himself, world government was still paying his wage and they occasionally made contact with him to see if he was all right, he told them he was, thank-you. He was left to wander. He observed society slipping gently and painlessly under the influence of the sedative of peace. He met people that talked against world government but they were not his kind of people and his contact with them left him disheartened and lonely. He had met a few people that he liked but felt faintly disapproving of their incautious friendliness. He had explored archives and discovered a record containing two letters from Arcus to Roban, the letters had astounded him and he had made copies. He had read innumerable versions of the legend of the locked box becoming more and more confused by the impenetrable tangle of the stories origins. He was angry at humanity and sympathetic with humanity by turns. Eventually he discovered a link between Remard and the locked box, the simple fact that the nation had had its own version of the story.

 

Trawling through a vast and disorganized Ibyan archive he had stumbled on an account of Remard dating from ten years before their destruction. They had sent a merchant-diplomat to assess the possibilities for trade. He had returned after only three months and his report was dismissive, disinterested and useless except for one piece of information. The Remadians, he reported, were not interested in the world outside their own borders; their interest was focused on their own conflict. A conflict of ideas. One faction were guardians of a secret information source and used its authority to control the populace. Another faction made up of younger sons and various other outcasts and exiles resented this monopoly and were determined to discover the secret location of the book.  The troubles were caused, he elaborated, by an ancient King who was so angered by the many self-serving and ambiguous interpretations of the book that he destroyed all but one copy, which he sealed up and hid in a dangerous and inaccessible location. The merchant had then gone on incongruously about the stinginess of his expense allowance and never referred to it again.  

 chapter 7

It was the last hour of the day. There was, perhaps, quarter of a bottle of wine left. Jerart was careful always to have a drink left for when the last hour had ended. Of course it wasn’t really the last hour it was only about ten at night. He had named it the last hour. He had a habit of naming things like hours or individual steps in staircases. It was the last hour because of time difference, because a few thousand miles away everybody would definitely be asleep even if they had stayed up late. Everyone would be asleep and no one would call him from there and so it was the last hour of the day. Once it was over and the last minute stumbled into its tiny place in history, never to be repeated, then the inevitable vacuum would open in his heart and at that point it would be terrible not to have a drink left in the bottle.

 

This kind of suffering was apt to his finely tuned sense of drama and in his final conversations with her he had been aware of the beauty of their tragedy. He had reached a decision when he was twenty-two that what he needed was not fame or power, two concepts scorned by people of his class, but relevance. She had wanted to map a rainforest. Administrators had spotted his potential and he had been mentioned to the Sub-state secretary and his rise had been rapid and intoxicating. She had finished school and gone to her rainforest.

 

The General Shing assignment was a tricky one to fill and had become a staging post for the most promising junior diplomats before they moved on to greater things.

 

Jerart knew that he wanted her to call. He had planned the conversation in some detail and now only needed her to miss him so badly that she would have to call him.

 

He poured the remainder of the wine into a glass and then drained it. He wound a brass handle in the wall and the thickened glass quarter dome that protected the balcony slid into the stonework base. The wind was fierce, cold and laced with salty spray from the turbulent sea beneath. Jerart gasped and swayed, far out on the distant horizon lightning flickered in the gloom.

 

[Jerart and Marten, a phone conversation the next morning]

 

“Where was he at this point, Jerart?”

 

“Venger Mar-Dray’s chateaux in the Verlin Mountains. That was where he went almost straight away. After briefly visiting his father-in-laws farm and discovering it was now in the hands of a Bulitse Banker and his wife who had littered the gardens with statues and fountains.”

“So did this Venger character have archives or a library or something?”

 

“Marten. He inherited the largest collection of books on the Callan continent.”

 

“Is it still there?”

 

“No it decayed. But we scanned and stored the entire library before the damage became too widespread.”

 

“I really don’t understand what he’s looking for. Why is he so interested in these Remadian people?”

 

“I don’t know. Some-where along the line he researches the locked box and Roban and Arcus so maybe there’s a link there. Sappo is an interesting personality; did you know he only spent seven years in his capital and yet he lived to a hundred and thirteen? It seems he just enjoyed picking fights with people.”

 

 

“Where are his AE 1167 writings? I’d like to know what he was thinking when he left Obah. Have you read that far?”

 

“Yes. I’ll send it on to you. It’s …um… quite interesting.”

 

[From the Generals writings AE 1167, continuing from the previous episode in Pavel’s office]

 

I remember the first day, or more importantly the first night, of escape. I walked over open fields, through vineyards and woodlands, for perhaps ten miles, oblivious to everything, consumed by my thoughts.

 

Details I could see so vibrantly clear, but as soon as I tried to make all the details fit coherently together in a harmonious whole, a wave, a tide, an ocean of confusion washed over me, taking all clarity and harmony with it. And then I would latch onto another detail, beautifully clear, and try to establish it as a staring point. Building it up carefully, methodically adding everything I could think of that was relevant to it. Keeping the structure sound as long as I could until, inevitably, I would reach to far, try to explain too much and then chaos, the tide of confusion, the endless and eternal unanswerable.

 

Why was I doing this? Because the person who does not fit into the world, as I patently didn’t fit into the world, has to explain himself. To the world but mostly to himself, because he knows that if he can’t explain himself to himself then he can only be mad. Even with the impetus of my rebellion this was a frightening thought. For the last thirty or so years my place in the world had been, at best, a tenuous fantasy. My only real reference point for belief was in a relationship that had ended before I could even understand its significance. 

 

Rainfall began after sunset. With the darkness and the rain on my face I came to my senses. I was in a wood, a pinewood I think. Above me there was a tiny bit of light left in the sky, but around me there was only the densest darkness in every direction.

 

I had left without the slightest thought about traveling overland, by myself. I was completely ill equipped. I was wearing only a light shirt and casual canvas shoes. The rain found its way quickly through the shirt and I huddled into the base of a tree, wrapping my arms around my knees. I began to shiver. 

 

For about half an hour my mind was completely blank. Then I began to remember the people who had been my friends. My wife first of all, fresh and young, smiling her enigmatic but somehow reassuring smile, loving me and laughing at me, a thing impossible to have ended, impossible. My father-in-law, Verg, wise and solid, and other people, that through the years had offered me their kindness or understanding. I had, I know, been a distant and difficult person, but these ones, some of whose names I could not even remember, had risked themselves and tried to help me or even love me. I realized that, in spite of the fact that such contact was rare in my life, I had nevertheless taken it completely for granted.

 

Suddenly I felt a desperate need to know if I had loved my wife enough, said it enough, made her feel it enough.

 

At this point wave after wave of wild exhilarating loneliness swept over me. I began sobbing uncontrollably and noisily, my chest heaving and shuddering. It was one of the most intoxicating joyful moments of my life. I cried and cried, it was like drinking from a deep cool spring in the height of summer. And when I finished I remember consciously stopping myself from thinking about anything else at all. I curled up between the roots of the tree and slept more deeply and peacefully than ever before.

 

[It is not entirely true that the General thought about nothing else before he slept, this excerpt from an ancient book in his families archive floated through his tired brain just before he slept]

 

(From “Lost books” BE 2760)

 

“ ‘So much for the clever men!’ said the Turtle, laughing heartily. The Dove and the Tiger-fish had not yet sobered up, but the wren (who disliked wine) laughed with him. 

 

“Yes” he said “so much for the clever men.”

 

“I knew from the beginning how it would end,” boasted the Turtle. “The sea is bigger than they think. I said, the mountains are higher and the stars further away, but oh! how they loved their confident assertions (Literally; ‘strong thoughts’)”

 

The wren began to find the Turtles attitude irritating, “Yes you’re very clever. Why don’t you wake up the others and tell them about it?” 

 

The Turtle took this as a serious suggestion and lumbered over to where the Dove and the Tiger-fish were sleeping soundly.

 

“Wake up!” He shouted, “I was just saying to the Wren, so much for the clever men. Ha ha!”

