The Rhevireon Chronicle: The Ascent of the West Page 4
Here we go, this is not my lucky day, Dusk told himself, taciturnly he reacted to the man’s absence of reserve,‘yeah, exactly!’ he barely mouthed, just so that after a while, ‘for the moment I presume, you gotta be wonder how the hell of a cow I’ve recognized you? You obviously let it slip off memory, don’t cha?’ the taxi driver, snoopily shot back.
‘Here’s the thing,’ he spoke to him, ‘I definitely did, what’s the holy secret?’ Dusk bore out, though that plain statement had gotten not bit of a truth.
‘Say a month ago,’ the driver, with a legendary capacity to gabble on and on and on, set forth in a spree of spittle, ‘same hour, same place, must be you the guy asking me to drop him off the Aletheia! You didn’t got enough money on you, so it was my turn then to say it, keep the change, kinda being nice to a college tutee. But hey, I’m a face-rememberator, huh!’
‘This is the kind of scenarios I despise about this city!’ Dusk retorted.
‘No dur.’ Offended with his response, the man grumbled the two syllables, no extra nonsense. Then out of the blue, the cab’s clapped out radio went emitting, the foremost infamous soprano in the Zentrum, she long imbued millions, now she harangued.‘The Juneauton Weltzentrumpoleis, ought to by all means maintain its neutrality; a critical element of our national security and economic prosperity, I have no fancies, whatsoever, to engage us underwater or above in this proxy warfare. Nonetheless, by name of the noble tenets that bound the Occidental Regnum, our great second nation, with their Sino-European friends; we are obliged to transiently cooperate with them, hand in glove, in exchange of communication material and expertise; embodied in the urgent deployment of the pride of our navy, and envy of the world, since the Elektroboot, the hunter killer submarine, Jormungandr, full crew effectives, into the choke point GIUK gap, by the 11th April of this very year. And to the naval forces at the other end of this bitter conflict, I say, you have my word and my nation’s, no torpedo of ours shall be fired, no matter what. You might say it’s a joint ultimatum, nei…’ Straight away, the radio knocked off.
All the way on course of setting up girders for a new order on this land of the midnight sun, the political and military tension between those involved has always been around, escalated into climax with establishment of the Occidental Regnum; Which driven into, proceeded to embrace a jingoistic sort of transitory policy forthward nigh to autarky; starting from armistice agreements with countries part of the game, and ending up by the definite withdrawal from the United Nations. This measure in particular, had had ruinous effects on the org in its entirety; reaching a zenith in the forthcoming years with liquidation of its affairs, toward the foundation of a new legal successor, the Terra Sphaira Alliance. Quite fared in veering the ongoing hostility spot light over its founding state members, only to jeopardize extra hunks of the big pie to the exposure. They’d gotten trapped in conflicts seriatim; tensing around December from every year back in their early stages, had earned it the nickname, the Silent War of Decembers.
Prompted by reason of the interminable voracity after assuring a bit much of cabotage rights, over the territorial waters and across airspace of geographic Alaska; and with the finishing blow to the fragile peace endeavours, crystallized intom the mutual nolens volens allegations of economic espionage and sabotage ultimatums throughout the laissez-faire chaos of the de facto international zone. The war had emerged but was never declared in practice, and the skirmish went from the surface and by degrees into the deep blue.
‘What a piece of junk,’ quetching about, after a quick failed attempt of mending the receiver, the driver relaunched the spiel loudly,‘Magistrate Elle Ciel, what an enfant terrible! when she’s skipping our will emphatically, will of the people.’ He said, and she was arguably, the second most powerful woman in the Weltzentrumpoleis for the fifth consecutive year of her second term, Magistrate Elle Ciel, incumbent of the satellite state. Something which didn’t keep up with the Western tradition, in that it was to be elected by the civil society on the surface, blessed by the ulterior motive of the Patriarchs Jurists, Assembly of the Theocrats, three in harness, the venerable triumvirate of the Occident. However, the lowdown apropos this organic law still, the populace really appreciated what the ring had come up with this round, Elle Ciel leader of the Neopatrician Party; the Neopatricians, strong advocates of Pan-Americanism, were seen by many as the progenies of the reactionary Folksy Whips Party, defunct. ‘I mean, what do they think we’re? morons? the Zentrum’s impartial to any click out there they say, while in concert, permitting some to benefit from our minds, for their own geopolitical glory. I perfectly understand the theory behind the Concession Charter, we impart you the ranch to rule over internally, but your foreign relations policy ain’t your business—what??! Come on, this isn’t the 50-year SARs’ age! I bet her statement didn’t imply neutrality, but a colloquial pars pro toto of, rhetoric. Arrivistes’ rhetorics.’ How dead serious about it he was.
