Roses For Maria 2: In Search Of Father

[Aedh]

Evil Genius Enterprises is pleased to announce a new EQ fanfic, a sequel to "Roses For Maria," featuring some of the same charas. (Though also some new ones.) This story grew out of two things: one, an idea I've been kicking around for about three years, and two, "Dupont's Dictionary." I'll keep "Dupont's Dictionary" going, and all are still invited to contribute to it in any way you like. But I will be using materiel from there in the story. If I use anything YOU contribute, I'll credit you of course.

It will be called "The Aion Engine" [Revision: "Roses For Maria 2: In Search Of Father"] and will address some of the eternal EQ questions with my take on them. Whatever happened to Father? Is he really dead? Did he ever really exist? How did Prozium get developed? What exactly does "Tetragrammaton" mean anyway, and why that name instead of something else? Where did the "thousands of recorded gunfights" that formed the basis for developing Gun Kata come from, and why didn't the cameraman get his head blown off early on? How is it that Clerics get to ride around in spiffy white Cadillacs, and how is a city which seems to make Stalin's Moscow look like Bournemouth on Bank Holiday Week-end able to obtain and maintain such vehicles?

However, it will not address the Gun Switch. Some things are too deep for even the most daring mortal mind to fathom.

A final warning ... it will appear only in very occasional installments, as I still consider "Queen City" to be my primary project, and I've been too busy lately to even do much with that. But that will be changing soon.

[Mirabilis]

Looking forward to it!

[Aedh]

Apr 19, 2009 7:51:04 GMT -5 Mirabilis said:

Looking forward to it!

*in best Fairy Godmother falsetto* Well, wait no longer, child! *POOF!*





The Aion Engine


BREATH: Just a clock, ticking. So one Sense Offender put it very appropriately.

FATHER, WILL OF: Peace, justice, and prosperity for all. The elimination of war and strife from the human condition. Anyone who dedicates him or herself to this, is in harmony with the Will Of Father. Anyone who does not is an enemy, a fomenter of trouble and discord, and must be corrected ... or processed. This is very simple--so simple that it is remarkable that so many people don't seem to understand it.

We often hear of things that "too complicated" for people to understand easily. Perhaps there is another category ... of things that are too simple for people to understand easily.

SENSE-OFFENCE: The chief crime of Libria, the contravention of the Will Of Father (q.v.). Sense-Offence isn't sense itself, of course ... nor is even feeling--in and of itself--a crime, despite what we release to the press. Of course, for publicity we have to say "Feeling is a crime." This is political language, which is not the same as private language. If all feeling were a crime, it would be just as much a crime to feel devotion to Father as to feel contempt for him.

We cannot, and have no wish to, delve into a person's brain and control every single thought. Librians are not called upon to be robots, but to be persons useful to society and purged of self-destructive (and socially destructive) tendencies born of overindulgence in their own feelings, which leads them to neglect their duty to others. Prozium (q.v.) is the symbol, the sign--one might say, the sacrament of this duty, which is nothing but the same as the Will Of Father. 'Sense-Offence' is the visible misuse of feeling--that is what makes it an 'offence.' To indulge ... to luxuriate ... to think freely, to wish and dream and while away the hours in idle speculation--our world cannot afford this. Other worlds can, perhaps, but ours cannot. To slacken, to dream, to waste time in idleness, begets passions, which make one useless, and can infect other persons, making them useless as well. It is viral, a disease of the spirit, which must be cured and purged by the hard medicine of the Grammaton Cleric (q.v.).

PROZIUM: Father's gift to Libria and the world; a solution (in both senses of the word) which remakes the very processes of the brain. I am no medical specialist, but it has something to do with increasing the number of neurotransmitters in the frontal and left areas of the brain by 'recycling' them, that is, by stimulating them to detach from receptors more readily, and simultaneously decreasing the number of neutrotransmitters in the right and back portions of the brain, where the mood centres are. It is also keyed to times of day at which activity in different parts of the brain is, statistically, more or less at a peak or trough. This is why timing in its administration is very important.

The exact formula is unknown to me, and it is better that I do not know it, or I might be tempted, as Vice-Council, to order changes to it in the possibly mistaken hope of improving it. That is why Father in his wisdom kept it unknown to me; that was his Will, which is law. What we do know is enough. It works, if administered in the proper amount, at the proper time.

There was once a Tetragrammaton Councilor who spread the notion that Prozium in fact had little if any pharmaceutical value ... that it was Father's regime itself, backed by the discipline of the PIU--knowledge that one was forced to dose, and to hide one's emotions--which successfully led to the suppression of feeling among the populace. This Councilor was subsequently found guilty of Sense-Offence and processed, but the rumour persisted.

Is it true? I don't know. But we have Father's Word and Will, and whether the libel is actually true, or whether everyone is forced to act as though it is, makes no practical difference ... although in the latter case we could be said to be running a regime of State terror here. Even if that were so, what is important that we have no war. No violence--no hatred, no crime, except for those who stubbornly resist the Will Of Father and desire strife and war and tears. For them, they shall have what they desire--have it from the hand of the Grammaton Cleric--and it will destroy them. For those that do not resist, and do not desire such evils, they do not have them. And what is that but justice?

TETRAGRAMMATON: 1. There's nothing they can't do. 2. The headquarters of the Grammaton Cleric (q.v.), the guardian and agent of Father's will, consisting of various departments for education, operations, strategy and tactics, evidentiary administration, liaison to the Courts of Justice, etc. Tetragrammaton tribunals deal with all instances of Sense Offence (q.v.), presided over by Tribunes who are not legally qualified judges in the general area of Librian law, but qualified to deal only with cases dealing with Sense Offence. Said to have stated, according to Father Himself, in AUC 2909, or 13.122 in ordinary dating, that is, the thirteenth year of the 122nd indiction. That would be AD 2156 using Old Style dating, which was abandoned by Father's order long ago--but Clerics are still required to be familiar with it as Sense Offenders commonly employ it.

CLERIC: 1. Officer whose whose sole task it is to seek out and eradicate the true source of man's inhumanity to man--his ability to feel. 2. The final line of defence. If the Resistance compromises it, we are doomed. Father is doomed.

FEELINGS: The name for biological responses in which emotions are determined from a given set of sense-data. Sense-data is not a bad thing in itself. It is necessary to survival; but it should be used only for purposes of evaluating logical options, because without logic no path of action leads, ultimately, to survival.

Feeling is also not necessarily bad in itself--it can be a tool for the Cleric, so long as we feel obedience to the Will Of Father, and repugnance to anything which contradicts it--that is simply logic by another name. It is when feeling leads us away from the Will Of Father that it becomes dangerous; hence, Prozium, that invaluable tool for enhancing control of feeling by reducing its intensity to a state where an individual on his or her own can control their will themselves. This prevents one from wandering inadvertently into independence from the Will Of Father, and thence into an intolerable state of Sense-Offence. Unless, of course, we suffer from a corruption of the will.

Since the will is the ruler of the individual, those whose wills are hopelessly corrupted are irretrievably lost to society; and so, for the good of Libria, at this time we have no option but to apprehend and confine such unfortunates, and--should they prove incorrigible--remand them for processing. Hopefully the day will dawn when corruption of the will can be scientifically remedied, and we will be able to shut down the Hall of Destruction for good. Scientists are working toward that goal every day. But we are not there yet. Until then we must suppress those in a state of disobedience to the Will Of Father by any means necessary.

OBEDIENCE: Willing conformity; the message itself is not so important. Father, Will Of (q.v.). Every Grammaton Cleric takes an oath of obedience. Preston has it, I assume ... ? So he says. We'll see.

PAIN: A variety of feeling (q.v.) which, like obedience, can be a useful tool to the Cleric. Used judiciously on Sense-Offenders, it can and does--at least temporarily--make the body master of the will. This can enable us to determine whether a given S.O. is a hopeless case, or a remediable one, with the help of Prozium.

EQUILIBRIUM: In ordinary parlance, the central Prozium (q.v.) centre, from which it goes out to prefectural, sectional, and vicinage distribution points, as well as sub-centres located in the premises of large employers. High-ranking official personnel, such as Conciliars and Grammaton Clerics, are required to use Equilibrium as their own centre no matter where they may reside. This is a measure instituted by the wisdom of Father for protection.

In the wider sense of the term, 'Equilibrium' is the state which arises from being in a state of complete conformity with the Will Of Father (q.v.). Every Librian citizen should aspire to Equilibrium, and it can be achieved with the help of Prozium, and proper education, and mental and physical training. In the beginning, it is difficult to achieve, seldom and temporary of duration ... but with practice, Equilibrium can become a habit, and finally a disposition ... as it is, or should be, with the Grammaton Cleric. I am told that its achievement on the final level brings a state of mental and physical liberation. With the burdens of my office, I have not always time to bring it to this level, but I carry on as best I can.

Someday, perhaps, Equilibrium will become ingrained in the human being, and Prozium will no longer be necessary to control emotions and hatreds. But that will not come in our lifetime, or that of the next generation, or the one after that. Until that time, enforcement will be required. The cost may be high, and there may be problems along the way. But that is always the way with any task supremely worth the doing. And it will be done.

FATHER: He whose Will is the law of Libria; founder of Libria, its guide, authority, legislator, judge, and best friend. He does not use Prozium. He has no need of it. He cannot break the law, for his Will is the law. As Vice-Council I am merely the agent of his Will, which has brought millions of Librians into peace, harmony, justice, and prosperity. He makes his Will known through daily messages which I relay. This task has gotten more difficult since his death, and I have had to make the terrible decision to forego the benefits of Prozium, that I may myself feel--that is, feel Father's Will, that which I know by long association with him to be that which he would give if he were here. It is a sacrifice, but someone must make it. And I now know the terrible loneliness, the awful responsibility, which he once benevolently reserved to himself. Would it were not so! But that ordinary Librians, and the Grammaton Clerics who serve us, may continue to function as human beings ought, I must not only bear this burden, but bear it in secrecy, never betraying my suffering save to a select two or three who can be absolutely trusted.


Upon reading these last words, a pretty, bespectacled, dark-haired young woman looked up from the looseleaf page upon which they were written with a thoughtful look. "Darling?"

"Yes, Maria?" said a middle-aged man from across the big, country-style kitchen at whose table the woman sat. He was finishing the washing-up; it was easy, as bright morning sun was pouring in the windows. Some tasks in Libria had to be done at certain times, as electric power flowed only from nine AM--terce, it had been called in the old Grammaton Monastery--until three PM, or none, with another few hours at night for heating. That was a far, far gone age to him.

"Can you get me another syn-caf, please?" she asked. He soon had the kettle heating on the stovetop, run off precious biofuel which, thanks to their remote country location and farm acreage, they were able to make themselves.

He walked over, taking off his apron, and put it over a chair back, resting the other hand affectionately on her shoulder. "Anything interesting in all that lot ...? Ah! What's this ... a sort of dictionary he wrote?"

"Yes. He wrote a lot, old Vice-Council Dupont did," said Maria, throwing a wry look at the three crates on the floor.

"It was a common vice of dictators through history," he observed, knowing without having to see, her smile, and slight roll of the eyes, as she prepared for another history lecture. "Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, Khwarami, Campbell ... all of them couldn't keep from the compulsion to record absolutely everything."

