NOVEL NEXT Chapter 61: Corporate Overreach I
"... is what I'm saying," Jirani sighed, leaning back into the sofa and crossing his knees. His fingers were steeped underneath his flaring nostrils and his balding head was turned slightly so that his eyes could stare out the fiftieth-floor window of Marja's Diplomatic Chambers apartment, to admire the forest of Saltillan Obelisks becoming duller and grayer as late-afternoon transitioned to evening.
A mug of coffee-substitute—kaffreinne, they called it here—sat, untouched and steaming, upon the low-table before him, and liquid shapes rolled off in steaming, aromatic puffs from its dark-chocolate surface.
Marja was sitting hunched-over at the other end of the same sofa, her knees hugged to her chest and her chin resting on her knees. Her face was blank and vacant, and Jirani turned to regard her after a half-minute of silence; he could see, behind her head—just above her listless expression—a digital clock shining vomit-green: 1837h.
"... Marge? You okay?" Jirani said, his brows furrowing.
"The violence is increasing," Marja said unhappily, burrowing her face between her knees and tightening her hands around her shins. "And it's my fault."
"You don't know that for sure, Marge, and I'd venture to say it's more complicated than that. Things like this happen as a result of the culmination of geologic forces, and I think it borders on arrogance to think you're the cause of the problems this city is facing," Jirani returned, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward to rub his face into his palms. "And if you're talking about the boy—if anybody should take the blame… it's me. I shouldn't have suggested you go out that night."
"He died, you know that? I think it has to be somebody's fault," Marja said, mumbling disconsolately into her thighs. She was by now bunched up so tightly into herself she looked like a bean.
"You've got to listen to me, Marge. There's a reason why none of the others leave their houses. Alan Grimmersby mentioned to me that it's the effect of the mass-compulsion-matrices. They fuck with your mind and make you crazy. It's absolutely not your fault."
"Everyone in the city, everyone that's not a fucking plutocrat is subject to it. That's no excuse," Marja returned. "I killed Eugene Lachlan. It's only right they want to hang me for it."
Silence. Shuffling of feet on carpet. Marja raised her head to see Jirani standing over her, and for one single, terrifying moment she became overborne by a terrible and vertiginous anxiety to wonder if the old man was about to kill her and end all her pitiful wrangling with guilt. But he put a palm upon her head instead and began to massage her scalp gently, gentler than gently.
'His hand is warm,' she thought.
"Marja Mentzer. I imagine you'd have learnt by now," he sighed, continuing to rub her head affectionately.
"... Ji…"
"You're just a mess right now, aren't you?"
"I'm—" she began, then cut off abruptly, her voice hitching on the powerful urge to start bawling.
"There is an old adage native to the Hyggambian Monsoon-Watch, which I picked up during the last Incursion more than a decade ago now. The mind is a machine for rationalization, it went. I know this is true because I've experienced it. There were whole villages I've had to exterminate, men and women like you and me, whose only crime was that they were convinced that the Chimerae were saviors and friends, not enemies. They were traitors to the Hyggambian supernation Bon, but to me, they looked human above all else—like Saltillans, like Jegorichians, like Earthians—human beings who, merely because they fell on the other side of the political line, were consigned by the long arm of the Democracy to death.
"So I killed them, as I was instructed to. I crushed their strongholds into the earth, flattened their hospitals and armies. I did not question my instructions, because I was a good soldier. You see where I am going with this. You can find an excuse for anything if you try hard enough. Anything, that is, except one thing and one thing only. You cannot excuse failure. You cannot excuse defeat. That is what the Mentzers teach, no?" Jirani said. His words were heavy with the weight of sorrow and remembrance, and yet his voice had barely modulated from its firm confidence.
Marja's body started trembling silently, as if she discerned a terrible truth hidden in his words. Jirani knew she was sobbing, but her stubborn pride would not allow any sound to escape her mouth.
"A war is upon us, Marge. The most troublesome and confusing kind of conflict. A civil war. I could see the signs written upon the wall from the moment I stepped foot into Saltilla. It was bound to hit whether or not Eugene happened—though I suppose that incident accelerated the hypothetical flashpoint. It's coming, and you better be ready."