‘You know what?’the other person riding shotgun, while easing her protruding neck, she appeared to have something to contemn about,‘I unanimously approve of you mentioning this sir, logically, we shan’t go any further through this, what would our distant neighbours’ reaction be? Yea, this is goin’ to crucially threaten their advantage on the theatre of operations from the technical angle of view! Before anything as mad as that boat be commissioned into the deep in what’er military quest, you better’ve a big reason for it; because something of this scale’s no patrol in the park.’
‘That’s it ma’am, the whys and wherefores dictum!’ blundered he out, doing his best to cope with the matter at hand, driving in parallel with vulgar criticism, ‘it’s known throughout history, taking the wrong step on the battlefield is a point of no return.’ He declaimed.
‘Last one doesn’t fit in context,’ the lady to his beside turned him down, giving him props in bonus though,‘but it’s kinda true on a larger scale, I give you that!’
‘I believe this will ultimately result in long term embargo on trade unions, or even worse when the war creeps over here,’ that expression on his face was priceless, as if fancied himself for a great wit,‘and supposing that ever happened, you both ought to volunteer for dear friends.’
‘Is he talking to us?’Hoyden looked daggers at him, ‘I don’t think we’re who’d be counted on, it’s all filibuster ambivalence of the Neopatricians.’ Dusk talked with him, his tone overtly tinged with a stain of deceit.
‘Good for you!’ the man responded unaffectedly, ‘never pissed excellence myself in the business of war not even with a map and compass, when it was all about conscription back in my heydays, but let me take a guess based upon your assumption, you’re not one of those Mugs, the students’ wing God forbid?’
‘Wrong guess, I’m something of an abstentionist in fact.’ Dusk kept on the guile, saw fun in him after all, simpleton beyond repair! Hoyden quietly slurred her last impression of the cabby, and their manners had gotten just too brusk.
‘Well, I’ve casted my ballot for the Mugwump Libertarians,’ the woman admitted unashamedly, she went on enquiring without constraint,‘in any case, why all the inimicality from your part towards the Mugs, huh?’
‘Chill out ma’am, it’s all spur of the moment,’ the taximan in containing the misunderstanding, ‘that’s what you’d expect from my likes, a goddamn patrician partisan by birth, a great deal of my kith and kin never been to college, while most chucked up the sponge, couldn’t afford that lux, so you get the big picture, they saw in adherence to one of the two majors the expiation for their social mobility fiasco, their highest hit point on the status class ladder.’
‘Ah, certainly—’ and so she simmered down,‘just reserve the ebullience for the election day, you’ll need it then before now, the campaigns readily set out, I cross fingers that we beat you in the Plebian by the popular vote, the Magistrate for the nonpartisans, if you know what I mean. Hmm! by the way, you do have a lot to say for an uneducated person, respect!’
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nbsp; ‘Wow, you hold on right there,’ he protested, ‘when did the uni mean education, for the record, I’ve got a high school diploma which I also use as a loo cover,’ talking about the toilet in the tenement he apportioned with many others; before swinging back to the harsh reality,‘and we are who we are, nothing whatsoever, no one whoever gonna change it! say I’ll never cotton on to it, what’s that? Our two-party system, a by-product of flawed democracy! Every time I’m driving this junker, I make bids with myself, the next person will settle by my side, either a Mugwump or a Neopatri!’
‘Whether a dominant or a two-party system, it’s still by far and large rule of the people,’ she confirmed,‘but in the end of the day, when every choice’s taken awaits for the middleman’s approval, heh heh, oh well!’
‘The middleman?’
‘Yes, Cabinet of the Constitution Protectors!’