"Father was the dictator, wasn't he, Max? Not Dupont," she said. "All that happened a little before my time, I'm afraid."

"Well, Dupont certainly took over from Father at some point. I was hoping you might see something about that in the papers. If there might be any history in there I'd like to find out about it. People must know."

"I seem to recall reading of riots when the Hall of Evidence was opened."

"There were ... that's because they didn't know what to do with all the information. There was such a mass of it, and so contradictory to everything they'd been taught to believe in. You have to go back two centuries, to the opening of the Communist archives in Europe, to see something comparable."

"'You-rupp?" She pronounced the unfamiliar word carefully.

"Entropia, I mean, of course. Back then it was called 'Europe.'"

The kettle began to whistle. He went to get it and make the syn-caf, and Maria pushed back her chair. "I'm still surprised you even have these."

"Well," he said over his shoulder, "I guess someone mentioned my name to the lawyers. Steven Dupont got them after his father the Vice-Council was killed on the eve of the Revolution, you know, and when Steven died last year--"

"Young, wasn't he?"

"Six years younger than me," Max said with a small grimace. "Forty-six."

"Ouch."

"PRC of course. They're goin' every day ... you read about them all the time. Every day another four or five Prozium-related cancer deaths."

"You've been screened lately?"

"Well, not very lately," he answered dryly. "I can't afford it."

"But they're free for ... for ... "

"For former Clerics and sweepers?" he asked gently, handing her the cup. He was a big man, with features once hard and craggy, but now softening with middle age well settled in. That, he thought silently, and the love of a good woman ... a wonderful woman. He smiled warmly, and she smiled back, running her hand up and down his arm. "Yeah," he continued. "I mean, I can't afford the time, now that we live here and I don't have to go to the city every day. Thanks to the money your patroness Nedra left us. I just want to farm and be left alone with you."

She gave him a little frown. "I worry about your health, you great big lovely man," she told him. "We've been five years building it up. No more nick, one drink a day, and all the freshest organic foods. And biocardial integration three times a day."

"I like the nighttime session the best." He gave her a grinning wink.

She sighed playfully. "Well, if I have to give my body so your health can improve, then I say, so be it."

"You love it," he smiled. They were silent for a moment, and he removed a pair of spectacles from her heart-shaped face.

She nodded. "I love you!" She touched him on the tip of the nose, mischievously leaving a spot of syn-caf foam there. "I just worry about you. It's a wife's prerogative."

"Well, you don't have to worry in that department," he said. "If I was gonna come down with PRC I'd have been showing signs a few years ago."

"Are you resistant to it--or were you one of these sense-offending Clerics who were secretly off the dose that we heard about?" she asked with another smile.

They had been moving, and took seats in the dining alcove at the table with the notebooks on it. "I dunno," he said. "You know--I took Prozium sometimes, sure. Of course there were times when you coudn't get out of it in the Monastery. But it ... I dunno ... it sure seemed to work like magic on a lot of people. But me--" he shrugged-- "I took it, but I didn't feel much difference from it. I did my job just the same even when I skipped it. Maybe having been unsusceptible to the drug means I'm also unsusceptible to the disease."

"And you never got your black coat, either."

"No. Why should I? There were plenty of other people willing to do it. I assessed the scene calmly ... coolly ... entirely without incident ... and it looked like my situation was optimised. Why be the first one into a pit full of dangerous maniacs armed with grenades, guns, hell ... Semtex vests sometimes? What was in it for me, or for the glory of Father and Libria? Somebody had to do the routine beat work and file reports and give the required blocks of CCFA instruction for schoolchildren."

"CCFA?" she asked. "I heard of that from friends."

"'Comrade Clerics, Father's Arms,'" he explained. "For children aged five through nine. You showed them presentations and read them storybooks and answered a few questions. Steven was the poster boy for that."

"Yes--so how did you wind up with the papers anyway?" she asked, crossing her legs charmingly under her skirt. "Were there no other relatives, or public repositories interested? I thought Steven Dupont had a cousin."

Max nodded. "Victor Delange."

"I never heard that name," said Maria, setting down her cup.

"Dupont's sister's son--the Vice-Council's nephew. A little older than Steven. You know him. He's 'Brutus.'"

Maria's eyes widened. "Brutus? The blogger and 'net commentator?"

"The same. He's about my age."

"No wonder he doesn't reveal his identity!" said the young woman. "He's bound up with the Party! And they didn't give him the papers?"

Her husband shrugged. "I dunno ... he didn't want them, perhaps. Publicity maybe? But yeah ... your 'Party,' the Reform Party, they're all about leaving old Libria behind. 'For A Brighter Day' and all that. Maybe he wants to do what the RP wants. It's an open secret--anybody who's anybody knows it. But the Party that grew out of the movement after--well ... after the time we met." Maria nodded; the events were still painful to speak of. "All I know is I got a 'mail one day, 'please contact this office at your earliest convenience,' et cetera."

There was silence for a few minutes while he looked out the windows at the green hills, and she drank.

"Have you seen his post for today?" asked Maria.

"Whose?"

"Brutus'."

"No. Anything interesting?"

"Perhaps not to you. I know how you are with politics. He says now that elections are over, and the old 'unity' Government has had to accommodate Reformers, it is time to put away our differences and support the new Government."

"Party politics are not something Libria has a happy history of, baby," said Max. Then he held up a hand. "No--no history lecture here. This is something that is within your time. The Reform Party, building on the principles of the Madours, as refined by Lisa Preston and now carried on by Zane Blackstock and Marva Maguire, and then the Libria Party--"

"Of your old boss Tyrone Brandt," put in Maria half-teasingly.

"He was never my boss. You know that ... you worked for me. I contracted for Consolidated Security, but when ConSec was nationalised after the Preston affair and turned into the LLE, Libria Law Enforcement, that was it for me. No chance of an ex-Tetra getting within a mile of them. And then Brandt turned to lawyering, got himself elected to a seat in the Concilium of People's Deputies--"

"And talks about how great Father was, and how the Revolution shouldn't have happened," finished Maria disapprovingly. "How can you support such a thing for a moment?"

"I don't!" he protested. "I'm no friend of Brandt, you know that. Or of his dad either, slippery bastard," he added with feeling. "Now there was a sense-offending Cleric to give sense-offending Clerics a bad name."

"I've read the archive on him. He didn't seem to very different than you. He committed no sense-offences. He felt ... but so did you. Didn't you?"

"I used my state to save lives," said Max. "He used his to ingratiate himself with Dupont and betray loyal Clerics."

"Like John Preston?"

"Ouch, part two," said the man. "Hey, what do you say we give the books a rest a while? Come help me feed the kids."

"Sure, I'll go put my overalls on." She finished her drink. She liked to help with the two dozen cattle and llamas. "It's back to the city tomorrow."

"Why do you have that job anyway?" he asked, taking her in his arms. "You don't need it."

"The Ministry of Commerce needs people who speak Porto," she said, referring to the language of her native Amazonia. "And fluent Libri as well, and who know the ins and outs of Ministry work. It's only part-time, and it's useful. Keeps you in information once in a while," she added with a wink.

"Yeah ... I dunno. Sometimes I just have a feeling about it ... like something is going to come up out of your Amazonian past. Something unpleasant. Like you're tempting fate."

"Well, I'm married to a good protector," she said. "I'll go change ... see you out in the yard."

He blew her a kiss, with a smile. But when he turned, his smile fled, and was replaced with his own thoughtful look.

>< >< ><

[Mirabilis]

A most promising start! Good stuff!

[clericjay]

Perfect definitions of the most important words of Librian culture.
_{Now I see, what the "Dupont's Dictionary"-thread was for.}

I haven't read "Roses For Maria" yet, but I thought that I may read this one first. This first chapter is understandable and interesting though.

[Aedh]

"Libria! There is no mental or physical disease that cannot be cured, if we but first cure the disease of emotion."

_{--from 'The Sayings Of Father,' pocket edition}


Farm work kept Max and Maria busy. They had a few helpers who came out, but not always the same ones. Some were specially selected Libria Service Corps people--mostly kids, but the occasional adult who'd been assigned a stretch of duty for being caught with red meat or uncertified soy products, or who'd failed a surprise theobromine test. Others were from a temporary employment agency in the worker-starved, unemployment-plagued City. They were supervised by the hired man, called Oz, whose parents had been 'reezers' many years before during Father's time. He was a character, him and his Miz Oz; he'd never been to the city but had passed his whole life in what--now--only old people in their blurted, mind-elsewhere moments, called 'the Nethers.' An eccentric with long, knotted braids of hair, entirely self-educated in matters agricultural, he and his lived in a dwelling dug out from a ruined building from the unknown past. Or, not entirely unknown ... when you dig every day for thirty-odd years, in the outskirts of what had evidently once been a city far greater than even Libria with its mighty thirty-storey buildings, you find a lot of stuff. Oz had a modest collection of stuff in a shed, and he also had a few favourite perches on his walks and ways when he 'went a-lookin';' a tumbledown chimney here; a big, flat cement foundation there with a cottonwood growing right up out of the middle that must have found some water source underneath, where he'd sit for an hour and eat his lunch and try to imagine things as they had been as the clouds rolled by overhead and the darners buzzed and the cabbage 'flies flittered ... until Miz Oz started yelling and banging a tube made from an old propane canister. She was very practical, Miz Oz was, and didn't have much patience with imagination.

Oz had been named for a character out of a book that his parents had read by the light of a lantern, or sometimes by light from torches taken from ambushed police and Sweepers. Some distance away was a great river, once called Miss ... something, down in the bottomlands, down from the gently rolling hills covered in oak, elm, pine, and hickory, sloping down to make way for sycamores and cottonwoods where there was water. Among them one could see artificial stumps--remains of old buildings--and wide swaths where now-crumbling paths of concrete had once provided awesome high roads capable of accommodating eight cars abreast. In the time of Father some of these had been kept up now and then in a desultory way; the pavement had been filled and patched at the worst spots, and here and there a bridge had been strengthened and restored to at least one usable lane, but except in the City itself, the electric signals were long decayed into crusted masses of metal and plastic. The river was now just 'the Big River.'

Max and Maria's place was not only out of the City but even away from the old ruins, mostly, though they stretched out in some places for many miles like the half-seen roots of a giant hackberry tree. On the whole it was a peaceful place, hot in the summer, cold and windy in the winter, with glorious springs and autumns. Oz had said he wouldn't live anywhere else even if there were anyplace else, except maybe Kansas, where the book he was named from had been set. But then one time he'd had a hankering, so he'd taken a couple of months to go to Kansas, or where he supposed it was. He'd bid Miz Oz farewell and she'd cried a bit and given him a lucky charm, and he'd gone, and a long and wonderful journey it had been. But when he got there, there was nothing but a sea of grass, and not very good grass at that, sprouting up thinly though grey, gritty soil that he knew was a layer from some man-made disaster. Even near Libria he found deposits of it, though nowhere as thick or even as in Kansas. He'd left there somewhat disappointed but not really surprised. Nowhere could be as good as 'Missland,' as he thought of Libria's general region. Max knew a lot more history than him, and no doubt could have told him the right names of what everything had been, but Oz declined the lessons. He liked his own names fine, and all the old names in the world weren't worth as much as knowing when to sow the barley and rye. Max probably even knew what had made the greydirt, but Oz didn't want to hear that either. If he knew, it would only make him sad, and that served no end.