A sucking sound emanated from Marja's curled form, as she drew in through her tear-sopped thighs one ragged breath.
"There will always be those of questionable loyalties like Bentil Pilix, who would betray their kinsmen for merit or power. There will be those like the Mandalazief who appear at first glance to be unyielding and principled. There will be Janna Sloanes and Janessis Hillears and Grimmersbys and Sturtevants and all sorts of people in between. You have got to get your head in the game."
"It's…" Marja choked, then trailed off and took one deep breath. She said, after her breathing steadied: "It's confusing…"
And Jirani burst out into loud and raucous laughter, its grating peals reverberating through the apartment. Marja felt his hand leave her head, and still the laughter did not cease, and she raised her head from her knees, finally, to find him doubled over in mirth.
"Fucking shit, Ji… I meant it's confusing my emotions, okay?"
"I'm sorry," he wheezed, after several seconds of hard laughter, "I was… haha… I couldn't help it… when you said it was… haha…"
"Ji…" Marja sniffled, her face smudged up with mucus and tears.
"Okay, okay. I'm done laughing. Maybe a summary with help with all this… ah… confusion, emotional or not," Jirani said, taking his seat beside Marja. "For starters, this is a proxy war, you know that better than anyone. On the one hand we have an ambitious, nouveau riche Saltilla, backed by Ninsei and the Choudurys. On the other we have old money Jegorich, backed by the Mentzers, stoking the discontent of the have-nots that comprise the Gimma Ashby-Sul. This is the fundamental divide. Every group is categorized to one side or the other."
Marja blinked and nodded. Nothing she didn't know.
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"Now, if I am right in this, we're going to be in for a hell of a time—things can get a lot worse before they get better. It will be a battle of attrition, I expect, given that the Choudurys and Mentzers have basically unlimited resources."
"You seem very certain," she said.
"It ain't my first rodeo," Jirani chortled.
"... Then what can we do? What is even our goal?" Marja said. "A side will only withdraw if the cost of winning is too high. But this is… we're going up against the Presbyter himself. No cost is too high."
"You don't see the how of it," Jirani sighed. "It's simple accounting, my dear, and the secret you must understand is that the cost is not denominated in Credits—"
"Stop tryna be cryptic, Ji. What're you talking about?" Marja blurted, interrupting Jirani.
"Let me finish. You asked me what our goal is. Well, it's all about the strategic importance of Desert—as a primary producer of Bismuth, Polonium, and as a strategic Frontier location from which the planned Expansion will take place…"
The Expansion. It was the reason that the Frontier planets were held to such great importance. As far as she knew, the Expansion referred to an interstellar mobilization plan that had been worked upon by Democratic military planners for the better part of three hundred years—Marja herself had only barely heard its name mentioned by the upper echelons of Lebensraum, and always in secretive tones. She had no idea about what it actually comprised, beyond a very general understanding that it would involve the invasion of worlds under the hold of the Chimerae.
"… The Mentzers' political position in the Democracy is not unassailable, and if it becomes clear their politicking on Desert jeopardizes this position, then it is a cost that goes toward their eventual withdrawal," Jirani finished.
"So… the case… our allegation that, by preventing Ortrud from coming to Desert, the Mentzers have put their interests above that of the Democracy…" Marja said, rubbing her eyes.
"Exactly. It's as important as you think it is. And consider also that we know that the Mentzers are involved in destabilizing Saltilla; it's just that we just don't know how. Say, however, we manage to get our hands on some hard evidence…"
"Then it will tend to prove that the Mentzers are indeed prizing their own interests," Marja finished, raising her head, her eyes sparkling suddenly with life. "We'll have caught them!"
Jirani nodded and fell silent. They sat side by side for a long time like this, as Marja mulled Jirani's words and felt the darkness in her heart start to lighten. The anxiety, however, the guilt, was still there, sitting like a hard ball of grit in the middle of her gut. Jirani had just retrieved his cup of kaffreinne from the low-table and was sipping it slowly when Marja turned her dark-ringed eyes toward him.
"... How do you deal with the guilt?" she said, trying but unable yet to fully suppress the powerful, welling feelings. She supposed it was normal. She supposed she had to get over it.
"There are many answers," Jirani said.
"How do you deal with it?"