‘Oh yeah, the Protectors, gotcha!’ returned he, and jumping from one subject to another,‘oh by the way, what do you do ma’am, if I may?’
‘Sure, there’s nothing wrong with that,’ prone to expressing her open heartedness,‘well, I am directress at an orphanage!’
All the way long, the hack-driver and the unidentifiable passenger reeled off their sardonic discussions, until the taxi arrived at, and likewise passed through the Rontgen passage 5. A vehicular tunnel and one of the twelve underground rapid transits, ingress-egress, to and fro the Juxtazone; while the pedestrians utilized overground tracks.
The Rontgen underpass, made civilian check points, gigantic backscatter X-ray units in charge of imaging whichever machine traveling in or out of there. A subordinate aspect of a much thorough web of decentralized surveillance, that assorted also under its supervision, ethernets, 4G of mobile telecommunications technology, and of course the comsats. The scheme had its origins way back to somewhere in between the Divide Et Impera dossiers. A constituent part of the ASTHE’s quest after secret of the divine on streamlined data mining of the masses on the long run, without a need to the Z.OS5. For this very specific purpose, the triple O’s Arm of Ubiquitous Information Extraction was installed; since the first torpedo was shot on wake of the SWODs, by necessities of the purge.
Punctually, the express was permitted access into the Shanty-Precincts, the blue collars’ home ground, stagnant in time. Penetrating the warren streets of the borough, interlaced in washing lines. A helter skelter manifolds of clumpy tenement houses, built in the unique Jugendstil architecture, roofs of acclivitous bronze-clad conical spires, charcoal smoke coiled up into the air out of flues breathless, stuck out of penthouses, fabricated of ceramic bricks, mid-reliefed with foliage patterns entangled, the cornices’ gargoyled with fiendish figures, it’d a thing for the grunderzeit ambiance more or less than art nouveau.
Hoyden, lowered the power window, she studied the flagstone footpaths teemed with modest men next to crestfallen women; on daily basis pursued the way to hope against hope, the canned crab factory. Below minimum wages, beyond a shadow of a doubt; yet, it’d been for a whole era the only Atlas around to carry economy of the enclave on its stinky shoulders, though their biggest issue was, their crab mentality. Then, school kiddies on their route to school, seemed not to give a toss as they gathered around the refreshment stalls, and so they felt free to jaywalk down the shrunken road, along the snarled up vehicles, a cacophony of honking horns.
‘Lovely mornings aren’t worth this!’ cried the driver,‘wasted among the gridlock? jeez no!’ flummoxed, jabbed he the throttle, freaking his client out when he set to thread his way through, in sinuous stitches.
‘Whoa, lo and behold! sir, don’t tell me that’s a pegleg!!’ the woman, whose name should in some way or the other match how Rosie O’Donnell sounds, at last noticing the atypical leg she whooped astounded,‘how on earth comes you’re driving with such thing?! Just drop me by, I’m beggin’ you.’
‘Don’t vex ma’am,’ sought to allay her worries,‘Imma deviate for a shortcut nearby, that’s it.’
‘And I took the precincts for a cutoff, here you are, it proved to be the contrary,’she nearly spit out the words,‘just please be cautious, is this legal in the first place?’
‘Of course it is, this is nothing compared to the rage on the American roads; so quite sanctioned, for me at least.’ The man was keen on preserving the image of the gentleman to whom life was unfair.‘No, seriously, it’s always like this at seven a.m.s, people stock racing towards their workplaces or whatever aim in mind! I hate it; but hey, what’s up with all the sensitivity, nothing wrong with an artificial limb; m’am sorry to say it but I found your concerns unsubstantial, and that overreaction unjustified, this is blatantly a form of ableism.’ He gave to rave.
‘Holy moley, my bad, shouldn’t have acted such—’
Sometime later, they hardly managed to procure a pass back into the JuxZ. Heading toward the Anfa street, locus of the financial district, home to the stock market, the Zentrum Stock Exchange by Dealers Axis of Equity Market, and many a citadel of the multi-billion firms that sell people promises, that they’ll pay them back when it’s the right time, but the promises never are fulfilled, when the insurer decided to forfeit the business since management had spent all the premium on floozies and private jets; for the most part of it, insurance companies.