They were good people, Max and Maria, but they just weren't proper reezers, as Oz and Miz Oz and some of the other folk they knew called themselves, especially when they'd had a few cups of corn liquor. Reezers knew how to survive on nothing at all, and that wasn't Max and Maria, who grew livestock for milk and hair, and grew corn and barley and sent crops and eggs to the City to sell--not a lot, but some. What they had just supported them, but it would have supported ten reezer families. Reezers grew livestock to eat, and anyone who did that didn't want to get caught in the City, where meat--except for bird--had joined guns, chocolate, children's playpens, coffee, nick, laser pointers, cough syrup, corn liquor, hand tin openers, sharp objects generally, and a lot of other things on the illegal list. Maria fascinated Oz insofar as she came from a land where coffee and chocolate grew. He'd never tried them or even seen them until Max brought him back a few forbidden samples got from resident foreigners there. He'd liked the chocolate, and so had Miz Oz, but neither of them cared for the coffee which was like drinking essence of soil tore up from the land bitterly, as Miz Oz said. They traded for some nick, or 'baccy' as reezers called it, brought over from a ways east up the Big River, mostly for metal ferreted out of ruins and crudely smelted down to be made into nails, knives, pans, and suchlike. Oz was good at 'goin' a-lookin',' finding the metal for the reezer farriers, and him and Miz Oz made a living between that, working for Max and Maria, and a little growing of their own. Add some chickens, a cow, a mule for the plough; a snug, warm dugout house, and a creek about half a klick away, and what else was there to want?

To-day Max and Maria had both gone into the City. Oz had the farmyard to himself, with three workers, all LSC kids, more or less regulars here; they liked it--it got them out of the City which seemed to depress them no end, and Oz approved of them. Over lunch in the fields he'd regale them with some reezer stories, of which there were a million. They'd learned that proper reezers were different from the City 'Resisters' way back when who'd seemed like a bunch of complete weirdos, willing to kill and to die for their paintings and books and movies and collections of stuff. Oz liked his own collection of stuff, but if some armed Sweepers had come looking for it he'd have been off like a jackrabbit and left it to them. Proper reezers could always start over; they didn't need anything they hadn't been born with, or stored between their ears. And anyone who came to try to take it away ... well, what would they get? Nothing they could use. That was 'reezer insurance,' as Max had called it. And upon having the somewhat puzzling concept of 'insurance' explained to him, Oz had to agree. On the whole, life was pretty fine, and looked to stay that way.


>< >< ><


Max and Maria Slater lunched together in the city, at a place favoured by people from Xylyx, or 'Zyes,' as they were called for short. They didn't object. Zyes didn't care much about anything except Zye business, which they were wont to discuss quietly between themselves in places with quiet corners--like this--in a side street near the Government centres but still out of the way in a row of pre-Cat buildings that had survived Father's urban renewal projects by being convenient, bland and unassuming. They had lent themselves to uses like data storage, electronics parts supply departments, 'net marketing havens, and the odd medical testing lab, as well as minor offices like the Translation Bureau of the Undersecretariat for Commerce and Trade (Region Four), of the Ministry of Economic Development. This was where Maria worked two or so days each week. Her workdays began with a half-hour's canter down to Rural Road 62, where she'd hand her horse over to Larkin, the resident reezer at Slater's Corner--as it had flatteringly begun to be called. There she'd wait for the sputtering hydrogen-powered bus to take her another hour to Sycamore Landing, where the ferry would carry her to the City side, and a TranspoLibria bus would take her the rest of the way in. That was ordinarily. Today, as they were both going in, he'd fired up the Jeep--a rare honour--and driven it all the way down to the ferry landing himself. It was safe enough left there. Motor vehicles on their side of the Big River, as far as anyone knew, numbered less than ten, counting the bus, and whoever took it wouldn't have anywhere to go anyway. They maintained Max's old flat in the City, too, but used it only under grave necessity.

"Looking good, as always," said Max, as his wife walked up to the table in a creme-coloured raw-silk skirtsuit, her hair up and glasses on for business. He looked at her with affection, up and down, and pulled out her chair for her. "I ordered the usual. Borshch--don't get any on that now--and cabbage rolls with a fruit salad."

"Very good--thanks, darling!" She took her seat. "Busy morning?"

"Yup. I have a lead."

"Oh, good," she said. "How did you find out?"

"A tip from a young mutual friend, Bjorn. Bjorn Shaw, you remember."

"Yes! How is he?"

"He's on the staff at Parkwood now." She put her lips together; Parkwood was Libria's most exclusive convalescent home, for citizens over sixty who did not have PRC, and was privately funded. "Good for him!" she exclaimed.

"You bet. I got a call from him ... he knows about my project," he said. She knew he meant the effort to track down surviving Clerics and Tetragrammation officials, especially older ones who might have known Father himself. "You know all the time I've spent in the Bureau of Statistics, checking death records, and talking to smaller fry."

"What did he find out?"

He lowered his voice, glance flickering around. "There's someone there now, in a suite, been there about two years. I never heard because they keep her hush-hush, off the official list of residents. Eighty-six years old."

Maria nodded sagely. "Long enough so her omission from the list isn't a clerical error. Old enough to remember the regime from the beginning." Then her eyes took on a glint of excitement. "You know what? If she had grandparents she knew as a child, she might remember stories of pre-Cat life! You think ... ?"

"I dunno. Her name appears to be given as Betty Smith, and said to be in a chronic vegetative state, but Bjorn saw her getting a test. She was alert and in her right mind. My guess is that she was someone very important ... and they're keeping her low-profile for just that reason. After all, who'd want to bother visiting someone who was insensible?"

"Who could that be? There were not many women in very high positions, you said. You have a list."

"I'm not the only one with a list," said the man, a shadow crossing his face. "So do--well, you know who I'm talking about. People who want their revenge on every last living person connected with the old order. Like me," he finished. Maria nodded, but held her words as the soup arrived. There were several known associations--some of which operated illegally--in the name of justice and reparations for lives and families wrecked by the days of Prozium, disappearances, secret trials, and summary combustions. Some sought to exact money or to get increasingly severe and irrelevant laws passed, and some sought to harass or kill anyone who had upheld Father's ideology in any way--or even simply failed to resist it with sufficient vigour. Whether because of his lower-order Cleric status, or his attested reputation as a relatively humane officer, or his loyal service to the new regime in its darkest hours, Max had had comparatively little trouble. But even he had been attacked, given grief from time to time, and shot at more than once, which was an extremely serious matter in gun-free Libria. He was one of only a handful of citizens authorised to carry a firearm for personal defense, which took a Ministry of Justice recommend and a secret vote of the Presidium itself.

"So her real name is obviously not Betty Smith," said Maria seriously. "Do you have a guess?"

"Yes," he said. "I'm not gonna say it out loud even here, but I've got a hunch. I've spoken of a person who's the holy grail of my search for information." Maria nodded again--she knew the name. Max had uttered it dozens of times in her hearing. "She never appeared in the death records, and I was told more than once that she'd left for Entropia after the Revolution. But I think she's here, and she's there, so to speak."

"What's your plan to get in to see her?"

"I'm thinking. I wanted you to help me think. You're good at that. I can't just walk in there. For one, she's officially not there, and the very fact I knew about her would look suspicious. They don't know me--I could be anyone. I'd be asked to leave, and that we can't have. She didn't survive this long without someone watching her back. I mean friends and influence."

"Who might that be?"

"In her case, I don't know." Max fished a little bit of something he didn't like out of his soup. "Maybe a devoted family member. But unlike Dupont, Brandt, Preston, Partridge, and others, she didn't have any family that anyone ever knew. Someone with a connection to Parkwood, but not necessarily part of it. There could be more than one."

"Have you run down your list? Asked?"

"Not everyone, but all the most knowledgeable ones. Whoever it is, they have an eye on her all the time."

"They have Parkwood staff cooperating, but it's on the q.t., because Bjorn wasn't brought in on it," she mused. "It's not her own doctor or he wouldn't have let him get close to her." Then she snapped her fingers. "You said she's listed as being in CVS, right?"

"Yes. She's got to have a guardian ... a lawyer most likely, or someone knowledgeable about the law. Even if she has her wits, such a person would have to be appointed for her to be legally listed CVS. I worked for LibMed long enough to know the ropes on that. That means a judge, and that means a court."

"And that means--records," finished Maria, her spectacles gleaming.

"And that person is very likely her guardian angel, or at least the chief one," added Max. "Brilliant, baby."

She shrugged and chuckled. "Easy work. All I did was repeat your own words back to you. I guess all you have to do is find this person and convince him that you're for real, an old stu--comrade, and you mean no harm. Seems like a visit to the Ministry of Justice archives is in order."

"Can you come with me? It'd halve the time."

"I ... " She shrugged. "I suppose so. I don't have any live work to do, just some documents. I could take them home with me and then 'net them to the office to-morrow. If that's alright."

"Sure!" He took her hand and held it until the waitress brought the cabbage rolls.

"You know," the woman said slowly, arranging her napkin, "you were a--you had your first job, and then you worked for the old MES, then you contracted for ConSec, and you're now not part of LLE only because it was made clear to you that you weren't invited. You've been a sort of detective, one way and another, for as long as I've been alive, and you're good at it. So might I ask ... ? I'm flattered that you like me to--as you say--help you think ... but do you really need the not-very-good help I bring?"

He looked at her seriously. "Yes, for two reasons. One is that as a person gets older, they start to lose touch in little ways. The world goes on, and you start getting left behind. No one can keep up with everything. You help me."

"And the other?"

He laid a big hand on her slender one. "You might have a murder case to solve entirely on your own some day, and I want you to be practiced, equipped to do that, should it come to pass."

"Oh?" She gave a little grin. "And whose murder would that be?"

He looked down, quickly, then straight into her eyes. "Mine."


>< >< ><

[Mirabilis]

Excellent...I love the descriptions of Oz's lifestyle.

[Aedh]

"Young Libria--avoid idleness! Seek not to study history, but to make it."

_{--from 'The Sayings of Father,' pocket edition}


A week passed, and it was a typical week for Libria. The 'netcasts, by Max's count, covering a city of a half-million people, carried accounts of twenty-six arsons; fourteen aggravated assaults; ninety-two deaths, eleven by suicide; eleven robberies involving metal-pipe- or ball-bat-wielding assailants; seventy-one births, all but eight to immigrants; two minor riots--one over immigration issues, the other over jobs; and one thousand, four hundred and eight layoffs. A survey showed that the average criminal prosecution now took sixteen months to bring to court. An energy conservation measure had been enacted, to further reduce Libria's carbon footprint, with a scheme of reducing the nighttime flow of electricity from its current six hours to four, except on week-ends. In Father's day, Max remembered, the city had had power twenty-four hours a day, but that was when City Power's 'Hadrian' nuclear plant, Father's greatest achievement, had been running. Father and his scientists had worked on it for many years. Max wasn't sure, now, that Father had lived to see it completed, but it was known to have been high on his priority list. Together with a food surplus, a power supply is the basis of any civilisation: and that supply's efficiency and abundance determine the level that civilisation will rise to. That was one of Father's true, documented sayings from early on, when he had still appeared in public once in a while. In later years his new sayings had become less clear, less didactic, less teachable and memorable ... no wonder, as Vice-Council Jerome Dupont, who had secretly taken over as Father's oracle, wasn't half the leader or one-tenth the mind that Father himself was.