 

The Dove awoke from a good flying dream and blinked in confusion at the Turtles grinning face inches from his own. “What?” He said. The Turtle repeated his astute observation with undiminished enthusiasm.

 

The dove blinked several times and then said; “Cleverness! Cleverness! You mean they thought they were clever and that’s your clever joke?”

 

The Tiger-fish was wishing that, the Bottlenose and the Small red Duck had taken the Turtle with them after all.”

----------------------------

The next day I woke up damp and cold, my joints aching fiercely. But the sky was large and blue and I looked up at it with a large happy feeling in my heart.

 

In this moment two feelings came to me, equal and opposite sensations that in their own ways have stayed with me ever since.

 

Firstly, the beautiful sky and the lingering intimate thoughts glowing softly in my heart. From these a big feeling began to crystallize itself. The only word I can use to describe it is Eternity. Perhaps that is too dramatic but as I say it is the only word I can use.

 

It was as if I was seeing something for the first time that had always been there, simple and vast. The best part of it, however, was that it included me. My small lens had somehow focused this sense of everything. I breathed heavily, absorbing every nuance of this sensation. And then the second thought arrived in my mind, just as clear but this time in the form of six simple words.

 

All the real people are dead.

 

And once they had arrived they repeated themselves, over and over. Increasing steadily in their intensity until they seemed to be reaching toward a devastating and destructive crescendo. I held my breath and forced the words to stop before they consumed my brain. Throwing my head back I yelled it out with all my energy.

 

“ALL THE REAL PEOPLE ARE DEAD!”

 

This, I said to myself, is just a feeling. It was an irrational thought, a reaction to my loneliness, to my displacement and isolation. But oh how often those words have returned and with what potency. They have become my World Government motto and though I know they are not true they encapsulate the feeling I get whenever I come into contact with the tendrils of their power. I felt then and I feel again now that something terribly and mysteriously precious is being destroyed to make room for this fantasy.

 

But time has a habit of carrying on oblivious to our revelations and at this point I was very cold and very hungry. 

 chapter 8

 

Shing’s Memories

 

Statistically he should have been dead. General Shing knew this. He had been alive for almost a hundred and twenty years and most people lived to eighty-five or less. His body did not feel old. His mind was the place where he felt his age but not in the sense of approaching death, just because he had so many memories.

 

He opened an old wooden door and stepped onto a grassy terrace on the protected side of the fort. Here was where he grew his food and kept his livestock. The regional committee had offered to supply him but a return to farming appealed to his ascetic sensibilities, it seemed fitting that after his wanderings he should come back to the earth, the gentle long-suffering earth. 

 

He walked out in the reedy early morning sunlight carrying a bucket of chicken feed. Looking up into a sky the palest blue, he thought, for the first time in several years, about his family, his second family.

 

He had met his second wife in the underground library at Saligard. She had been sent as his new contact from world government and she didn’t really have anything new to say, but she laughed at his jokes, was young, pretty and cheerful. The next time he saw her was in the Muppo hills an incredibly beautiful place where the quality of the light had been breathtaking. She had been sad because dysfunctional protestors had caused trouble in her hometown. It was not a deep sadness but, combined with the liquid honey quality of the light playing over her small face, it had prompted him to ask her to marry him. He had been considerably surprised when she had accepted with some enthusiasm. The next thirty years were a strange contrast with the rest of his life. He was married and moved into his wife’s home. Very different from the sterile house he had been given originally, it was a home, a private personal place. She was in fact a very pleasant woman and he had enjoyed those first years simply because he was no longer alone.

 

They had a son in the fifth year of their marriage and a daughter in the sixth. He had finally taken one of the many jobs offered him, as a writer for a small film and theatre company where he had had some fun with pre world government themes, a popular genre at the time.

 

In this time period he had begun to view people differently. He had always had an almost sacred regard for the importance of individuality but now, because of the nature of his work, he began to view people as an audience. In the tenth year of his marriage he was approached by The Committee For Global Media and asked to help with a serious problem. There had been a rash of incidents involving adolescents who rejected the system and became disruptive. They needed help writing something they called steerage material, in order to protect these youngsters from straying into self-destructive behavior. Edouard found himself fascinated by the creative challenge and in spite of his reservations about working for a world government committee he sat down and started writing. The committee was very pleased with his work and offered a permanent position, which his wife encouraged him to take. 

 

The next twenty years he worked intensively in global media. Situations would arise and the pressure would be on. His period of ten years outside of the world government authority was referred to by his colleagues as his rogue period and was considered the source of his creative inspiration. He somehow forgot its significance to him perhaps because he had become sensitive to what “everyone” was thinking and doing. He had become intoxicated with this vast machinery; he told himself it was beautiful. He enjoyed the feeling of relevance and even importance that his life had taken on. He knew his marriage was not ideal and that there were things he would never be able to talk to his wife about,  but they still laughed together. This he thought was a sign that he had conquered somehow, that he had built something out of nothing, had discovered what the current WG grief pack called “life after loss”. This rationale provided a platform for a measure of contentment but he was aware that he was never really happy, that those rare moments when reality sparkled with a pure and elevated perspective and glowed with a deep security, had died with his first wife.

 

Then came the day when his committee forwarded a parcel of mail from fans of his films, books and V shows. He spent an afternoon reading these curious and intense epistles with slowly increasing horror. People who had felt lost and isolated thanked him fervently for helping them to feel part of things and for creating characters that they identified with, teenagers praised him in the most exuberant language for bringing their problems to the attention of the world. One letter from a twenty-two year-old girl concluded with these words:

 

‘Mr. Shing, most of all I want to thank you for understanding what it means to be afraid of conformity. I feel that now you have explained how I feel I can go on with my life and fulfill my potential and be happy. It’s exactly like Terlaine say’s in “The Four Shadows”; “now we are alone and yet together, I will not fear the dark anymore.”  Thank you again and again etc…’

 

He had thrown this letter across the room and stopped reading the others. He sat inert for some time and eventually got up only to be sick in the toilet. He wrote much later that at this time he felt that the sudden colossal weight of self-loathing would force him out of existence and that every passing minute he was shocked to still be alive.

 

In fact the delivery of the letters had been carefully timed by the WG committee that handled potentially problematic people in their employ, timed to seal him more securely into the system by the simple means of gratifying his ego and satiating his vanity. They were soon to discover that they had miscalculated dramatically.

 

Edouard Shing sat down, after three days of drinking himself insensible, and wrote the book that would end his career, alienate his family and make him the first exile in the history of World Government. It was called “Apology”. He outlined his “crimes” against his audience, detailing the strategies and manipulations he had invented and employed and sincerely begged their forgiveness. It was a little over dramatic and he said later that he wished he had waited until his mind had cleared before he wrote it, but written it was. He first sent home-printed copies to the people who had written to him and then he had sought a non-government agency to publish it for him. None would. World government had fielded many embarrassments up to this point and although no books or kinds of books were actually banned they had created subtle but impervious taboos in the industry. A copy did however find its way into a local WG legal facility and they in turn handed it further up the chain until a committee with some genuine authority decided it was serious enough to present to the central forum. 

 

World Government Central Committee was a strange and mysterious beast, it was said that an individual could not comprehend its extent in one lifetime. However this was probably less due its size than to its shifting form. There could be no doubt that different agendas competed within this forum and even different personalities also that decisions were made and legislation handed down but actual power seemed suspended in a strange kind of collective consciousness. Individuals were not elected to this forum but invited and then left to establish their own role almost entirely by themselves. Ordinary people would find themselves looking at a politely worded invitation to put WGCC after their names and would find their links fast-tracked to a corner of the forum where their views and opinions on a wide variety of problems would be requested and opportunities to enter debates would arise almost continually. Fraternities naturally developed but they were limited by an absolute rule of anonymity.