III
ALETHEIA
March the 25.
07:45 a.m., off a distance, he stared at Hoyden as she got away, a group of her colleagues loitered on the vast stairway that led up the colonnaded entrance of the private Aletheia Institute of Theology and Scientific Research; erected on a massif, the building at corner of the avenue, took deconstructivism to a whole new level; the prodigious statue of the Lamassu, this peculiar winged bull hybrid of Mesopotamia with its anthropomorphic visage had something feminine to it enchased into its head of full bronze, glowering in the way of the staffers and swarms of students attending, as though were they elements of a soc-real propaganda poster, attired in sternly fashioned ebony colored uniforms, with iron woggled blue stripped neckerchiefs, they strutted off on cycles of politically charged patriotic speeches by Forefathers of the Occidental Regnum, six days a week, one hour a day, from seven sharp until the start of the first class, conveyed into ears via a loudspeaker niched inside the gaping snout of the Lamassu; the alma mater of the prestigious institute of higher education, its guard who stood still on a grotesque pedestal of cement, there forever, its back posed against the building’s façade on high above which the aphorism carved, a riddle, read:
There are two sisters: one gives birth unto the other and she in turn, gives birth to the first.
Who are the sisters?
That was the mantra, the sort of mind manipulation to only work with people, exhibiting signs of amour-propre, and that’s the rule of collective identity, shared by those who toppled the pecking order.
‘“Ode to the Liminal Star.” Considered by many scholars to be a milestone chapter constituting the Lex Aurvanthilis, the pinnacle of man’s thought, an idea amidst a thousand scratching the stratospheric regions towards our universal salvation. Last of the book, it chronicles the godhead divulging the word to its hierophant, the word of the dire portents before the end time and the ensuant palingenesis of all, to bring balance back to this world of conflicting dualities, of the insane and sane, the dream and reality, the lie and truth, the ethereal and corporeal, the female and male, the destroyer and builder, the one and zero, the antimatter and matter, of the microcosm is that of the macrocosm. The ode, being written in two parts, with dactylic hexameter scaled its beginning before it escalates into intensity while in unison wanes in complexity as the anapaestic tetrameter brought it to a close with a dimeteric foot, give us an inkling as of why this scheme of rhythm embedded in quantitative meter was abode by, albeit, indeed its uniqueness is reserved not for its meter, but outstretches that into its overall unprecedented structure, for its verse was put together in a particular arrangement, the stanzas are put inverted; only from bottom and so
upward ought to be read therefore, thusly, the ode stands as though a spire thrust into the sky, pointing to the falling one; like the Tower of Babel, verse after verse, we are elevated higher and higher athwart the unfolding thirty-three stairs of wisdom, the last stanza confusingly told through the tongues of three different men, is left unfinished, which serves, if you acquire the right tools to see, a lofty purpose, in the lateral sense.’ His professor elaborated further; Dr. Nescio, a ponytailed partially baldpated man in his thirties, who suffered from some premature baldness syndrome back in his late adolescence, so whenever would he make a remark, he’d go brushing his inches-long beard off, out of an old habit to diverge attention away from the patch; right behind him, was an isopsephic character map tagged on an interactive board.
‘So, anyone to read the passage?’ he offered, ‘someone whose voice we don’t hear that much; you for example?’
‘What?’ he exclaimed, peeved for they disrupted the state of serene tranquility he’d been in.
‘You, read it.’ Pointing to the book.
‘Sure!’ Dusk gruffly uttered, he stood up, held spin of the holy writ flat open; and then, then he read, his reading was prosaic, while his voice, his voice had a kind of sonorous undertone to it.
Scientia solus potentia est.
Beguiled! Nether-world in schmaltz-fest;
Aber da, ich trotzdem nicht erkenne dich echt selbst!
In forlorn Apathana.
Bonfires of anoint’d martyrs on thy dawning past of arcana.
Lichen’d scrolls in yon grove, aglow caverns of arches;
O’er mount haggard, sheer crags, stone-stepped marshes
Arise! Initiated ones of yore, unto whence hath come the fire,
Thereat redeem’d Apathana.
Misled the burgeoning gale into her barrow tomb.
But gone’s gone, and life only doth what’s to be done;