Max's 'project,' as he and Maria called it, was research into the past, to uncover the facts about Father, who, it was believed, had been dead since well before the Revolution which overthrew Equilibrium--over twenty-five years. Under Father's rule, dates had been computed in two different ways: AUC for ceremonial purposes, and by indictions for common business use, the latter having been done away with by the Revolution. This year was AUC 2995, as now reckoned, or 9/131 in old style ... the ninth year of the one hundred and thirty-first indiction; an 'indiction' being a cycle of fifteen years which had governed Libria's business law under Father. The Revolution had taken place in 2970. There had also been a system of years called AD, which Resisters had used. Max couldn't recall off the top of his head just what this year would be in AD dating now; he'd have to consult his notes. AD dating had been used in pre-Cat, that is, pre-Catastrophe times, before the events which had changed the world utterly from what it had been before, obliterating whole civilisations, killing millions or billions of people, and changing the shapes of continents. The Cat had taken place some time between fifty and sixty years before the founding of Libria, which had been in AUC 2929.

Max had been educated in the story of Father as an acolyte and then a young Cleric. Through the Nethers--the lands of confusion and chaos, where cities and civilisation had badly degraded during the Cat--Father had led a large group of followers to the current site of Libria. Here there had stood a city once called something else--again, he'd have to look up the name; he had trouble remembering since it meant nothing to him--but it was in roughly the middle of a vast area of land once called 'America.' He liked that name ... it sounded classical and rolled softly off the tongue. In Maria's homeland of Amazonia it was occasionally bestowed as a girl's name. This city had been left, physically, mostly intact by the events of the Cat, which had devastated the coasts and the more northern regions. Here, there was a big river for power and transportation, good land for agriculture, and a city more or less ready to move into, once the inhabitants had been persuaded to cooperate--by the power of Father's personality, ran the official version, but Max had always privately suspected that it had required more than a little forcible subjugation. The ruined buildings and structures outside the inner core had, evidence showed, not all been destroyed in the Cat. That had been proven by scientific analysis of excavations. They had been slowly decaying for a hundred years or more before that, and some of that demolition had been carried out by pre-Cat inhabitants, indicating gradual decline in their ability to maintain the City even before the events. The destruction had accelerated after that, showing that the Cat had seriously impacted the citizens' ability to maintain what was left; though their city had not been hit directly, the events had proven to be a fatal blow to their economy, and thousands had died or fled. The remainders had deliberately taken apart much of the outer area, probably for protection against prowling bands of predatory militants, but also to recycle and reuse materials for the inner city that they could no longer obtain from elsewhere. That had led to the hundred-and-twenty square-kilometre area that now comprised the City, which Father and his followers had appropriated, for the sake of a bold new experiment designed to bring humanity up from the ruins.

That experiment was, as everyone knew, encapsulated in four words: The Will Of Father. Not everyone knew everything that the Will Of Father entailed, but Dupont's note had summed it up pretty well: Peace, justice, and prosperity for all; the elimination of war and strife from the human condition. This was a pretty ambitious mission statement for one man backed by three hundred or so elite enforcers--Clerics--and a few thousand troops called 'Sweepers;' but no doubt Father had thought of himself as merely the founder of a long-term effort. He had had an astonishing array of knowledge. Somehow, in an age where woodburning had more or less become the norm, he was able to marshal the expertise and resources to build, first, a network of wind generators backed by turbine stations that drew power from the River, and then go on to successfully launch, if perhaps not see to completion, a nuclear power plant. He had conceived of, brought to perfection, and successfully taught, his most able followers the art of Gun Kata, which enabled them to prevail over vast numbers of foes while needing little material support. He had written an entire code of law, which--though few cared to admit it openly--even now, after the Revolution, broadly shaped Libria's government and society. And of course, he was responsible for Prozium, the amber nectar to cool savage emotions, dampen useless feelings, and enable people to get about their tasks efficiently and vigorously. Any one of those would have been a great life's work for a man.

And this was the fascination that had always pulled at Max, since his earliest days, but especially so now that he was retired to the farm with his investigator's mind given free rein the work on anything it pleased. Just who was this godlike, or at least demigodlike human being, this Caesar, Maecenas, and Galen all rolled into one? Why had he wanted to devote himself to the punishing work of trying to lift humanity out of the mire into which it had seemingly sunk with all the contentment of a pig in its wallow? He had clearly had long-term goals; how did he hope to perpetuate them, to keep things rolling, after his death? Why had such an obviously wise and intelligent man apparently neglected all measures to secure his legacy? Was Dupont, so obviously inferior to him in every way, really intended by him to be his successor as Leader of Libria? If not, then what had gone wrong?

Some people, looking at Father's achievement, said that 'Father' had not really been a person; that there had been a spokesman, of course, who lent his visage, but that the spokesman was not the person he was presented as. If he had been a cabal, that would go a way toward explaining Father's multi-talented initiatives and titanic energy. It might also explain why there was no information about Father's death. At the time of the Revolution, facts uncovered by Cleric John Preston had revealed that Father had been dead for some time, but Preston had gone on to kill Dupont, from whom he had had the revelation. That was unfortunate, from Max's point of view. And Max and Maria were now sifting through some precious boxes of notebooks, scribblings, and jottings by Dupont, in the hope that he had left a record there, or at least some clues. Dupont had referred to Father's death in writing, but so far revealed nothing about it, how it was caused or when or where it happened ... or where the body was laid, which might produce valuable information. But if there were no body, because Father had been a construct, that would make sense. The few references to the 'death' of Father might be a reference to the combination breaking up, or the passing-away of the spokesman. There had been one or two scholarly works circulated on the topic of Father; one, Deconstructing 'Father:' A Study In The Phenomenology Of Mass Consciousness, Max had beside him now. The author had been a graduate student at the University, Zane Blackstock ... since gone on to make a name as a psychologist, a progressive-minded technocrat, an active leader of he Reform Party, and now the freshly-designated Minister of Health and Social Development. Blackstock took the 'construct' view and diagnosed Dupont as a paranoid schizophrenic. Which could have been the case, Max reflected. Yet on the other hand, if 'Father' had been several people, why was there no evidence of that? Why had no one of them been found?

Particularly interesting was Blackstock's survey of the urban legand of 'The Return.' This was something that Maria had encountered it in the days when she has been 'doing school,' as she said, with Irina Madour. It was a story passed on mostly among children, so far as was known, and it said that Father had not died, but that--wishing to test Libria on how well it had learnt his principles--he had retired from Libria to another place, where he was rumoured to wait, preserved by fantastic technology, watching over his beloved City ... and that if and when the need arose--should Libria be in danger of utter destruction--he would return and save it from its doom. This story was a charming fable, of course, which children grew out of, especially in later school years where they were thoroughly educated on the evils of the past ... but it certainly captured the impressiveness of Father's mind and spirit. There was a naive veneration for one who, after all--putting aside for the moment whether he was evil or not--was certainly a tremendous person in every way. It also showed awareness of the issue of Father's unknown end.

During the early days of the Revolution, people had been so glad to be rid of Equilibrium and the hated 'dose' that no one had stopped to ask what might have become of the terrible figure that rose above it all. There had been riots, and a state close to civil war for a while, after the first summer breeze, and buildings had been broken into and their contents looted and burnt. Information on the end of Father might have been among what went up in smoke, and that bothered Max a great deal. But, curiously, when you thought about it ... everyone had just accepted the unsupported word of Dupont--who was a known liar--that Father was dead. Everything else he'd said had been carefully investigated, but not this. And there had been really very little nervousness about what might transpire should it prove to be another lie. But time had gone by, and with it came increasing confidence that if Father had not died, and had survived the Revolution, he would now be dead of old age anyway; and the speculation had been left to children's games.


>< >< ><


The progress on locating his quarry had had to be suspended for ten days while sowing went ahead, under the eye of Oz some of the time, but also sometimes with the supervision of Max himself; Oz had his own planting to do as well. One of the workers was a Libria Service person who'd spent every day of his year there. Ivan had asked to be taken on as a worker, but Max had had to say no. But he'd encouraged young Ivan to go ahead with his dream of farming. There was lots of land for the taking, for whoever cared to register in the City, claim the land, and then go out and start work. Ivan had been disappointed, perhaps aware of some fatal weakness within himself when it came to being the boss; some people work best for others, and not themselves. Max understood that. The Tetragrammaton had been staffed with people hand-picked for just that quality.

At length, however, enquiries had turned up an Elisabeth Smith, whose age matched that of Bjorn's 'Betty Smith.' She had been declared legally incompetent in 2974, twenty-one years before, and her profession was given as just 'Citizen,' which usually meant the stay-at-home partner of an official or prosperous businessperson. Her guardian was listed as one Annette Hanssen, listed as her registered partner. Any Librian of age and sound mind could take a registered partner, so long as it was another Librian of age and sound mind; partnerships were one of Father's institutions that had survived the Revolution untouched. 'Marriage' had been strictly outlawed under his rule, and had been observed only by daring and romantic Resistance members. Originally, Librian partnerships had had a lifetime of three years, after which they expired and could not be renewed. After the Revolution, the Government had extended the life of partnerships to a renewable fifteen years, the length of an indiction under Father's rule. Indiction-based thinking, too, had survived, even if it had been banished from the calendar. Annette Hanssen and Elisabeth Smith had been registered as partners in 2970, just at the time of the Revolution, but the partnership had not been renewed in 2985. That would make sense if Elisabeth Smith had indeed been non compos mentis. All invalids were considered wards of the State unless provided for by a legal arrangement; yet another survival of Father's laws. Such an arrangement had been made in Elisabeth Smith's case, and her guardianship was vested in a certain law firm in the City, a prestigious one that Max knew very well. She must have had considerable property or resources, either her or Ms Hanssen, or both. It was suggestive.


>< >< ><


The woman in the bed was awake, alert, and bright-eyed; her white hair had been cut short, as is common with very old women; and she was starved for conversation. "Do come in--come in, Slater!" she said with a smile. "And this lovely young lady is--?"

"This is my Maria," said Max. "My wi--permanent partner, that is."

"Hello, Maria!" said the old woman. "It does me good to see a young lady properly dressed," she added, taking in Maria's dress, hat, gloves, and high heels. "It does!"

"Thank you, Betty," said Maria modestly.

"Or can we dispense with that and call you Jonna?" asked Max, taking her proffered hand. "Archcleric Jonna Haenninen, once Head of the Division of Training, Martial Arts, Unarmed, in the Second Concilium of the Tetragrammaton?"

"Well, you shouldn't really," said the lady quickly. "That's all ages past, you know. I've grown quite accustomed to 'Betty Smith' by now."

"Okay, Jon--Betty," said Max, as Maria smiled. "You obviously remember me."

"I remember you, Slater," said the old woman. "I always wondered what had happened to you. A fair hand with the Berettas you were, but--you must admit--never fast off the mark with kicks and throws. Good at blocking though. If you're still alive you must have been better at blocking--of one sort and another--than even I rated you, which was good indeed. Help me sit up," she directed. Maria gave her a hand, plumping up her pillows, and Max arranged the coverlet and poured a drink of orange juice out of a thermal carafe. "Good! Thank you," beamed Jonna, looking entirely unlike an Archcleric of the dreaded Tetragrammaton, mother-trainer of a thousand ruthless killers, and much more like a kindly great-grandmother who knitted and baked cookies. Such was life, reflected Max, no reason she couldn't be both. "Now what can I do for you?"