 

The problem of Edouard Shing’s Apology was not entirely new; the same kind of thing had happened before and had been dealt with locally and with no publicity the damage done being quickly and effectively resolved according to a number of straightforward strategies. The General presented an opportunity however that some in the forum had been itching to take; the opportunity to create an example. This was an old world concept and it had been shouted down many times but the idea kept popping up in more and more persuasive forms as dissent began to take on new forms itself with the passing of time. The idea of an exile to World Government had a small group of exponents also, not, they said as a punishment of course, but as an experiment in rehabilitation.

 

The beaurocratic machinery that enforced World Government had evolved from the original global unity organization that had worked so hard to promote the concept. It was vast, tightly run and altogether more tangible than the vague committees whose decisions it enacted. They acted swiftly in the case of Edouard Shing, an investigative tribunal was arranged experts were called in and a public hearing was scheduled. The General, for reasons best known to world government, was to have his day in court.

 

That morning his wife, who had maintained tearful and slightly uncomfortable support up to this point, left him. He at first hoped that disentangling himself from an existence that had become suddenly abhorrent might be relatively easy. There was uncertainty in his family and in fact in the community as to what these unfamiliar procedures might end up in. His wife evidently had erred on the side of caution, his daughter had left a long time ago and had shown no signs of interest in her family since discovering a career in biomimetics. She had registered her disapproval in clipped answer-phone messages. His son however took it upon himself to be ashamed, ostensibly for but in fact of, his father. This was a painful thing to face for the General, he was ashamed that he did not know his children that he had been too preoccupied to prevent them from becoming isolated from their father, but he was not ashamed of his book and he meant to defend himself.

 

His son drove him to the temporary legal facility arranged for his hearing. 

 

“How could someone who has achieved so much willfully try to destroy it all?”

 

He had asked with the right degree of bitterness. Edouard knew that he must try and make his son understand, that it was a kind of fundamental obligation. But the large off-road car swung awkwardly fast around corners and created the impression that they were rushing to the hearing and that there was no time for last minute confidences. His son did not want him to talk but the General gritted his teeth and prepared to penetrate the defensive wall of animosity.

 

“Listen to me now, son.” He found that it was an enormous effort to talk in this atmosphere but he persevered. “Have you ever heard the story of the prisoners wall?”

 

His son flashed an angry glance at him, “why don’t you save it for the hearing Dad. Everything I ever believed about you was a lie.” It was the obvious line, the formula for this conversation had been established in a thousand plays and screen dramas. The General had constructed this scenario himself countless times. He knew what was supposed to come next; his confession of guilt, the protestations of love that were his only honorable redemption because after all if you were sorry enough and you loved your family enough you could be forgiven almost anything. But he was not sorry and he had no idea whether he loved his family or not, his feelings had become so blurred or perhaps had never properly formed. He realized that, in fact, he had not adapted to a new formula for living he had simply followed the rules laid down for a husband, father, writer. It had been natural for a man with a busy and important career to have little time to develop relationships and frankly it had been a relief to have people around but not to feel compelled to be close to them, he had been controlled effectively for the last thirty years by a kind of subliminal emotional lethargy. He had been taught to feel human and enlightened and even brave without actually having to engage with humanity at all. It was a manipulation far more subtle than any he himself had devised. The long dormant emotion of anger began to gather potency in his mind and heart once more only this time with a clearer object. He tried to think of something to say to his son that would break through the carefully programmed barrier that had gone up when he, Edouard Shing, had diverged from type.

“I will tell you who I really am; I am General Edouard Shing, for the last thirty years I have been the unwitting puppet of a profoundly dishonest administration and yes everything you ever believed was a lie. I have not really cared about you since you were born because I was never meant to care about you. The system was protecting me from the real pain of loving my children. I have done great wrong in letting myself submit to it. That is what you should be angry with me for.” The General was breathing heavily as if he had expended great physical effort.

 

His son looked for a moment confused but he was a genuine product of his times and his confusion poured down the carefully constructed channel that had been prepared for it by years of conditioning into the brimming reservoir of his anger, his bitterness and his sense of drama.

 

The General had made an effort to forget the rest of that conversation. He could not help blaming himself for his son’s inadequacies but he tried to discipline himself not to relive bitter and painful scenes that could not now be resolved.

 

He gazed down at the chickens feeding complacently in their roughly constructed run and he sighed. With all his heart he hated loose ends, the half-formed emotional attachments that would flail endlessly until he died. He had not visited these wounds for almost seven years but they were as fresh as when they had been inflicted.

 

Chapter Nine

(GUO Archive material)

 

Of the ancient writers, I believe that Asyncritus and Acclimatus will be of the most use to us. Especially Acclimatus. I am reading a translation of his first three novels now. He was able to influence his culture for several hundred years after his death because his ideas were compelling and accurate. I also have a short biographical article which explains a little of his motivation.

 

“Acclimatus began writing his famous “Blaise” series of novels after discovering that his father married his mother in order to punish her for being beautiful and talented. That he was born of the calculated destruction of another person’s innocence was a discovery that shook him to the core and he undertook an investigation of the relationship between sex and various forms of violence. His mild, thoughtful and above all readable analysis of his subject captured the imagination and I think the conscience of an entire generation. He is credited in the circles of literati with the disentanglement of sex and the metaphor and with elevating the concept of man. High praise indeed for someone who chose stories as the vehicles of his thought.”

 

The books themselves are excellent. They are gentle and yet very powerful, perfect material for balancing the thinking of a world community.

Asyncritus provides a template for understanding the relationship between the individual and his possessions and has a few philosophies on the subject of reversing the downward spiral of culture.

 

Of course there are other writings that will prove useful to us I’m sure, but these two will require the least sifting and I know how you like to get your teeth into things.

 

(From “The Legend of Fra’anam”)

 

Fra’anam forced himself to his feet despite his terrible wounds. The guardians of the box had been children under his blade, but their number had nearly defeated him. The rain beat down ever harder mingling with his blood. In the courtyard only the bronze statue of Mun’gai leaning on his mighty sword remained standing, the old warrior facing the young over the bodies of his disciples. Then truth came like a dawn into Fra’anam’s weary mind and slowly ever so slowly he began to laugh the clean laughter of the young, from the birth of the world it welled up within him. Then it was that he let his loyal blade fall from his fist. Then it was that he turned and left the last precious place and began his wanderings and he did not return to those that had loved him nor to his kin but he left his sword for his servant to bring back as the only comfort for the loss of him. They have said that something in the gaze of the old warrior relieved him of the burdens of this life and that he wanders still teaching the young and the humble about the foolishness of the great.

 

(A Poem)

 

I have become the guardian of the blade

Like a pet or a child it has its own

Sense of purpose

It has needs I struggle to understand

It is a demanding icon

A hungry vacuum

I try to reason away its potency

I try to hold it

Like it means nothing

It controls my arm

It links itself to my heart 

With commanding petulance

Somewhere in my brain 

Its weight has always been known

Has been anticipated

 

 

(From The Ramblings Of Kaluk)

Not so much about light and colour as the strange divisions of the mind some traps or nets or walls so be wary of exploring the self. After everything we are confused still in many things. But pointing to what we know we speak of everything as if that were all. Accept that you are in a process of knowing. That “fact” is what seems to be true but truth is what is true regardless of what seems. You imagine the brush in your hand the shapes appearing on the canvas and your act of art is complete. What you then go on to do is an interpretation. So the brain, the vague and mysterious mind is the source of your creation. Your hands translate your thoughts into a physical representation, which is by no means accurate. It is only my opinion but your success must be the level of accuracy you attain. It may be that you see it differently in fact I expect that. But I want you to be honest first; once you become a deceiver it will be your only trick. Did I mention that untruth feeds itself endlessly?

I weep when I think about you. You are the late child, life renewed and life slipping beyond my horizon. I remember your eyes gauging my importance, that must have been when you were about five before my sight was finally gone.

