symbolism for me. I used to see a certain satisfying nobility in the slim white towers and the sweep of the blades; I never thought to ask grey questions.
Now: in hospital.
Only one question burned in me now. When would she come? When? I wanted her hand around mine. I needed her belief. Perhaps something had gone awry, maybe the birth…
I was hot. I called the nurse but no one came. The blanket seemed to press down heavily on me. Why couldn’t I slough the weight off? Was I dreaming?
Recall: abroad.
Main heat bore down on me, an extra burden adding to that of full battle kit. I gave the final orders. There was nothing to do now but wait, maintaining radio silence, probably for several hours. The hostiles couldn’t decipher our communications but even with frequency hopping they could sometimes detect chatter, so knew we were nearby. If the intel was good and One Eye passed through this valley, we’d have him in a noose at last.
I wondered whether I could use the lull productively, then recalled the favour I was going to do for Evelyn.
I stared hard into veils of leaves and the green shadowed ways beneath, opened my ears to the calls of unfamiliar creatures, sank my fingers into loam and root fibres and let sizeable ants circle up my arms, all as I strained to call forth my peculiar perception, to focus it on finding what I sought, who I sought: Gaia. Vision blurred, power stirred. I had in mind some crazy plan to ask direct what really was happening to our world. Excitement surged; maybe my new dimension really could dial me a hotline to deity. Shapes writhed silently in space, then suddenly she was there.
Gaia was indeed a goddess! Features inherited from the ancient Greeks, a cloak of leaves borrowed from north European fairy tales, skin tint a moral flag for modern politics, yet not serene, more… supreme, almost haughty.
I supposed a goddess must implement cultural translation when manifesting to mortals. Her only piece of jewellery was a shining gold medallion. Her image was tenuous; could it be that Evelyn and the eco-set had it right? Were humans incrementally erasing her? For a few moments I was breathless, over-awed, concerned. But what were those images behind her, fainter still? I strained hugely to focus them in…
Now: in hospital.
Incarcerated in this clinical cell, betrayed by infirmity, umbilicaled to blinking technology, several decades after naiveté hand in hand with my youth wandered irretrievably away, still I well recall what was then revealed: suburban semis, clipped gardens, lampposts, tarmac, super-markets, and flowing between all these the evil multi-hued streams of gleaming motor-cars!
Recall: abroad.
Anger swiftly followed awe. This was not the Gaia I sought! Her image did not rise up from the soil but came down from the sky, from the West, from home. She was not born of this forest at all, or of any other, nor marsh nor reef nor sea nor steppe; but was suckled by suburbia. This Gaia was a social construct, an effective and infectious hybrid meme, religiosity sanctioned by science, rooted in ancient dread fears of the capricious climate, the real and wildly dynamic system that always has, and still does, claim a tithe of us. This Gaia was an irresistible need made manifest, our hard-wired compulsion to anthropomorphise our environment and then placate it. Although cloaked in verdant beauty she was just another social worm, flushed on the plentiful nectar of Western guilt. The medal at her bosom was the same UN issue as Evelyn’s. She could afford to be haughty.
I yanked my hands from the ground. Her image strengthened. This Gaia had appeared because she loomed the largest in public consciousness.
“Contact, boss.”
I dismissed her like a dog, though that whore would eat me whole if ever I bared her tricks.
“Boss! Hey Cap, contact!”
“Where?”
“North north-west. Giving the old trading post a wide berth, to our right of it.”
We weren’t advertising ourselves with a UAV. Line of sight only.
I carefully dabbed sweat from my eyes with a tissue – eye infections were a devil out here – then turned away from the trees and used the crosshairs on my gun to trawl the head of the valley. Men on horses. Best transport for the heights where they’d come from. Apparently a leader inside a tight escort. Looked right, but felt… I cheated and stretched out my perception.
“Stay hid. Let them pass.”
“Are you crazy?” came back Lewis.
“Twenty minutes more, and we could ’ave ’em,” chimed in Sergeant Boden.
“It’s a stick to spring any traps. One Eye’s the best. Not going to put his bare hand in a narrow pass like this.”
“How do you know?” asked Lewis.
“Radio silence. That’s an order.”