"I just wanted to see you again. Chat, introduce you to my partner," said the man easily. "Catch up on old times."

"Old times?" Jonna chuckled. "Bunk. Nobody's come to see me in eons. You could have looked me up a long time ago, Cleric. Why now?"

"I was busy. I got married, retired from business, then started a farm. It's only lately that I even realised you were still alive. And then it took a while to find you. You're surely aware of that."

"Yes, well, one has to stay out of the way of these obsessed people, half of whom weren't alive then and none of whom have the faintest understanding of what Libria was about in those days. You know. All they go on about is Prozium and Sense-Offence and combustions. You'd think that's all there was to Libria in that time."

"It is true to a certain extent, though, isn't it?" asked Maria mildly.

"It is true to a certain extent," echoed Jonna. "To the same extent that horsemanship is all about the whip and the spur."

Maria flashed defensively. "Neither are necessary if rider and mount relate the way they should."

"My point exactly," returned Jonna. "And yet Libria has maintained a ban on equestrian sport because of the mass of people who think it's simply an excuse for animal torture. Neither would there have been any combustions if people hadn't been sick and self-destructive. But you are young. You weren't there; you don't know. The worst criminal offenders in the City now are babes in diapers compared to what they were fifty or sixty years ago. Then, they were tough--offspring of survivors of the Catastrophe and its horrors--more animal than human. The bottom has risen considerably."

"I'm hoping that she can come to know in time," said Max. "At least somewhat. I'm trying to get at the truth."

"What truth?"

"The truth about Father," said Max. "You knew Father personally. You were close to him. Closer than anyone, I've heard."

Her blue-eyed gaze sharpened. "Truth about Father? You're on a pointless mission, Slater--no one wants it, no one needs it. If it were told, no one would believe it. It would be branded as lies."

"How do you feel about that?" asked Maria.

Jonna smiled. "'How do you feel ...?' Now there's a fine question to be asking a Grammaton Cleric!"

"Some people say there was no such person as Father," said Maria. "Is that true, or not? We owe at least that much to leave to history."

"History!" Jonna snorted. "He always said it was a sublime waste of time, and he was right. No one knows. Most people don't even care. If anyone pays attention to it, it's only because they want to appeal to it to justify themselves. But I can answer that question. There really was such a person as Father, and he really did do all the things credited to him, and more. That's one reason we were hated. Maybe--maybe the main reason. We told no lies, about ourselves or anyone else. It was all true."

"Was he very much older than you?" asked the young woman.

"Yes. In fact, I remember him saying once he was born a few years after the Catastrophe, maybe six or seven, I guess," said Jonna. "That was the only remark I ever heard him make about his own life before the Discovery and the founding of the Tetragrammaton Society. That didn't happen in Libria, you know."

"I remember the story," said Max.

"It, too, was true."

"And the trek from the Nethers?"

"Also true. I joined on the way. I was there when he said: 'This is the place.' I very much doubt there's anyone else alive who can make that claim."

"So you remember the Founding of Libria then?" asked Maria excitedly.

"Oh, yes. I was very young, of course. It was hard in that time," said Jonna. "The people who lived in the City at that time were a poor lot. Ignorant and selfish brutes--no thought for anything but their physical appetites. Father had faith, though, even in them. He tried to lift them up, give them hope. He spoke great things to them."

"Did he have a personal name that you knew of?" queried Max.

"He had a Tetragrammaton name. So did we all in that time. Your birth name didn't matter, and you were actually sanctioned if you used it. He considered them to be emotional. If he had a birth name before that, he never spoke of it, so I wouldn't know."

"Do you mind--just out of curiosity--what was yours?"

"Hypatia," answered Jonna.

"And his?"

"Julius. Julius Justus. A fine man he was, about medium height, but very fit. His mind seemed to control every molecule of his body. He exercised relentlessly in those days."

"Latin names--and Greek," mused Max. "He was a classicist. He used indictions for dating ... the Roman empire's system. Prefects, tribunes. And of course the name, Tetragrammaton. 'Four Teachings.'"

"You remember them," said Jonna. "Geos, gnesis, gnosis, gymnesis: 'Place, truth, knowledge, training,' each one of little use without the other three. The four Gammata, or G-letters, which stood for the Grammata, the Four-In-One. The gammata, which looked like upside-down Latin 'L's', placed in a wheel, and each backed with a stylised pistol to reflect the need for enforcement. That looked almost like four T's in a circle with their bottoms together, and so it came to be rendered. The symbol of the Tetragrammaton."

"Really?" exclaimed Maria. "That's fascinating!"

"Father spoke of the Fourfold Path. By it he meant a path to healing ... the healing of the earth and of humanity."

"But--but--that's marvelous," said the young woman. "And so wise! How did we get from there to police raids and summary combustions?"

"It's a long story," said Jonna. "Are you ready?"


>< >< ><

[Mirabilis]

Absolutely fascinating...and totally plausible! Looking forward to the next installment!

[Aedh]

"Students! A place and a disposition--a goal, and the means to achieve it--the Tetra Grammata! These are not simply what the Tetragrammaton provides; together with you and your Cleric instructors, they are the Tetragrammaton itself. You provide the one other necessity, the will to realise them."

_{--from 'The Sayings of Father,' pocket edition}


Cleric Jonna, alias 'Betty,' looked from Max to Maria. "What do you know of the origin of the Tetragrammaton?"

Maria crossed her legs and leaned her chin in a cupped hand, her elbow resting on her knee. "Only what Max has told me: that it began outside of Libria, elsewhere, and that Father led a group of people on a journey though the Nethers ... a long journey, before they came upon the City, and the day that Father pronounced it to be the place where Libria would arise." The man nodded. "I don't know about the 'Discovery' you spoke of. I've run across the term but I thought it just meant finding the City--but from what you say, that seems not so."

"Of course, I heard about it, but of course since I didn't make Cleric First Class, I never received Advanced Initiation," added Max.

"The Discovery took place at the beginning," said Jonna. "About the time I was born, or a little before."

"What was the Discovery?" asked Maria.

"It was while Father was a graduate student at a university, studying philosophy, history, and technology. He left his school and travelled, once, into a wilderness place, and there made what he called the Discovery. Just how, or what the moment was like, he wouldn't recount because--he said--he didn't want details about himself to eclipse the importance of the Tetra Grammata that he taught ... and he especially didn't want anyone else trying to replicate the experience, because we each need to find our own moment of Discovery. But, however it happened, he returned having Discovered the Grammata, and integrated them into his studies. He formed a group to teach them to lower-level students, to help them think clearly. He never called it 'teaching' or 'instruction.' He called it 'review.' He always said, 'I will review with you.' Because he held there was nothing special about him ... that people were all alike, and that he had made the Discovery because he happened to be in the right place, with the right disposition, and he had the right knowledge, and the strength of personality to go out and live it. He once said that it would make an interesting question whether he had discovered the Grammata, or whether they had discovered him."

"That sounds .. almost ... superstitious," pondered Max aloud.

"Perhaps that's why that remark was never published," said Jonna, throwing him a sharp glance. They both knew that Father had treated 'superstition' as a public menace worse than plague or nuclear contamination. Anyone found doing--or discussing--anything that couldn't be scientifically explained, simply disappeared; no trials, no records, no martyrs, no explanations, no defence. So successful had the effort been that the word religion had vanished from use. Even now, a quarter-century after the Revolution, there was no visible trace, except perhaps for the occasional long, lingering glance toward the dawn, or an uptick in social activity around the end of December. For citizens Maria's age, it meant nothing. They had no notion that such things had ever been.

"And did he gain acceptance for his teachings?" asked the young woman, driving on with her point.

"No," said Jonna. "Not at first. He was thrown out as a troublemaker, but a few young people followed him. To them he unfolded the lessons of history, philosophy, and science. I should say--lest you conjure up pictures on your mind of a horde of people trekking over hill and under dale in primitive vehicles, searching for a place to settle--the Journey was not that. The Journey was principally a journey of information, of the Grammata, as knowledge of Father's way spread here and there. Networking, as it were. A pair of students would come to a settlement, and visit, and talk with many people about many things. To a few they would speak of Father's teachings, and maybe one or two people would accept them. Such people often did not leave their places at first, but stayed to teach others. And so the idea of Libria grew, and evolved. This was the process called the Journey."

"Loosely used, then, the Journey simply meant the whole time between the Discovery and the Founding."

"Yes."

"But Father himself travelled," said Max.

"Yes, he and always a few companions, constantly meeting others, collecting information. And all along, he was looking for a physical place to build his model society. I received the Grammata when I was eighteen, in a place north of here. It was difficult for me, as I had family who thought I had gone crazy and tried to 'correct' me. The next year, Father himself came through. I asked to join him, and he saw no use in me remaining where I was, so he let me come along. Over time he saw I had talent for working with people, and kept me with him for the time being. And I was still with him when we'd been in this City a few weeks, and he called a meeting and said: 'I have decided. This is the place.' We all knew the meaning of those seven words. The Foundation of Libria was dated from that day. Then those elsewhere who had received the Grammata gradually came in to join us."

Maria sat rapt, while Max said, "I had heard some of this. But you're fleshing it out ... making it more real, somehow." Jonna chuckled. "Not quite like sitting in a freezing lecture hall listening to Laertes drone it out, eh?"

"No!" Max smiled. "Laertes ... I wonder what happened to him?"

"Captured by Resistance during the Revolution," said Jonna. "They ringed him." Max bowed his head.

"What's 'ringing?'" asked Maria.

"Binding someone up in rubber tyres and setting fire to them," said Max. "Very nasty." The young woman shuddered. An attendant looked in briefly, raising her uniformed arm to look at her wristwatch. Max poured the old woman another orange juice.

Maria spoke up. "Can I ask you about Prozium?"

"Well, you can ask." Jonna smoothed her coverlet with thin hands. "At your peril," she added. "For one thing it was not at all my department. For another, when that subject comes up, someone always takes offence. I can tell you up front that I don't know the formula--no one knew the whole formula but Father himself. Different people made different elements of it, but those who did the final preparation did not know the composition of the elements, and used computerised equipment that had been programmed by someone else again. I know there are people trying to secretly re-create it."

"If you keep your ear to the street, you hear stories of unbroken Prozium ampoules selling for incredible amounts. It's every layabout's dream to find some in a cellar somewhere make his fortune."

"Idiots ... you will remember, Slater, Prozium had a short shelf-life."

"Yes. Any ones dated forty days or more back were to be turned in to Equilibrium, where they were accounted for and then destroyed. I sometimes went on enquiries about missing doses. If even one were unaccounted for, they'd send a pair of Clerics."

Jonna nodded. "There would have been very, very few missing ones. And by now, if you did find one by some incredible chance, it would be completely useless."

"Not much point in keeping it illegal, then, surely," said Max.

"It's a political measure. Symbolic, that's all. Bunk," said Jonna testily.

"When did Prozium first appear?" asked Maria.

"Before my time," said Jonna. "Father seems to have had it from the very beginning. He knew enough about medicine to have made it himself."