(From Arcus’ Letters To Roban)

 

I am not happy. It is not that I don’t like the idea but I am not confident that I am accurate on several of them and number three is glaringly inadequate and blurring it as you suggest is not my style. I keep losing heart with this idea that poetry can be so powerful, perhaps it can but should it be? That is the question I stumble over constantly. I would be very happy not to be an important person and thus be more reassuring to all the rest of humanity that is not considered important. No I am not happy with my place in the world or with all my unique opportunities. I used to think that your heartlessness was amusing and a little fascinating but now I think your cynicism hides your misery. 

 

The Balloon Father will be a brilliant machine for operating on a sick world but doesn’t the very usefulness of it destroy its artistry? Now I undermine the very foundation of our education, but I can’t help this feeling of betrayal. So much for Seven Mighty Poems.

 

Roban, you know you are my only family,

 

Arcus

 

(Notes From the Generals Time With Venger Mar-Dray)

Maia is here for a very sensible purpose. To scan and store Vengers library before it decays into dust. However I still find her presence intrusive. She makes no noise and to be honest I rarely see her but knowing she’s around is still annoying. I think it is because she is quite obviously not interested in any of the material she is scanning. The first day I was studying in the same room as her and I asked her what she was scanning she said “history”. How can she be so passionless about it? I told her she was very fortunate to have such an interesting job and she just looked at me like I was an idiot.

 

How many significant facts I wonder slip through the cracks? I think the “hundred worthwhile books” has been very destructive in this regard, or at least the Mellium Universities tradition of listing each generations hundred worthwhile books. I mean how can they possibly know? Especially as what is worthwhile to them might not be at all worthwhile to the rest of us.

 

“Worthwhile books” quote, from “dialogues with Tryphor”, found today (Not catalogued, under a pile of census volumes)

 

Mappen: “Respecting the infinite nature of potential learning and the finite nature of our ability to learn; tell us how to use our time.”

 

Tryphor: “Your question is really; what shall we learn? Not how much shall we learn? However mark this, for each of us there must only be a hundred worthwhile books, that is, books from which to draw out life. You know that a swimmer must know that he can reach the opposite shore or he will tire much more quickly in confusion. Which books to choose is much more difficult. That must be your choice but the answer starts with the question; what gives you life? What will light your eyes with its power? Therein lies what you should learn. In truth, what you must learn.” 

 

Mappen: “I am drawn to the idea that there are a hundred books which are especially worthwhile to me, but tell me what I should do with them once I have found them?”

 

Tryphor: “I see you apply my answer immediately to yourself. That is very good and it is the first principle of the teachings of Tryphor. The answer to this second question is a little confusing I think but I will try to make it understandable; You must not simply read and reread, no! That is not the way with worthwhile books. You must make these books your companions, this is something more than reading, you must choose them as you would your friends; for their qualities. You will find that books can be loyal, honest, and discreet as well as having many other valuable things. You are beginning to see how important it is, this choosing of books.”

Mappen: “That is very interesting. Can you tell me more about how to make a book my companion?”

 

Tryphor: “Being a companion, the point of careful choosing is first, so. Then when it is chosen, then as you would a friend you will treasure it spend time with it and learn from it. Carry it with you when you are wandering the world so that it may help you and so on and so on.”

 

So there it is. I wonder how many of the ideas that influence our world are true now to their original form. Maybe one day I will stumble across an original copy of the seven liberating truths and discover that they are totally different. How important it must be to always have resonant phrases to hang policies on. 

 

I have looked so far toward ideas that draw me because of their potency or influence or because of suggestions of hidden truths. It seems obvious that the Ibyan’s originated the story of the locked box, but I can’t help feeling that their earliest accounts of it are still too mythical too storyfied to be close to the original which is frustrating as later accounts from other cultures seem to have much more realism to them but I suppose realism is as much a skill as storytelling. Or perhaps even the next level of skill in story telling. 

 

Venger says that the Ibyans have an enormous disordered electronically stored archive which contains virtually everything that the entire aristocracy and the educated merchant class ever wrote from diaries to shopping lists for nearly two hundred years until the technology became unsustainable. He said he went to Ibya to look for details of small navy that they developed BE 243, personal records log books and so on, things that were only referred to in passing in their official histories, but found that no catalogue, index or any kind of organization existed and that if he wanted to find it he would have to spend years searching file by file. The Ibyans were, he said, completely unapologetic. There was however a small group of independent students working with the Ibyan archive who had established a very rough and uncertain chronology.

 

(Fragment)

 

There was a strange wailing, plaintive and obscurely violent. There were people walking while others ran. In the air was a suggestion of upheaval, of indecision. Something had been done in anger and now the anger was being faked to support the deed. They felt queasy with shame, the brave heroes distilled from the crowd. Saying silently; “what have we done?” and still more silently; “what have I done?” They were not observers; they were here at the center their eyes and plunging hearts mixed with the blood.

 

You are creatures of circumstance children of ancient grudges. These are your beliefs, your parents, and your older brother. You are the black eyed beginning of the circle at the birth of the blades and stones and fists. All I know is that I need sleep, and that men who hate will never be free. 

 

(From “Lost Books” BE 2856)

 

Truth

 

That is, what is still, enormous, simple, and real. A huge silent mass, over the surface of which we walk every day. And so we sleep, eat, think and believe and truth remains truth.

 

The responsibility we have, within the boundaries of our own senses is this. To match our beliefs as closely as possible with truth. This is what we owe ourselves; this is what will make pain bearable.

 

The first questions are these; what is true? Can this truth be known? Will I decide or discover truth? What will I believe? Why will I believe?

 

All life springs from belief. Belief in relationships, belief in our place in the world, in our relevance, belief that the next moment will be important, the next year.

What we believe is an essential choice. If we choose a falsehood as a belief our foundation is unstable, we will be discovered and exposed by the weakness of our reasoning.

Reasoning is the tool which must be kept sharp.

What we consider to be true will not alter actual truth.

Chapter Ten

He became a prisoner before he was thirty years old. His name was Rhuan but he came to be known as “Dark Cloud”, a name, he thought at the time, which would either inspire his future children or make them laugh. His crime was that he loved humanity.

 

He had isolated himself so many times, as a child, he had sought to protect himself from other peoples pain by hiding away in attics and by running away to the woods. But they drew him back, inevitably, like a moth to a paper lantern. He could not resist those little phrases that signaled fear or anxiety or insecurity.

He came from a rich family but he had no love of wealth and he was afraid of what money did to people’s minds, narrowing and poisoning them. He was a poet but he wrote poetry to explain himself to himself and when other people read it, whether they liked it or disliked it, he invariably felt ashamed.

 

He had never intended his own role he had simply become it. He was a defender of innocence, a champion of the poor, a bold reformer and a constant irritation to the establishment. He could speak with the authority of total belief while being constantly unsure of himself. His humility was so compelling that strangers could love him almost spontaneously.

 

But it was inevitable that he should go to prison. He went uncomplaining as if he had known and accepted long before. He knew the cruelty that the authorities were capable of but he had never seemed to fear it. But he did expect to be freed eventually, to be returned to his wife and two little children. People went to prison and they came back harrowed, haunted, gaunt and thin but they came back. And he was ready to face what others had faced. But he was not released. They kept him because they hated him.

 

His cell was very small and he was never allowed outside it, his food came through a hatch in the door and no visitors were ever allowed to see him. He was entirely alone for years and years. He lost his sanity for the same reason that he had lost his freedom, because he loved humanity.

 

[From The Private letters of Horg Pavel] 

 

Dearest Tchicha, my best cousin,

 

With what elegant subtlety you always write. Tell me; are your children like you? How wonderful they must be.

 

Of course you are right, about so many things. When Avryen asked what our objective should be (whatever you say his humility is such an obvious ploy) I should not have laughed. If you met this man I know that you would understand my contempt. Do you remember when you said that, if regretting the change were ethical you would only have one regret; those who would go from a life of privilege to a life of still more privilege. I offer you a perfect sample of your regret, for not only is he rewarded with everything but he also feigns indifference to it. Isn’t that what Lila calls, the worst of all pretensions?