My level of alertness soon drifted downwards. Not professional; I hadn’t been myself lately. I wondered whether there was a real Gaia, a living process that had nothing to do with social expectations. I touched the earth again.
Mathematics cascaded before my eyes, then a procession of ugly cell-like structures, then briefly a beautiful coral island seen from above, the ring around it teeming with life. I realised that some approximate representation was being sought which I might grasp, each time a little cruder. Nothing worked. Perhaps I was just dim.
Then a vision of a manic trading floor appeared; guys in stripy blazers signalling and yelling, massive nests of computer screens, bright financial headlines tracking around the walls. I began to see. Here was urgent competition of every possible kind: derivatives, futures, bonds, shares, options, etc. all inter-linked yet all fighting for a share of capital, just like species and representing every kind of survival mode, even the esoteric modes like symbiosis and multi-stage parasitism. Huge co-operation too: the infra-structure, the rules and regulatory bodies, the negative feedback of national banks steering for stability, ultimately the medium upon which all this rested, human society, which itself was progressively altered by the financial environment’s cycles.
This was co-evolution, optimised co-opetition. Albeit via the peep-hole of my limited understanding, I saw Gaia as a mass of intimate interlinks progressively altering underlying infra-structure: oceans and atmosphere and ice etc. From the ‘outside’, natural internal cycles and rich complexity looked like a coherent life entity, but was no more so than the financial system. How fitting that a thriving parasitic mode in that system sacrificed huge sums to a goddess who was, in essence, a world-sized trading floor.
Recall: abroad.
We nearly missed them, hours later. The growing dusk was still too light for night-vision, yet long shadows aided concealment. Not enough to escape Fitzgerald’s sharp eyes though.
They were on foot, strung out, lightly armed, watchful but not really expecting trouble. My extra dimension revealed their number and spread. We took them with only one casualty on our side, not fatal. They lost three.
These wary men with sun-lined faces were soldiers, just like us. Having separated the survivors from their weapons and herded them to the edge of a small ravine, we invited One Eye to step away from the group and have his hands bound first. Boden approached him cautiously, pistol at the ready. Compliantly, the patch-eyed leader put his hands behind his back.
A grim smile escaped me. At last we would leash this old dog of war.
Too late I saw. I shouted even as I dropped to the ground.
“Get back Boden!”
The explosion was modest, as these things are reckoned. But it still killed Boden and the nearest of One Eye’s men. Some of the latter made a run for it after recovering their wits. Two were shot, one got away, one stopped and put his hands up, clearly surprised to discover a biro protruding from his wrist. Boden’s biro. The red rain of friend and foe united, dripped from my helmet.
Boden’s loss was a piercing stab. And there’d be no deep intelligence and no bargaining with a valuable chip. Even though I was armed with truth, One Eye had beaten me.
Now: in hospital.
“Mr Jackson. Mr Jackson!”
I struggled out of a doze into anxiety and
resurfacing pain. The nurse seemed relieved to see me react. Was I that far gone?
“We’ve had a phone call from the airport. She’s on her way.”
A surge of comfort warmed and eased me. Not long now. I had to hang on.
Recall: home.
I had to hang on! I clung to a cold metal rail as the pod accelerated dramatically down a preposterously steep decline. Icy wind rushed past. Only seconds before I’d been plucked up and raised swiftly into the frigid heights of the heavens, to be dumped unceremoniously into this primitive metal car perched upon a thin arc of shining track that dizzyingly spanned the sky. As the pod jerked into motion I’d searched frantically for a seat belt. There wasn’t one.
Glancing desperately left and right for any possible escape, I saw a vast array of other tracks, all carrying pods and drawing towards me from hazy horizons on both sides. I was in some kind of gargantuan race; or perhaps a bizarre fairground ride of planetary proportions. With heavy deceleration and jars that wracked my bones, my pod bottomed out and started up a gentle incline. As fear marginally diminished, I finally figured out what must be going on.
After my failure to squeeze much that was useful out of Gaia, I’d been gazing up at thin clouds and thinking about the climate system, how it all worked. My perception must be graphically demonstrating. Yet this ride seemed so real! My knuckles were still white on the rail and I didn’t dare let go.
There was a line of purple spaceships