"Was everyone required to take it in your time?"

"No, not everyone. At first, Father required it for overly emotional people only. Later, after the Foundation, he introduced it into areas we had taken and held, and made it mandatory for the general population as an aid to controlling them. It made sense. He was supremely logical, and there was naturally no question of swaying people by appealing to their emotions."

"Naturally. But--you said--'controlling them.' That sounds a little ... well ... cold-blooded for someone as idealistic as the Father you've described."

"No one's more cold-blooded, dear, than an idealist in pursuit of his Idea," returned Jonna. "He or she will sacrifice everything for it. We did."

"Yes," said Maria, "but that's not quite what I was driving at. I mean, he--you--sounded like you were trying to lift people up. And then with Prozium it sounds like the decision was made to degrade them."

"Degrade them? No, no, dear. That way lies 'Net blather about evil Clerics dosing susceptible young ladies for nefarious purposes. You were right at first. The goal was to elevate--to make them more human by damping down their animal passions and emotions."

"Dupont, in his journals, wrote that Father did not take Prozium himself. Is that true?"

Jonna gave a merry, knowing laugh. "It is. Father did not take Prozium. Father gave Prozium. Father gave himself in Prozium, to the purpose that all those who took Prozium would find peace from striving, logic from emotion, and cooperation from hatred; in short, that they would rise to find themselves remade in the likeness of Father himself. Why then would Father take anything designed to make the recipient more Fatheresque? The idea is quite absurd."

Some jumbled, half-remembered words from an ancient text, forwarded to him from an Entropian acquaintance, drifted through Max's mind: Take this, all of you ... for this is my blood of the new covenant, given for you and for many for the remission of sins ... do this in remembrance of me. "I see. I think I see," he said.

"Well, it rather escapes me," confessed Maria. "And it sounds rather hypocritical."

"Naturally. I like you, deary, but you're a product of your generation. Father and Father's Libria didn't have superstition, but they did hold fast to a vigorous sense of sin--the ability to diagnose a fundamentally harmful disposition. That was part of the Teaching of the Second Grammatos. In an age where the concept of sin has been lost, the worst offence--the only meaningful offence--is hypocrisy, that is, stubbornness in thinking there is such a thing as sin. Soon, anything that sounds bad becomes 'hypocrisy.' And the other offence left is rudeness--hurting feelings and making others feel bad. You've been thoroughly educated to think that fine emotions elevate and improve people, and that cultivation of feelings--the right feelings--are the key to a successful life. And that, therefore, suppression of feelings and emotions is degrading. But you are now studying a teaching which held that all feelings and emotions--especially the finer ones--are eminently perilous. That we need to be saved from them, not saved for them."

"I respect that, but I can't say I'm on board with it," said Maria frankly.

"No. Well, you've passed your life around people who've treated you well for the most part, so there's no need to make what is after all a tremendous sacrifice."

"What about the origin of the Gun Katas?" asked Max, as his partner coughed--a sign, he knew, of irritation, and not just of the throat. He flashed her a reassuring look. "Was it practiced at the time you joined? How developed was it?"

"Again, like Prozium, it wasn't my department ... of course I learnt it, the basic Katas of course, and all the intermediate ones. But the advanced ones were not revealed by Father until after I assumed my teaching position. Like you, Slater, I never got my black coat--"

"You didn't?" asked Maria. "But you were an ... Archcleric."

"True. But 'Archcleric' was a grade, not a rank. My rank was Cleric Second Class, but that had little to do with my area of expertise, which was teaching unarmed combat; any head instructor had the grade of Archcleric. Father himself was of course entitled to wear the black coat, but he was a modest man for all his achievements, and contented himself with a grey coat ... or rather, one of a slight blue-grey shade ordinarily. For ceremonial occasions he wore a blue coat--the only blue Cleric coat there ever was.

"About the Gun Katas; they already existed when I joined. To go armed in those days was absolutely necessary. Most ordinary people carried long weapons of various sorts, carbines or rifles or subguns. Two handguns would give you two weapons to the usual opponent's one, and smaller and quicker ones--if you knew how to deploy them properly. Even the oldest companions of Father had instruction, from Father himself, though when I joined there were already Cleric Trainers. Father never spoke about how he himself came up with it. Probably by observation, analysis, and self-training. But they did not have the central importance to a Cleric that they had later. During the days of the Journey, Clerics spent far less time in enforcement and much more in teaching. It was only after the Foundation, and the realisation that pacifying and civilising the City would require a great deal of force, did Father introduce the advanced refinements. Some Clerics took to them, others did not. The ones who didn't, like me, were dubbed the 'Old Greys.' After the introduction of the advanced Katas, anyone who wished to become an Archcleric had to master them, but because the grey was the highest rank when Father appointed me, he left me as I was. In later years I was the only 'Old Grey' left on the faculty of the Tetragrammaton."

"It sounds like Clerics became--well--somewhat more militarised after the Foundation," observed the young woman. Jonna made little shrug of noncommittal agreement. "How did you feel about that? Did it seem strange, somehow, that those whose job was to teach peace had to practice more war?"

The old woman took a long sip of juice, set down her tumbler, and looked at it for a moment; somewhat sadly, Maria judged. At last she said: "I did wonder from time to time--purely to myself--what Father had seen in a place so full of debased, ignorant, vice-addicted maniacs to make him feel determine that this was where the Republic of his vision should be planted. Unless it was the very difficulty of the challenge. Maybe he saw a crucible here--judged that if his programme could survive and prosper here, it would do so anywhere."

"His history research, perhaps?" suggested Max. "Romulus deciding that foundations of the future queen city of the world should be laid in a malaria-infested marsh?"

"Perhaps," said Jonna. "That I never knew. No one ever will know."

"Turning to the present briefly, do you know anything about biocardial integration?" asked Maria quickly. Max shot her a wry look. "BCI? Way after my time, dear," answered Jonna. "Only what I see on the 'vidcasts."

"What do you think of it, though, if you don't mind my asking? I see you can be plainspoken." She gave a little smile of forgiveness.

"It seems like a sound discipline to me," said Jonna. "If I were fifty years younger I might be interested. If I were seventy years younger I might even aspire to teach it. I think that with certain minor revisions in the approach, Father himself might have approved. His own personal training seemed to approximate it sometimes."

"They say that no one--no one--is too old to derive some benefit from it," Maria said. "I look at you and I think of that."

Jonna twinkled. "I'm not the only plainspoken one! I'm flattered, dear, that you think me worthy--I am."

"Now let me ask about Sweepers," said Max. "Our visiting hour is disappearing, and I especially wanted to find out about this. I've been wondering for thirty years, since I first heard it."

"Yes?"

"I remember hearing that the first Sweepers, in the original brigade established in the year after the Foundation, were all natives of the City; volunteers, whom Father trusted enough to help out with pacification, but not enough to make into Clerics. Was that true?"

"Yes. That's why Clerics and Sweepers worked together but lived and trained apart. There was definitely a culture of separation. Father for years drew Clerics only from outside the City, and Sweepers only from inside it. Exogens and endogens, he called them. He thought it wise that they not know more than necessary about each other. There were City people--endogens--who were resentful of it, I know, and exogens who were jealous of their exclusive access to Cleric status. Father was well aware of this and the potential for active discord. Later, of course, when exogenic Librians settled and began to have endogenic offspring, Father assigned some exogens to be Sweepers, and some endogens to enter the Monastery. Later still, he formally did away with the distinction altogether--though Cleric and Sweeper still lived and trained apart. And some people persisted in thinking that way. But it became more of a class distinction than a question of native status."

"Any endogens in the Monastery I'd know?" asked Max.

Jonna smiled. "The first of them, and the one who rose the highest, was Jerome."

"Jer--?" Max swallowed, then blurted: "Dupont??"

"Yes," said Jonna. "Vice-Council Dupont. Does that surprise you?"

"It does," he admitted. "But it explains a thing or two."

"It surprised a lot of people. But the visible admission of Dupont to Father's inner circle was a critical point. He became Father's spokesman, and that brought status. It satisfied enough endogens so that pacification took a fundamentally new course, becoming chiefly the suppression of Sense-Offence. Clerics were allowed to resume their birth names after they left the Monastery, instead of retaining their Tetragrammaton names forever. And the Cleric became more terrible and remote as his task evolved from pacifying the City to pacifying the human mind. It was after Dupont entered the scene that the Libria you knew, and which has gone down to history, assumed its shape."

"Finally, I wondered about Father. Obviously, the time came for him to pass away. But there seems to be no account, no one who knows anything--"

A soft series of chimes made itself heard, and the attendant pushed the door quietly open. Jonna nodded to her, and Maria turned. Max looked at his own watch with a frown. "It's that time, I guess," he said, standing up and stretching.

Maria stood, too, smoothing her skirt out and smiling warmly. "Thank you, um, Betty. It's been an very interesting hour."

"Yes! Briefly, to what you were going to ask--and, as with Prozium, I've also been asked that. I really don't know. He just seemed to--not so much die, as fade, slowly. He had become more remote, appeared less often, and said less and less over time, to where rumours flew, as they did for years before the Revolution. When it came out about Dupont saying he had died, it simply made sense. And I must say," she finished, as the attendant entered, pushing in a plastic medical cart, "the hour was interesting for me too. I like to meet intelligent young folks like you. I shall mention you to the proper people so you can skip all the rigamarole the next time you come." Her voice softened: "Do come again."


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[Mirabilis]

Very good...I especially like the account of the split between Clerics and Sweepers.

[Aedh]

"Clerics! I will now review with you the meaning of the Tetra Grammata. Place; place comes first. A person must have a place to stand; if one cannot stand, one must always run, and nothing else can be done when one is running. Truth; when you stand, you face a truth, the truth of your own existence. The truth will war with lies and illusions and emotions, and the resulting conflict will actually weaken you at first. But when you become disposed to truth, you allow the truth to conquer and fill you, and you will find yourself far stronger than before. Yet these first two are not enough, for even animals have them. What more is required? Knowledge, the twin of truth. Truth and knowledge together make right action possible, and the potential for right action is what lifts us above the animals and makes us human. By this the world around you is harmonised. And, Training! Right action is easy to start, but hard to carry though without training to strengthen the body and mind, and focus the will. So: Place, Truth, Knowledge, Training! These are the core principles of the Tetragrammaton. Without them there is no Cleric--indeed, no Libria. And so long as even one of you lives by these, the Tetragrammaton, and Libria, lives within you.

"The Monastery has been your home while you learned these things. Now it is time for you to go forth, to assume your duties, and make way for others to learn as you did. You will go to different places, each of which will become a little Monastery in itself so long as you remain faithful to the principles we have reviewed today."

_{--excerpt from "Oration To Graduating Clerics" from 'The Sayings of Father,' Presentation Edition}


As they waited for a 'cab to take them to the Ministry for Maria's afternoon assignment, a livemeet between a minor Amazonian official and his Librian counterpart, Maria asked Max: "Was she really head instructor for martial arts for the Monastery?"

"For unarmed combat, yes. About thirty years."

"I don't imagine she ever looked like a martial arts master."

"No. Well, true martial arts masters don't look like martial arts masters. You go around with a lot of tattoos and a black belt yelling Hiyah, and not only will you irritate a lot of people, but if it came to a fight, someone would simply shoot you."