"There's no substitute for believing that what you're doing is fundamentally right, Marge. Very little can be as effective as this. You must believe that Eugene died for a reason."
"... I don't understand how it can be anything other than… " she stuttered and gaped, trying to come up with the appropriate word. "Criminal," she settled on, and she breathed awkwardly and felt guilty at her own accusatory, wondering if maybe she could withdraw the word and choose again.
"All great things start with a crime. The lives of lessers have never been anything but political tools. That is a kind of truth some of us have no choice but to live by."
"... Is what we're doing fundamentally right?" Marja pressed, trying to pin Jirani down on an answer.
And Jirani sipped his drink, staring deeply into Marja's eyes.
"We can never know for sure."
The night had fallen without much incident. Jirani had told her to take the rest of the night off and to spend the time in Fafas meditation.
"Shut off your implant," he advised, "close up your mind and practice being mindful of your place in the universe. Remember: the cosmos are locked into entropic flows ending only in death and denaturation. Imagine yourself succumbing, and you will know you are alive. Maybe you will obtain a greater appreciation for your role. A great role from some perspectives, a small role from others."
The light had gone out of the lattice-suns and the city outside the window had resumed its darkly purple nocturne. She was still on the sofa—thinking, pretending to meditate—when she decided the meditation wasn't working.
0211h
Irritated at herself, she whipped out the rectangular touch-screen tablet the Embassy had issued to her and began surfing the Protectorate-Intraweb. She went through the news, The Daily Saltilla, the Ayish-Zhabo, so on and so forth, but found very little worth reading. It was a mindless drone of propaganda and patriotic bullshit sprinkled in with maudlin praise for the Grimmersbys'—in particular, Mayor Richard Grimmersby's—contribution to Saltilla's 'economic miracle'. Apparently, their commitment to meritocracy and unstinting incorruptibility were the main pillars of the silvered bureaucracy that had over the past decades served as a powerful engine for growth, and everyone agreed that this was the reason for Saltilla's recent ascendance over the venal Jegorichians.
Marja sighed and, after giving it a moment's thought, decided to explore the sites that had been officially banned. Despite the Media Authority's efforts, Saltilla's underground economy kept these supplied with traffic, and it was basically impossible to completely restrict access without expending tremendous amounts of resources, resources that, under their current circumstances, had to be carefully husbanded.
It was easy to access the so-called 'banned' sites anyway. All it required was her authentication key, and then her tablet threw up a list of banned-site-links for her perusal. She went down the list of site-links and decided with very little activation of her will to visit the Feminist Disquisitions.
Can't be more boring than the shit they have on the official sites…
She was taken to a site that was snazzily colored in golds, browns and whites. Unsurprising—It was where the Fem-D plied their trade.
There was more content than she was ready for. Feminism and Moids. Meninism and Femoids. A crushing torrent of a billion articles saying a billion things at once, in Common, Aluaan and even Sinic—amongst a variety of other languages she didn't realize were extant on Desert. The repository went back many decades, and she supposed trawling the site chronologically was about the dumbest way to get a sense of what the Fem-D was saying.
Ker-klack!
A stuttering sound reverberated in the darkness, drawing her attention away from the article. Marja's head shot up and to the side.
The sound had come from the direction of the door. She squinted into the shadows, half expecting to see Eugene's mother framed in the dark hallway, her mind making phantoms of the drooping bulbs that must have been the flower buds of the Anemopaegma chamberlainii laced into the doorway-trellis. Knowing this didn't help; visions of faces contorting and expanding in murderous anger assaulted her, penetrated toward her…
She blinked, realizing that she saw nothing. That there was nothing. It was some seconds before she calmed down enough to hear her heart pounding in her ears.
It was her imagination. It must have been. The Diplomatic Chambers were protected by a legion of auxiliaries. Nothing could get through.
Her heart-beat slowed, recovering from the sudden shock. Nothing to it. She thought of reminding herself that she was a Mentzer, but decided against it. She had already made the decision to divest herself of the rights that came with her name. She would make her own way, bear the consequences of her own mistakes… and she would pray every day that, somewhere beyond reality, her contrition would afford Eugene enough reason to forgive her.
Should she have noticed the beaded eyes glinting by the purple silence, she would not have been so quick to dismiss her fears…