 

Well, how can I not despise such a man after what has been suffered to achieve his security?

 

Avryen’s conviction that his mind is such a great asset is ridiculous and his obvious devotion to his old General is an embarrassment to his position. I know I can tell you all this, little chichi, because you will not judge me.

 

The integrity of Shing’s mind has such gaping fissures, you would laugh. Remember your research into the concept of great men and your conclusion that balance was more important than strength? Your discernment has always tempered my idealism, how I wish you were with me now. 

 

I must be courageous in acting on my convictions and for all his faults Avryen trusts my qualifications even if he doesn’t like me. If the General does nothing then he will make himself obsolete, but if he becomes more extreme, it will be left to me to gauge how far the fabric of his mind can be tested. There is a kind of madness, which must be drawn like poison.

 

I miss you so much. I am always tired here the air is so thick.

 

You won’t believe it but sometimes I cry when I think about you. You as a mother, as a wife, how strange that we are no longer children. What I would give for one more summer by the lake. I will never complain, only whisper this to yourself when you are alone “they have used him up”, just once and I will feel better.

 

All my love in this world

 

Horg

 

Marten had found this document in his mailbox at work sent along with several other letters not referring to the General. They had arrived in response to a message he had posted in various genealogical forums, from one of Tchicha’s sons who hoped he would find them useful and was he related to the family at all?

 

Marten had felt angry with the man for sending such personal documents to a stranger. 

 

[From the Prisoners Wall]

 

The prisoner’s wall, when it was discovered, frightened the prison authorities. It was not a potent symbol of rebellion that could serve as any kind of rallying point. It was pathetic, a crude fragile structure made from dust off the dirt floor mixed with water and bits of food, a few inches in from the cell wall. Attempts to create a ceiling were evident in a few places. The prisoner declared himself free inside walls of his own making, this was his single thought, his last thought.

 

Men went mad in prison. Some minds were weaker than others; it was not surprising or even unsettling. Jano Warr’s training had refined rather than changed his personality. He was an unemotional person and had to simulate anger when occasion called for it. The wall shook him. The prisoner had crouched, not quite in the corner, of his “room” and had contemplated him with a look of calm triumph. Jano had walked slowly around the wall examining it carefully. At one point he had pushed his forefinger into it and a portion of it had crumbled away, the prisoner had growled uneasily.

 

He left hurriedly leaving the regime unchanged. After all he could not be held responsible for one of his prisoners believing that he was free as long as he wasn’t in reality. But the images remained with him and the concept frightened him for reasons he could not understand.

 

 

Chapter 11

Thursday evening, just before he left for home, Marten’s boss, Popple, took him aside for a chat. Marten he said had been looking worn out all week, would he like tomorrow off? Marten had said yes. Then Popple had asked if he, Lydian and the children would like to come for dinner at the weekend. Marten had said yes.

 

The next day he lay in with his wife. She left for work at nine thirty. She taught very young children to swim. The day was becoming hot when he finally got up at eleven and he wandered aimlessly around the house and garden in his shorts.

 

He opened a bottle of wine at lunchtime and drank half of it before loosing heart. He watched an afternoon film called “The First page”. It was a standard story about a man who looses his wife because of his violent temper and then gradually, through various refining circumstances, becomes a better person, earns her respect and wins her back. The style was overblown and old fashioned but Marten found his heart aching and moisture gathering in his eyes as the hero’s newfound humility began to soften his estranged wife’s heart. The film ended. He was about to wipe his eyes and make himself some food when he caught sight of the General’s name in the credits; “based on a book by “Edouard Shing””. For some reason he cringed a little when he saw it then his eyes hardened and he slowly wiped his mouth.

Marten walked purposefully out to the garage. He raked around among his old tools until he found a rusty lump hammer. He walked back to the living room, picked up the control and turned the V screen off, feeling as if he was covering its eyes from seeing what he was about to do to it. 

 

He swung the hammer full into the screen shattering the glass completely. This was all he had intended to do but a shard of glass caught him in the shin, just below his knee, and he stared at the blood, trickling like lava down his leg, for a moment before launching into a brutal and comprehensive assault.

 

When he had calmed down he looked at the wreckage and laughed what he thought was a hero’s laugh. He threw the hammer carelessly aside, grabbed the remains of the bottle of wine and went outside to drink it, lounging in the sun. He felt incredibly happy.

 

On Disputes between Scholars.

 

On the ground floor of the building where the General lived, during the few months he was in Brineveh, was a café. The city was a World Government City of Learning and students and teachers made up the majority of its clientele. After his initial visit to the famous museum he fell very ill with a fever and spent two weeks wrestling with long hallucination filled nights and equally long and uncomfortable days. During his convalesance the café became a source of entertainment and, occasionally, companionship. He had been drawn particularly to an old man who seemed to hold his classes in the café, he would spend the mornings with small groups of young history students listening carefully to his quiet, relaxed and fascinating lessons on archaeological theory and practice. Edouard had moved his table and chair closer to the classes and had enjoyed watching and listening to a good teacher at his work.

 

His pupils left at noon and the old man would have an enormous lunch before settling down to doze through the afternoon on an old armchair reserved for his exclusive use in a corner of the café.

 

Soon enough the General had offered to buy him lunch and they had become friends. His name was Sherque and he was a retired curator. He was not shocked by the Generals rogue status and in fact described himself as blissfully irrelevant.

 

“Because I’m old and resigned to confusion and chaos, no drive to provide simple undemanding explanations to mask complex truths. But look; they send me these wide-eyed kids and so I disabuse them of their dreams; palaces in the desert and tombs full of gold and explain how a piece of bone is treasure to an archaeologist, a bit of broken pottery.” 

The General looked at the old man with sympathy. His tone was wistful but not bitter. The General himself sat wrapped in a blanket shivering a little though the day was warm.

 

After sitting in silence over their coffees for a while, Sherque asked Edouard what had brought him to Brineveh. Edouard explained that he was pursuing a vague interest in Remard and became oddly shy on mentioning his idea that it might be linked with the locked box.

 

Sherque’s eyebrows had risen almost off his head. 

 

“Raffah and Depeucy! My friend, you have strayed into some unusual company.”

Sherque then went on to spend the rest of the afternoon explaining this outburst. The gist of his story was this;

 

After Sappo’s death his capital, Brineveh had had a long and fascinating history. The most fascinating element of which was that the hoard of plunder that Sappo had acquired had remained almost entirely intact. There were many reasons for this phenomenon; the main one being that Brineveh was predominantly conquered by different empires for whom it was very useful as an economic anchor.

 

Two hundred years before World Government historical and archaeological discoveries had become fashionable and a foetal scientific community was beginning to gain respect for itself. As a result of this intellectual forward movement Brineveh found itself a bubbling centre of intense scholastic endeavor.

 

At first chaos had reigned and any number of wild and exaggerated claims were made. Then the many scientists, who had gravitated there, met and devised an organized approach. Two senior scientists would be allocated to each community plundered by Sappo they would be supported by teams of younger scientists who would travel back and forth between Brineveh and the modern day locations of these communities.

 

Raffah and Depeucy were allocated Remard. They made some fascinating discoveries; like the fact that Sappo had had machines invented to grind the Remadian buildings and roads to powder, that, after its conquest, the destruction of Remard had taken five years.

 

Everything was going well. And then a discovery was made which disturbed the harmony of these scholars and discredited them all. The artifact was discovered in a secret chamber in Sappo’s catacombs. It was a lump of metal about two metre’s cubed. Theories proliferated and rumours were rife that this was the Locked Box of countless legends. The crucial question became the objects place of origin, it had no features to connect it with any particular community and there were no records of its existence. Such a mystery captured the imaginations of many and the answers to these questions became a matter of wide interest. At this point of course the scientists should have applied themselves to discovering the truth but each knew what it would mean for his career if the “truth” were discovered in his personal field of study.