"That's true, dear. I meant, she looks even less like one than not at all."

"She is, as it were, a 'black hole' of masterly mien? She not only has none, but it can't even exist in her vicinity? She draws it in with incredible gravity and destroys it?" Max asked with a grin.

"You!" Maria suddenly snatched off his porkpie hat and ruffled his hair. "You really ought to be a writer, you know that?"

"I'd make you crazy if I did," said Max, pulling out a comb. "Besides, I can't spell worth a damn."

"Perhaps, silly man. Anyway, yes, you are right, in your colourful way." She held up a compact mirror for him to finish combing, then snapped it shut and put it away.

He settled his hat back on. "Forty years ago, when I started as an Acolyte, she was head of the department, and so busy with administrative duties that she'd mostly ceased instructing except for the basic beginners' section. But remember, a gift for teaching is one thing, and proficiency in a skill is another. You can know what to do, and successfully coach others to do it, even if you're not expert at actually doing it yourself."

"True." She flipped open her PDA, looked at the dot that marked the 'cab's location on the mapscreen. "What is taking them?"

"The usual, I'm sure. Road problems ... overpass closed for a hazard. Unexpected power cut. A demonstration. Could be a million things. This damn city's falling apart, you know. That's why we moved away. For all the isolation, the wild animals or the risk of accidentally digging into an underground hazard, it's still safer than here."

"You got that right," said a voice near them. They both turned. "Bjorn!" said Max, putting out a hand. "How ya doin'? Congratulations, and thanks." Maria gave him a little hug. "Good to see you!" she told him.

"Thanks--thanks," said the other, a man a little shorter than Max, about Maria's age, in neat casuals, with curly reddish-gold hair and a short beard. "You came to see Betty, then?"

"Yes," said Maria. "Thanks again. It was fascinating." Max nodded. "Can I ask how she is overall?"

"She's strong enough physically. And our oldest resident by a few years. Probably all the years of training that did it."

"And no sign of PRC?" asked Max.

"She wouldn't be here if she had."

"Why do you think that is?" queried Maria. "Do you think she was another one who secretly didn't take Prozium?"

"Oh, no, she did. But she's one of those that we just don't know why. I believe she lost a partner to it, and a younger one at that. Just lucky, I suppose, as we scientists say when science can't provide the answer. She has good days and not-so-good days," he continued, lowering his voice a little. "But the good days tend to coincide with visitors."

"She has other visitors?" asked Max. "Anyone I'd know?"

"Well, they're not in the official log, but she has a private log in her file. You know Victor Delange?"

"Yes," said Max and Maria together.

"He's seen her a few times, but not lately. Someone from her guardians' office drops by now and then. They don't need clearance, naturally. Then there's Aneth."

"Aneth?" asked Maria.

"Aneth Sennas. I don't know much about her. I'd say she's in her forties, but she's one of those where it's hard to tell, you know? She visits every couple of weeks. Works for one of the Ministries, I think, maybe MOH or MOJ, but I don't think she visits on business. Nice dresser."

"An ex-Tetra, maybe?"

"Maybe. You could be under forty and still be considered an ex-Tetra if you were a beginner Acolyte at the time of the Revolution. Maybe a friend from childhood ... a Tetra's kid or something." The doctor shrugged. "Or she could be an immigrant. There's something--well--not very Librian about her, if you get me."

"Yes," said Max. "Doesn't go around moaning and grumbling all the time, and doesn't have a grievance lawsuit filed against anybody. Probably eats fried food once in a while."

"I don't remember a name like that from my time at MOJ," said Maria thoughtfully. "Of course, that was a few years back, and I was a temporary staffer. And they've got lots of people."

"The visits are brief, and seem cordial enough. Ah, here we go," said the doctor, as a van-like vehicle approached. "Can I share a ride? Where are you going?"

"MOC, a meeting," said Maria.

"Close enough. Do you mind?"

They didn't, and the 'cab was soon pulling away with a purr of its electric motors.


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Max's original plan had been to spend some time shopping and loafing around the MOC Commons area during Maria's meeting; it was supposed to be fairly short, over before Brownout started at 15.00. He didn't care to be in the City after that time, as from then until 16.00, block after block powered down, by order of the Ministry of Resources. He didn't really mind. He just found the sight of it depressing. Not all power was cut, but most of the downtown core lost it except for specially designated Essential Areas such as Government Centre, hospitals, and police stations. After that time, one had to live on such batteries as one had charged during the day, or else return home--as long as 'home' was in a designated Residence Area, in which case it had powered up while the rest was powering down. It meant that the Librian work day was 09.00 to 15.00 for most people, that is, those who had jobs--up to 16.00 for some, on whose blocks Brownout came last, data jockeys and medical researchers.

Libria was chronically short of power needed to not only run it, but repair its crumbling structure. Most of its buildings, public places, roads, and bridges rested ultimately on pre-Cat foundations, of which the newest were a hundred and twenty years old--most went back up to a century further. Generally, buildings were kept in repair, though they were becoming increasingly fragile. Demolition and rebuilding were fiendishly difficult to obtain permits and clearances for, and any private entity which got so far as to start new construction faced being lambasted and attacked as a gang of capitalists. The original streets and roads, many built on what proved to be concrete, had been resurfaced, cut through, patched, drilled into, frozen, repatched, flooded, recut, torn up, resurfaced again, cracked, weathered, and generally abused for so long that there was no stability left to them. Wheel-bending, axle-cracking heaves and sinks, sometimes of ten or twenty centimetres, could appear overnight, and some residential streets were more pot-hole than pavement. While this made for slow access by police and rescue services, government officials pointed to studies that showed strain on the system due to overuse of services in the past. Then they proudly announced reductions in service as being 'new efficiency measures,' and called upon citizens to live more safety-conscious lifestyles to prove themselves worthy of the cuts they had just taken. Furthermore, it was noted, poor road conditions made it harder for criminals to make quick getaways after their deeds, and that, yet again, if fewer people drove, and more slowly, that would save energy. That was the clincher for many people.

Energy conservation was vital. It had begun with the shutdown of Father's beloved 'Hadrian' nuclear plant on the grounds that it was dangerous; Max had said at the time that the plant's chief danger was making Father's ideas look sensible to posterity, since its safety record was immaculate. Father's old windfarms were not considered as an option, since the huge blades looked unpleasant and posed a hazard to birds, and besides, they contained a great deal of industrial metal that would be useful to the City. So they were taken up and ploughed under; the metal wasn't re-used, but it was recycled--into cash, by being sold overseas. River power had been ruled out on the basis of potential damage to fish. Solar power provided some help, when used by individuals for themselves, but for commercial scale required a sophisticated transmission grid that was beyond the MOR's power to build; it had trouble maintaining the old low-tech grid that already existed. Research, citizens were assured, was underway, and might prove fruitful if a few more billion were invested, and it were given a few more years. Fossil fuels had been outlawed by international treaty; except that they were permitted in Koguryo, Arabistan, Amazonia, and Xylyx ... that is to say, they were outlawed in Libria and Entropia--part of Entropia. It was now a matter of world concern that one million Librians and Entropians were not exercising sufficient fuel economy for the rest of the planet to be able to pollute with a clear conscience. Research into geothermal power was being carried out, though it was unfortunate that Libria sat far from any significant geothermal hot spots. There had been a short-lived experiment in burning corn, until an internal Government study published by an unknown 'blogger revealed that it took twice as much power to produce a ton of corn than could be extracted from it by combustion. This led one wag to observe that progress of a sort was happening--burning corn was at least better than burning people; but that if a way could be found to burn inefficiency, Libria would have its energy crisis sorted for ever.

Part of the problem was the economy. Libria had both the world's highest wages, secured by strong labour organisation--and the world's shortest workweek, secured by progressive-minded bureaucrats. As a result, Libria's industries, carefully built up by Father, had mostly ceased to exist, priced out of the market by Koguryo, Arabistan, Amazonia, Xylyx, and that part of Entropia still permitted to use fossil fuels--all except for medical research and datasystems and networking. Coincidentally, those enjoyed partial exemptions from labour laws, and were--more and more--staffed with immigrants who were willing to face the dehumanising brutality of forty-hour workweeks. And then, of course, there was Government. Most ordinary Librians worked for the government, supplied or serviced the government, or worked--part-time--for someone else who worked for the government. There also were students, which by careful manipulation you could be up to age thirty-four, and retirees, whom you could join starting at age forty-eight. All of this was paid for by an enormous State debt and the manufacture of consumer credit based on estimates of one's lifetime earning power, which were computed using formulae so arcane that it was said that anyone who understood them had a brilliant future in the construction industry. Maria's livemeet this afternoon was between two Deputy Assistant Undersomethings for Finance to discuss potential implications of the Amazonian government's proposal to devalue its currency, the peseta. This had been the subject of a celebrated quip a few days previously, on a 'netcast in which Tyrone Brandt had said, uncharacteristically, that this would hurt Libria's exports to Amazonia. When it was pointed out that Libria exported nothing to Amazonia except pieces of paper on which were written to promises to pay, Brandt, in a phrase long associated with Father, had said: "It is so."

Shortly after Maria's meeting started, Max had received a message that it would go longer than planned, and while the MOC Commons was nice, with its soothing atmosphere and array of little snack places and international shoppettes, he decided to go to the State Archive nearby and plug into some serious 'net, not just the Libria Online, or LOL, that served as most citizens' provider of sport roundups, newsclips, diet, style, beauty, and fitness tips, 'mails, jokes, and gossip. The Archive was also a good place to be after Brownout, since as part of Government Centre it had power around the clock. Not just anyone could get in, but Max had a researcher's pass, obtained through an old acquaintance at MOJ, so he was safe there until 20.00 if it came to that. After that he could still return to the MOC and wait there. Such things had happened.

He got into the Bureau of Statistics' database. The Archive workstation wasn't Old Betsy, his home computer, and didn't have Betsy's accessory case, but he was able to look up Annette Hanssen, onetime registered partner of Betty Smith. Ms. Hanssen would be turning fifty years old this year but that she had died of PRC at the age of thirty-eight; a little younger than the mean, but not unheard-of, and also another and better reason why her and Betty/Jonna's RP status had not been renewed ten years before, and also the reason why the older woman's guardianship was in the hands of lawyers. So she had been twenty-five when she had become Betty/Jonna's RP, at an age where the latter was old enough to be her grandmother. Still, that was unremarkable in itself. In Father's Libria, registered partnership had nothing to do with sex, which was officially EC-10. Especially for two women to register, to be able to share a residence, split costs, and look after each other--a younger one to handle most of the work, and an older one for resources and savvy ... it had been common then, and was common still. Ms Hanssen's profession was listed as Data Clerk III, and she had lived an ordinary Librian life, other than being the RP of an Archcleric. Max wondered about that for a moment, until he saw that Annette Hanssen had had a previous partner--a Cleric named Brandt. His breath caught. Marcel Brandt ... once paired with Cleric John Preston; killed by him at the same time he killed Vice-Council Dupont. And father of Tyrone Brandt of the Libria Party.

He pushed back his hat. Things were starting to look very interesting.


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[Mirabilis]

Ooo... ...things are starting to look very interesting indeed! ;D

[Aedh]

I'll reprise a pic of Max here, previously used on "Roses For Maria ..."





And speaking of Maria ...





Hopefully you will be seeing them again soon!