 

Raffah and Depeucy were not the first to discover “evidence” linking the artefact to their allocated community. Two claims had already been made and a fierce debate had been raging for some time, the evidence being rather tenuous, no-ones reputation was in danger as yet but some very unprofessional agenda’s were beginning to surface. Sappo’s concubine letters were either an amazing and revealing discovery or a very clever forgery. They were discovered by Raffah and Depeucy’s journey team in an isolated town where Sappo had housed a concubine with whom he had apparently corresponded during a period of about twenty years. The details of the letters that related to Remard were, roughly, these:

Some three years before its destruction Sappo had been invited to Remard. The invitation, it seemed, was a kind of challenge. He was invited to read from a famous Remadian book, a book in which any man would read an “accurate account of himself”. (At this point in his story Sherque digressed in order to explain that the letters were supposedly translated from Sappo’s mother tongue which belonged to a very ancient family of languages, he also mentioned that the word Depeucy had translated “accurate” had no counterpart in any modern language and could also be translated as; true, proper, good, honest or even honorable but the exact meaning also contained an element which had confused scholars for hundreds of years) Sappo had accepted this invitation and traveled to Remard with a surprisingly small retinue of bodyguards and advisors telling his faithful concubine; “do not be fearful for me, sweet one, your gentle words are ever a guide and a comfort and I feel that I must go and see this thing for all say it is a wonder.”

 

The correspondence then lapsed for four and a half years, picking up again with a confused and angry diatribe against himself for not being able to; “destroy this thing that a child could toss into the fire, what to do then? When all else is burned and ground to dust,” Sappo then went on to list a number of options including burying it under a mountain and, the crucial, “seal it forever in a stone cask”. 

 

The next thing to happen was that, after labouring over the translation of the letters, Depeucy supposedly lost the originals and the discovery fell under profound suspicion. Raffah had a bitter falling out with Depeucy and left Brineveh in disgust leaving Depeucy to defend their discovery from increasingly bitter attacks. Then a previously unknown catalogue appeared listing the object as being from an entirely different region. The catalogue was discredited as well in time and the broader scientific community began to loose patience with the whole mess, funding was withdrawn and only a few independent archaeologists remained occasionally publishing discoveries that everyone had lost interest in. More than a hundred years later, during a more sober scientific age, a research team arrived in Brineveh and began a quiet investigation of its treasures and their origins. The artifact was listed as “metal cube of unknown origin” a discreet and sensible paper appeared a few years later theorising that Sappo had cast the cube when his palace was built and sealed it into the foundations as a symbol of permanence. This, Sherque concluded, was the accepted view today.

 

Sherque waited expectantly for a reaction to his story.

 

Edouard sat in silence for several minutes. His brain was not used to either heat or illness, he was aware that the Ibyan document was suddenly important as it corroborated Depeucy’s letters and that he was probably the only person in the world who had reason to believe the letters were actually genuine. Part of him could not accept that the truth had eluded so many clever men for so many years. His brain instead latched on to the phrase “accurate account of himself”.

“What does that mean? ‘an accurate account of himself’ “.

 

“Well, as I said no one knows for sure, most people believe that Depeucy included an untranslatable word in the letters to add an air of authenticity.”

 

“No. I mean the concept.”

 

“Maybe it harks back to the old locked box mythology, you know, terrible hidden knowledge and all that.”

 

“Listen, Sherque, I was in Ibya last year and I found a document that sheds some light on this mystery.”

 

Sherque raised his eyebrows again only not so far.

 

“Oh, Ibya. Did you find an ancient treasure map?” His tone was laced with icy sarcasm. Edouard knew that the pervasive irritation with the precocious, attention-seeking nation of Ibya had not dissolved with the coming of world peace but somehow the fact that Sherque shared the prejudice deflated him. He was even more hurt when Sherque, instead of being interested, simply moved the conversation on.

 

“I can take you to see it if you like. Under section 45 of the black book, as the only example in existence, it cannot be moved or tampered with. That’s why they couldn’t resolve the debate by just opening the thing up.”

 

Edouard realised that this was Sherque’s story and he pitied the smallness of mind that could not bear someone else to contribute. He decided to wait until the show was over when he felt confidant that the old mans professionalism would kick in. He ignored the fact that his interest in Sherque as a friend had ebbed away on discovery of shabby motives. There was nothing he could do about it and scrutiny of the sense of loss would only waken a deeper feeling that was best left sleeping.

 

The next morning the two of them visited the museum. Sherque had access to the catacombs as a former curator and he told the security staff that Edouard was a visiting curator who was interested in their cataloguing system. Edouard did not like people lying in his behalf. 

 

They walked through the area open for general research and proceeded deeper into a tunnel which, Sherque explained, spiraled downwards for several hundred metres branching off on each quarter turn into huge chambers full of Sappo’s plunder. The quantity of stuff that the marauder had accumulated was staggering. He had once heard a theory that Sappo plundered all this treasure, not because of greed or avarice, but simply because he couldn’t bear other people to possess beautiful things. He had thought it was a ridiculous idea at the time but now he saw the manner in which Sappo had piled up his ill gotten gains it made more sense. The tunnel was poorly lit as well as damp and cold and Edouard began to sweat and shiver. After walking for some time they reached the chamber where the artifact was stored (Sherque explained that it was found in the lowest chamber a considerable distance below and was moved nearer the surface to save the energy of the scientists studying it).

 

“Why didn’t they move it into the museum itself then?”

 

Sherque gave Edouard a strange look. “Because they don’t know what it is.”

“That doesn’t make it any less interesting though, does it? In fact it makes it more interesting.”

 

“I see you don’t fully grasp the science of institutional authority. We can admit to each other that we don’t know something. But the confidence the populace has in us would be seriously shaken if we admitted it to them.”

 

“I disagree. I think the populace would respect the admission and what if they discover this pretence of infallibility?”

 

Sherque smiled. “I used to long for the day when people in general would show that level of interest. Edouard does it occur to you that you might be a rogue element because you no longer share the values of the populace? They might not individually be aware of it but this is how they want it. No more uncertainties.”

 

This statement made Edouard feel uncomfortable. Also he was becoming impatient to see the artifact.

 

“Where is it then?”

 

Sherque led him through a low door into a chamber cluttered with artifacts in crates. They were all carefully labeled and each item had a note attached listing the Black Book protocols that applied to it, some were not available for any research at all others could (with the right documents) be taken away to distant research facilities or even in a few cases be dismantled entirely. The artifact itself was not in a crate. It sat at the far end of the chamber. As he got near he noticed the pitted rough texture of the surface, it was roughcast and with no finish on the surface, it was simply a large cube of metal. He shuddered slightly and was irritated at these odd sensibilities he had developed. Trying to look at it dispassionately he placed his hands flat on its surface, but the thing repelled him like a magnet. It was horrible, it seemed to sap his strength and his will, he began to get angry with himself. 

 

“Sherque, I believe the Remadian book is in there.” He said with some effort pointing at the cube in accusation.

 

Sherque looked at the General with curiosity and some concern.

 

“Doubtless something is sealed away in there but neither you or I will ever know what it is and nor will anyone else unless they invent a way of looking through metal.” He patted the artifact disinterestedly, “that’s all there is to it, it’s fascinating but you can’t go anywhere with it, I suppose, that’s why everyone lost interest in it in the end. Let’s get back to the café and have lunch.”

 

The General was not listening. He was starting to shiver violently; the fever he had almost shaken had been brought on again by the cold and damp of the catacombs. Sherque led him gently back up the main tunnel but halfway back he blacked out.

 

------------------------------

Marten awoke parched and badly sun burnt. He stumbled into the kitchen and alarmed his three children who were at the table discussing the destruction of the V screen. 

 

His oldest son stood before him. “Dad, what happened to the vee?”