[Aedh]

At last, and thank you for your patience ...



"Let‘s face it. In Libria today there are really only three occupations left: government, working for the government, and stealing from the first two."

_{”Brutus,” posted 10 March AUC 2995}



Max and Maria did not attempt to return home across the River that night. Things would be safe enough under the eye of Oz and Miz Oz, so they returned to Max’s old flat on the edge of the industrial district. It was very dark. There were still a few warehouses and contractors’ supply depots occupied, but the street lights, previously curtailed, had now been cut altogether in an economy drive; the fact that neglect had created hazards would have made an irony of the savings effort if the area were policed. But that, too, had been reduced to little more than a once-weekly drivethrough by LLE law enforcement contractors, and their vehicles never stopped. “They just report,” Max said after paying off the ’cabster, who turned his vehicle and headed off as fast as he dared over the pitted pavement. “Or rather, they pretend to report. I think they just copy-paste the previous report. Someone pretends to read it, or rather, just marks it as read, and sticks it in a d-base somewhere.”

“Instant oblivion,” said the woman, looking around and drawing her coat closer in the damp chill drifting up from the River.

“For something to be forgotten, it has to have existed first. Real supervision once existed here. Now it’s virtual. In another few years, as things are going, it won’t exist at all.”

“Why don’t they condemn and clear the vacant buildings?” asked Maria, as Max fished for keys, real old-fashioned metal keys, in his pocket.

“Why? What would they do with the space?” She had no answer. She knew why he didn‘t have electronic locks: because he didn’t trust the power supply. This area had very long brownout status. She was glad to get upstairs, where it was dark, musty, and somewhat dank--but still, a home from home. He turned on the mains and got the heat and the shower bath going, a real old shower-bath and not an ionizing electrostatic body clean. After that they ate some Koguryan takeaway. Max would have liked something from Sal’s shop, but the place had not been open its usual hours lately--some days not at all.

“He’s a tough one,” Max said, looking at his chopsticks in his hand and click-click-clicking them together above the carton, a sign that his mind was uneasy.

“Who is?” she asked, knowing the answer.

“Sal.” She also knew the speech that was now starting. ”He’s from here, you know, from before Father, before Libria and Clerics and the rest of it. A real original endogen. Made of tough stuff. Never a number on him.” This meant the number tattooed on every Librian’s forearm in the old days--that is, every exogen, so that Father’s trusted immigrants could be distinguished from the unreliable natives. An unnumbered person had been barred from all public office and from many occupations, even from entering some places, such as the Monastery--that is, before the elevation of Dupont to Vice-Council and the relaxation of the old hard order--the Rescission, as some called it. Not a few saw the Rescission as the origin of all Libria’s later troubles. Tyrone Brandt was one of these, and another was ‘Brutus’ the ‘blogger, Victor Delange. But, down to the fall of Father‘s order, numbering had been continued for Clerics, as a reminder that each was, body and soul, the property of Libria in a unique way. Most ex-Tetras had had theirs removed. Typically, contrarily, Max’s was still on his arm, 009957. He liked to joke that he might someday be glad he’d kept it … when Father returned, he would add with a wink. She did not find any humour there.

The talk moved on to farm matters, and then after a last check of ‘netsites and ‘casts, they called it a night and went to bed.


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The next morning’s return to the farm was uneventful except for an unexplained delay with the River ferry. Thereafter, Max was kept busy for several days: their best cow was sick with foot-and-mouth, the backup generator needed overhauling, a solar panel had gone wonky and needed a new part from the city, which he had to order, and of course there was spraying, always spraying. But having other work, if it made him a slower detective, made him a better one by giving him plenty of time to think. And there was ‘net in the evenings. There had been another wave of layoffs at technology firms--that explained the uptick in messages in his ‘netbox from workseekers. He didn’t publicize, but they had employed dozens of people over the last several years, and word spread at the speed of thought in a society as small and close as Libria. One of the largest, Librisoft, had been declared a ‘vital interest’ by the Ministry of Commerce and was being placed under government administration as part of the Libria Technological Consortium, to be overseen by a three-person panel on which would sit a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Technology. There were few firms by now which had not become arms of the State in one way or another. ‘Brutus,’ while writing that he deplored the crisis in which a groundbreaking, innovative business had found itself, said that this was not a time for remonstration, but rather the time for all citizens to look to the Concilium for decisive action.


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Councilor Tyrone Brandt made a speech on the issue the next day, in which he took up that theme, and appeared on several of the evening ‘casts as a guest. About the takeover, he told one host, “While this is a necessary move, it is also a temporary fix. Ultimately, we must progress, we must rebuild Libria on sounder and better principles. While avoiding the mistakes and abuses of the past, we cannot, we must not, ignore the philosophy that built Libria out of a ruined, disease-ridden shambles into a leading power …” Max opened a vidwin to check the latest news stories while the speech played. In the downtown area, a piece of the old First Central Finance building’s roof had fallen and fatally struck a woman, injuring two others. Max snorted. Like more of the City than anyone cared to admit, it was a pre-Cat structure, not built by Libria but only done over and given a new façade by Father, and ironically it was a chunk of Father’s concrete façade which had crumbled.

“ … speculation why you have not disbanded the ‘Volunteers’ from your election campaign,” said the host. That brought Max’s attention, that and Maria’s hand on his shoulder with a mug of syn-caf. He took her hand as he watched and listened.

“Let me be perfectly clear,” the politician began, leaning forward in his black suit. “The Libria Party’s agenda is no secret. There are many who oppose it, some violently, and they are known to take refuge among the immigrant community. They do not oppose us by votes--they scorn the democratic process altogether, claiming it by turns to be fraud-ridden, irrelevant, and culturally insensitive. No doubt, their rhetoric would change if they controlled the votes. But they do not. The Libria Party and our honorable counterparts do. Citizens vote, and their will is made rationally effective through our system. That is our system. It is the basis of Libria.”

“About the Volunteers--” put in another guest, identified as Akosua Belden, a Reform Party spokesman.

“Your Party has a similar body of staff for service and security. They, too, are armed. It’s necessary in a time when LLE have their hands full with serious crime among the people. If ours wear uniforms and have certain grooming standards, that is our choice. They are volunteers.”

“You must admit, Councilor, they look rather like Grammaton Clerics,” said the host.

“Those you name were an excellent security force, and did many things as they should be done,” came the reply. “If they did come down too hard sometimes, and if they were eventually betrayed by one of their own who turned out to be a criminal underneath his apparently sterling record--” the reference to John Preston was obvious--”those are things we need not repeat while utilizing what was good.”

“They carried out the will of Father,” ventured the commentator.

“Did they?” interjected Belden, a bespectacled young man with a modish haircut. “That would explain a lot if they were obeying the orders of a nonexistent person.”

“Father existed,” said Brandt forcefully. “That has been proven.”

“Then what happened to him? Why was he not found after the Revolution? No living man, no body, not even any personal living space or quarters or personal effects apart from Dupont’s secret mini-museum with a few dusty items in glass cases that could have come from anywhere. No medical records, no trace of any living person.”

“It’s a good question,” said the host.

“It’s a tired question. DNA testing on some of his personal items proved his existence. We have hairs.”

“DNA testing revealed some person whose prints and records were not in any database. That is a long way from proving that that person was this so-called ‘Father,’ who was a creation of the Council and the voice of Vice-Council Dupont and nothing more.”

“There are citizens now alive who knew him personally,” countered Brandt.

“You’ve said that before. And we ask you again, who are they?” challenged the Reform person.

“And once again I reply, anyone who can be trusted can find out, but to name them publicly would be to seal their fate at the hands of fanatics,” said Brandt. “A fair number of whom claim allegiance to a party other than the Libria Party.” Maria squeezed Max’s hand, and he returned the gesture gently as Belden and Brandt tried to talk over each other and the host smoothed things out. She bent down to kiss him, and they kissed tenderly, but once again the screen called their attention.

“ … can’t control your partisans,” Brandt was saying, “you ought to try prescriptions for Muzipro.”

“Isn’t that the new medicine meant to help people control their emotions?” asked the host.

“Yes. Volunteers of the Libria Party are undergoing trials. At the cost of some of the dizzying heights of human emotion, it seems to suppress some of its abysmal lows.”

“Sounds like Prozium,” said Belden scornfully. “Just say no to cancer.”

“Say what you like about Clerics and combustions,” commented the host, “a lot of people sure wouldn’t mind having Prozium back, and darn the cancer risk.”

“So far in trials, Muzipro has not demonstrated any cancerous effects,” Brandt said, “but of course it’s very early in the game. Prozium-related cancer took decades to appear.”

“All the while, causing pain and misery and opening the door to a thousand other problems,” added Belden.

“Not the least of which is being killed in your own residence by rampaging criminals,” returned Brandt. “Just say no--if I may borrow a phrase--to murderous hooliganism.”

The other started to speak, but the host held up her hand; they were out of time. Maria said: “It is true that the LP Volunteers do look like Clerics, at least their uniforms. And they do have a lot of discipline.” She bent down and punched a few buttons, calling up vidgrabs of Volunteers. The black coats and impassive faces summoned a twinge in Max’s memory.

“Nothing wrong with that,” he said. “More discipline is something Libria would have been better off with these last twenty-five years.”

Maria looked thoughtful. “They also look like something else I remember seeing in some of Nedra’s old books and files. Church men.” She did some more keyboarding; images flickered on the screen. “Hmm … no … no good …”

Max got up and pulled an old book down, one that he’d borrowed from the archive. “You mean, this?” he asked, flipping back and forth, and finally finding the page he wanted. He held it open to her.

“Yes. There were tales of them in Amazonia. ‘Jezz--’ how do you say that?”

“Jesuit,” said Max. They looked at the picture of a man in a long, close-fitting black coat, his neatly shaven face and cropped hair. “They took an oath of loyalty to serve the Church utterly, to go anywhere and do anything. They were all ordained.”

“They were priests?”

“Priests. Or, as anyone in holy orders was called … Clerics.”

Maria’s eyes widened. “Really? Do you think--Father knew--that this was intentional on his part? Could he have … ?”

Max said thoughtfully, “Father knew more about history than anyone else alive. He read much that he made sure was destroyed later.”

“Perhaps he had it destroyed so that people would not know he was repeating it,” said Maria.

“M’mm. It would make sense … actually, that’s very good. Re-creating the old Catholic Church, minus God, with himself as Pontifex. That’s rather frightening.”

“It was rather frightening, from what I’ve heard,” said Maria softly.

“It was that.”

“Brandt’s point--about the crime,” she said slowly. “I do worry about that. We are isolated here. Not that criminals from the City could get here easily. But anyone who meant us ill, if they did come here … they’d have plenty of time to do whatever they wanted.”

“Don’t worry, love. We have the hired people, and Oz, and Larkin down the road. The reezers are friends.”

“Yes, they are,” she said. But her face above his head, where he could not see it, wore a look of doubt.

Max closed the book. “I’m tired, and it’s been a long day, and I still have to wait for Larkin to get here with the part for the solar panel. I’ve had enough history for to-day. To-morrow’s another day, my love. I’m looking forward to it.”

He put his arm around her waist and she smiled. “Me too, darling.”


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[Mirabilis]

I've been looking forward to you posting on this again...good stuff.

[invisiblescientist]

Brilliant...