 

“I killed it.” Marten croaked. “Get me some water.”

 

He took the pint of water his son brought him and stumbled upstairs. He spent a few minutes daubing himself with moisturiser before falling back onto the bed and into another deep sleep.

 

-------------------------------

 

When Edouard awoke, alone, drenched in sweat and with his mind as clear as ice, he discovered that he had been ill for two weeks. His landlord had covered his nursing and medical bills and Sherque had left the city leaving the following note for him:

 

  My Dear Edouard,

 

I am returning to my home country in the Muppo Hills. I was unwilling to leave without the assurance of your full recovery (feeling somewhat to blame for your relapse, dragging you all over the catacombs like that!) but family business of a most pressing variety has called me home. I hope very much that you will be well again soon.

 

I find I have occasion for another small regret on your account. My scorn of your Ibyan discovery relating to Remard was, I feel, more than a little churlish. I hope you will forgive me and consider an offer of hospitality as recompense. I understand that, when your research in Brineveh is concluded, you are planning a visit to the new library at Saligard (where I’m sure you will expand your body of information). I would be much flattered if, after visiting the library, you would come and stay at my family’s farm in the Muppo Hills, which are only a few days walk from Saligard (what a restless romantic you are, walking everywhere!). I would be glad to hear of your discoveries and conclusions at our leisure and in more comfortable surroundings. 

 

Your friend,

Sherque

 

-----------------------------------

 

In the recesses of Edouard’s mind a voice urged him to stay in Brineveh, that there was more to be discovered, that with patience and persistence certain barriers could be made to fall. But the offer of a friendly hearing ear held a stronger appeal for a lonely old man than the prospect of butting up once more against the flow. His case for opening an investigation into the contents of the artefact would have to be very strong to overcome black book legislation (Black book laws being viewed as fundamental to world peace)  not to mention the fact that his status was against him from the start.

 

In some respects Saligard was the logical place to go. World governments accumulated world archive, electronically stored and open for the scrutiny of the populace. It boasted a brilliant and more expedient than ever before subject search system and (where possible) original documents could be viewed on application. 

 

He had been planning to visit it since he had heard of it but had felt it imperative to first clarify what it was he was looking for before venturing into, as he visualised it, an ocean of information. Now the journey had the added appeal of Sherque’s invitation he became impatient to leave Brineveh. So he settled his bills, restocked his pack and embarked, with great relief, into that most effective of distractions, walking alone through a strange land.

-----------------------------

Marten was having trouble discriminating between memories and dreams. He was at the birth of his first child, Andram or was it Licia? The baby’s sex seemed to keep changing as it was passed back and forth from nurse to doctor and then back to its mother. He himself was fidgeting around trying to establish the details of the scene.

 

“It is hard to describe the experience of the birth of your child…” the words ran through his head from an unremembered source, “you will feel joy, euphoria and a sense of relief mixed with anxieties about your new responsibilities. These feelings are quite normal and all new fathers need time to adjust.” The voice faded. Had he felt reassured?

 

He was normal. He was like other fathers. Yes, he had been reassured. He watched the dream version of himself folding its arms across its chest with a look of exaggerated, relaxed complacency on its clumsily detailed face.

 

But there had been other feelings. They had blossomed briefly and powerfully in his heart. He remembered crying somewhere by himself. There had been other feelings but somehow they had gone, on finding no words to attach themselves to they had withered, evaporated, leaving him with only a trace sense of loss.

Normal life had flooded in busily occupying the vacuums left in his heart and mind.

But there had been other feelings. Were they gone completely?  Were they recoverable? The frantic hospital scene playing itself out in the backdrop of his dream paused while some little brain engine was sent off on a search. He waited, the characters in the dream tableaux waited, shuffling their feet and looking at their nails. His wife sat on the bed happily absorbed in the child. He began to feel impatient, looking at the clock, which displayed a completely random time each time he looked at it and was therefore no help.

 

And then the brain engine returned looking battered and exhausted. It presented the real him (not the dream him) with a small card. It had a question on one side and an answer on the other.

 

Q: How will I take my revenge?

 

A: By still loving you with all my heart.

 

He stared at the card, reading each side over and over. He felt the meaning of the words in front of him, they were his words, their sentiment was familiar to him but he struggled to remember the context. It was familiar, this idea of love as an act of vengeance but why and for what? The words were clearly a description of something that he had felt and somewhere still felt, something that contradicted the rest of his reality that was why the engine had had so much trouble finding it.

 

He woke suddenly. His eyes snapping open with a sharp intake of breath. His eyes roved and he clutched at the edge of the bed. He settled gradually and slowly became aware of his wife sat at the end of the bed. On her face was a look half concern half amusement.

 

After a long pause she said slowly, emphasising each word,

 

“What did you do?”

 

Marten sat up and, leaning forward, took his wife’s hands in his own, his eyes red-rimmed and intense.

 

“Lydian, do you know that I love you?”

 

“Of course! Marten what is all this about? The V, it’s…”

 

“But do you know that it’s real? That…that just because the concept has been worked over a thousand times and cluttered up with shabby imitations and all it’s words have cloying leering connotations, that doesn’t mean that what we have isn’t deep and subtle and true, does it?”

 

“If you say so.”

 

“No! Not if I say so! What do you feel about us, I mean really feel?”

 

“I…I don’t know. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

 

”I want to hear the truth and not the formula because you are more to me than the woman who shares my house and my children. You are my wife, part of the fabric of my heart…you are to me a glimpse of something bigger and better than this empty heartless pointless world…I …I…”

 

Marten faltered, he looked at Lydian’s hands in his own and they seemed suddenly insubstantial. Looking up at her face, it was as if she were sat the other side of an impenetrable glass wall, with him but distant from him. He dropped her hands in a kind of terror. 

 

Into his head at that moment came a scene from a documentary he had watched at school.

 

The M’sel tribesmen who held their swords over the faces of their imprisoned enemies, who would just be waking from a heavily drugged sleep. They would say “Know that you die under the sword of…” and them they would say their name poem before driving the sword between the prisoners eyes. It was a horrible and distressing memory, a disturbing image and it played on a loop while Marten waited for his wife to speak.

Chapter 12

The General’s voice had a strange immediacy, almost as if he were talking right into your ear although sat across the room. This quality of the General’s voice always unsettled Jerart.

 

He was alarmed when the General was not there to meet him on the quay, as it was a habit of courtesy that he never deviated from. Walking up to the fort alone he had a heightened sense of the isolation of the place and he began to worry that he would find the General dead. This thought created some childish anxieties and he waved his hand in front of his face with irritation as he walked.

 

He opened the door to the Generals rooms cautiously and walked in. He stood looking at the untidy clutter of books and papers that the General cultivated and had a very strong sense that the room was empty, that the man himself was not there. He was about to leave the room and look for him elsewhere in the fort when the General spoke,

 

“How are you Jerart… how are your refined sensibilities?”

 

He was sat in an alcove set into the wall; he was wrapped in a blanket and was nursing a bottle of drink. His face looked thinner and paler and he seemed somehow folded in on himself like someone suffering from hunger.

“General, you look terrible. What’s wrong?”

 

The General ignored the question.

 

“I’ve been thinking about you, Jerart, wondering what your career will ultimately be worth to you, how you’ll react when all your subtle and important objectives turn out to have been futile.”

 

Jerart considered a snappy “don’t measure me by your own foolishness” type of reply, but found that he did not have the heart. Instead he cleared a pile of papers off a chair and sat down.

 

“And what conclusion did you come to?”

 

The General considered for a minute, arranging his thoughts.

 

“That, as long as you never perceive the actual value of what you have lost, you might yet die reasonably content.”

The General shivered and pulled the blanket tighter about him. Before Jerart could reply he continued,

 

“You know, you might consider letting it go; this elaborate and carefully cultivated cynicism that you people are so fond of. It may protect from the truth but it inhibits a genuine spirit of curiosity and…and…”

His breath was coming short and Jerart leaned forward in concern.

 

“And it stops you from having real relationships.” He finished with an effort.

 

Jerart had several reactions to this outburst and was surprised to find that his rational mind was sifting the motives behind these reactions with a view, he supposed, to committing to one of them. One question, however, remained unresolved and was pivotal to this internal debate.

 

“How could you go back to world government? How could you work for them for so long?”

 

The General understood the significance of this question and suddenly he looked up at Jerart his dark eyes intense. Jerart tilted back in his chair but held the Generals gaze.

 

Some time passed before the General answered.

 

“Unrequited longings.”

He said and then stood up and walked to a window set deep in the masonry. He straightened his shoulders and when he turned around it seemed to Jerart that he was back to his normal self.

 

“Part of my heart had been taken away, it was missing from me and I had decided to look for it. Perhaps I was foolish to believe that somewhere there existed a repository of deeper meaning. Perhaps my motive was wrong, it was a long time before I realised that I was not unique, that a sense of loss pervades humanity, for whatever reason, as I set out my primary conviction was that I was alone.

 

But to live with it, to address my loss every morning, to drag my bones here and there across the world, it takes a strong man to carry his injuries while insisting he will only accept a totally effective cure. So I ended up submitting to the simple solutions being offered me constantly by world government, because being constantly alone is an evil thing (that, of course, is the reality that humanity is trying to cope with as a whole although it was a long time before I realised it) so I took the life that they offered me, as an antidote to loneliness. I find it hard to forgive myself now but I think it was understandable. From world government point of view the only problem was that I lived long enough to regret it ( Sappo used to say “Merca amicka ni kamito” that is “The dead know no vengeance”) however I am very glad that I did as, you see, truth has a value of its own, a comfort, or even a kind of reciprocal beauty that makes even a lonely existence worthwhile.

 

You know, Jerart, you were taught from a young age that by trusting certain authorities you could very quickly reach an intellectual level that would ensure you relevance, importance and make you impervious as well as saving you a lot of time. You deserve better. Their values cannot insulate you against death. Our life span is finite. If it was possible to create an infinite pattern within it don’t you think there would be more evidence of it, something a little more tangible?”

This reference to The Seven Liberating Truths prompted another question from Jerart,

 

“General, why do you feel that the “Truth’s” are invalidated by the fact that the wrong person got the credit for writing them?”

 

“First of all, I do not think that what Roban did in any way invalidates what Arcus was trying to do. Arcus was a perfectionist whose idea was to create seven powerful poems to unravel the problems of humanity. He was frustrated and disheartened when he found that he was unable to formulate what each “truth” should be to his own satisfaction and in the end decided that the task he had set himself was impossible, that, as he put it, “beyond these glimpses of imagined freedom is a slavery so profound that it drains my heart”. Roban, on the other hand, was well aware that, true or no, the ideas had marketable potential and had no scruple in cashing in on his dead friends genius.

 

The truths were useful to the GUO because they were popular in so many countries and virtually any reform can hang on one or the other of them. But, here’s the point, the weaknesses were useful to them to. “The Past ended yesterday” to Arcus meant that mistakes did not have to be repeated in the name of tradition, which was true in a world riddled with ancient grudges and foolish protocols. But now the idea has been used to disconnect humanity from its past, like children taken away from irresponsible parents into the care of a cushioned present and a secure future. It has been a very effective strategy and yet it is wrong. The past is in no way irrelevant to world government and the people who know this best are the GUO researchers who dedicate their lives to sifting and reworking the most influential works of ancient literature to best control a modern community. The whole structure is riddled with contradictions like that. Don’t forget I was initiated into this machinery. If you find them out then they pat you on the back and offer you a job; you’ve reached the next level of delusion and so it goes on layer after layer.

 

The “Truths” have some genuine authority because they were well intentioned. It is the uses they have been put to, by Roban first and then by almost everyone else after, which I object to. All these tentative noble thoughts put to work to create an illusion of an enlightened and free society. I can offer proof of this; the higher you go into the authority structure of this world the deeper the cynicism you will find. It’s really very horrible, Jerart, and cruel in its own way.”

 

Jerart tapped his teeth with his fingernails. His eyes started flicking. The Generals words felt like a stream of ice-cold water pouring through him. The General had chosen the right part of the fabric to attack.

 

Jerart had, through the General, actually discovered some pre world government humanity and it had actually been relevant to him. His stance as a cool-eyed observer was a blind for the reality. The reality was that the girl in his story, the old farmer, had all been creations of his own longings, set as they were, in a time when his own feelings would not have been so constrained and he, he was the General.

 

He felt an immediate and pressing desire to be alone. He stood up shakily.

 

“I…I have to be going now General…”

 

The General, who had sat watching him during these internal discoveries, nodded, looking tired and drawn again. Jerart walked towards the door. Just as he was about to leave the General spoke again;

“Jerart. I did not tell you the whole truth when I said I was looking for something lost. What I was searching for, am still searching for, is for something that corroborates my own sense of eternity. Does that make any sense to you?”

 

Jerart’s mind was flooding with unrestrained implications. He realised that the part of his mind that would normally block the Generals meaning had disintegrated and that he was aware of the General’s perspective with the clarity of personal belief.

 

“Yes…yes it does.” He said and left.

 

End Piece

Lydian removed her hands from Marten’s and left the room.

 

Lydian had instantly grasped the situation in more or less the following terms; her husband had stepped from a reality in which her love for him held the position of a useful but ordinary household object into a reality where it as a matter of crucial importance. She absolutely preferred the new reality and realized, as she walked down the stairs, that it had always existed somewhere within the boundaries of their shared world. Elusive, marginalized, crushed but always there. Her instinct was, not just to tell Marten that she understood but to offer him proof that she understood.

 

After a few unbearable minutes Marten followed his wife downstairs. She was packing.

 

“Lydian, what’s happening?”

 

“Wherever you’re planning to go we’re coming with you.”

 

She said ‘we’re coming with you’ meaning herself and the three children.

 

It became clear to Marten that, not only had his wife understood the flood of emotion that had spilled from him a little earlier, she had also seen implications that were still unformed in his own mind. Of course he would have to go. This house was not his home and never had been. He belonged somewhere else. Where he belonged and how such a place was to be recognized was still unclear however.

 

“Lydian,” he said, “I feel like I hardly even know you or the kids. Maybe this is something I should work out for myself.”

 

The line had an unpleasantly familiar ring and for a moment Lydian looked disconcerted.

 

“You’ll get to know us. And the first thing you’ll learn is that we’re sticking with you.”

 

“You mean; you’ll tell the children they’ll have to stick with me.”

 

Marten’s doubts were still lead weights hanging on his heart.

 

“The first thing I did” Lydian said, “When I left you just now, was to say to the kids;” Your dad has to go away. Do you want to stay here? Or do you want to go with him?””

 

“And what did they say?” Marten asked in agonies.

 

“They’re in their rooms packing their bags.”

 

For the first time in his life Marten felt like he filled his own skin.

 

“Right then” He said “Let’s go”

 

-----------------------------

 

Jerart had a personal library of beautiful antique books. They were arranged in his favourite room on shelves crafted from rare aged timbers, with a desk made from the same timbers placed near the window as Jerart had a great love of reading by natural light.

 

Jerart sat at the desk now. The sense of ease and wellbeing that he normally felt in the place was not present. In fact he found he was struggling with considerable claustrophobia.

He suddenly began searching through the drawers of the desk. He continued searching until at last he found a tattered, red-covered note-book. It was a document he had written himself. He had trivialized its contents to himself for many years but had never thrown it away. Now it seemed that thoughts he had considered sentimental and ridiculous were actually just personal. And today what was personal was more precious than anything else in that room. He placed the book in a worn leather satchel hung over his shoulder and left the room with a strong impression of escape.

 

samhollands@me.com