Yeah, this whole thing really blew up on the SongLuminants. They nearly got kicked out of the Combine. At the insistence of the Eer-gaaani, the Panoply of the Ancient Foam issued a formal apology to the Matriarch and the Archon. There was a lot of internal shuffling, and then at the recommendation of the Southern Coriolis Directorate and the Lords of the Inner Vent, the Outer Vent Defense Guild replaced the Champions of the Skylight Spin as the premier SongLuminant military order. OVDG was given express orders to assist us with security for the Shambhala colony.
I’ve been called in to restore order and get things moving again. I have Graysal gather up the colonists in the central square of the camp. They’ve had a rough few days. Archonist or not, everyone looks happy to see me.
I let him do most of the talking. They’ve pretty much figured out what happened already, piecing together the stories of the possessed. Graysal just has to tell them the how and the why.
I tell them that the Shambhala Archon will be emanating in a few days, and the next wave of colonists will be here in two weeks, and we’ve got to get them settled into their homesteads. I tell them that their trees are waiting for them, which is true. Whatever Jamey told the saplings, whatever the old man told Jamey, it’s working. Grass is starting to grow on the homestead plots, real Earth grass. I can feel the Cu’endhari waking up, getting ready to make the grand jeté. This time, our Archon will have to lead them in the dance.
And then I’ve got the girl to deal with, the original instigator, Phara Maddock, the one Rand called Anger. If I were her, I’d be angry, too. But the problem with anger is that it has a way of getting misdirected. It has a way of coming back at you and destroying everything you sought to create.
“I’m going to sentence her right here,” I announce. “As the Unified Fleet Admiral, I have the right.”
It’s true. According to the law of Skarsia, she’s a commoner, and tried to murder an aristo. I have the right to kill her on the spot. During the reign of the 5th Matriarch, that sort of thing was a real possibility. But since Tara has become Matriarch, the aristos are reluctant to exercise that right. They rely much more on the court system. I think they know the potential for immortality is a powder keg. I think they get that the media is their worst enemy. We’re all walking a thin wire. We don’t need a revolution, and we don’t need another flock of fucking terrorists.
I grab the girl by the arm. The people hold their breaths. They know I’m strong. I could snap this little bitch in half. That’s not what I’m gonna do, though.
I pull her over my knee and give her a spanking. Hard. So that it hurts. Then I shove her on the ground.
“That’s it,” I say. “Ship her home to Momma.”
She stares at me with those blank eyes, uncomprehending. Then she makes a leap for me, howling, scratching at my face. She meets my boot. I’m careful not to kick her, just to hold her for a second, my sole pressing against her chest, then shove her back to the ground.
“I said get her out of here. What did you think I was gonna do, make a fucking martyr of her? Take her dumb-ass cause seriously? She’s a little girl, and I’ve spanked her, and I’m sending her home to her mother.”
“Pig!” she screams. “Skarsian pig!”
Fuck all, I gotta address this. I step forward. Everyone takes a step back. “Don’t you know who I am? You can’t even get the insult right. It’s Christmas tree, you stupid bint. You must really hate your family, that’s all I can figure.”
Her mouth is moving funny, like a blubbering Floatfish. She finally says, “How dare you speak of my family, you pig-tree?”
“It seems like you want me to kill you, so then your little brother will come here and try to kill me, and I’ll have to kill him too. And then what will your momma do?” I motion to Graysal. “Goodbye everyone, show’s over. Get her ass on the next transport back to Tasea.”
Oh, she hates me, more now that she’s been humiliated. But her whole fucking cause is now the punch line of a joke. Everyone will know that the Archon couldn’t even be bothered to take it seriously.
Seriously, though, we’ve gotta figure out something to do about Tasea. We don’t need more like her.
*****
All my life, I’ve wondered why a military man like myself is so goddamn fascinated with literary theory. But it wasn’t until I saw what happened to Sloane and Lorcan that I figured it out.
If humanity is going to keep evolving, it has to stop fighting itself. Maybe war has to stop entirely. We solved the problem with the Denolin Turym without war. I dunno. We’ll see.
That means I’m gonna need a new job soon. Soon is relative. Maybe next year, maybe a thousand years from now.
My new job is going to be to reinvent literature. See, throughout human history, stories have been broadly defined as being comedies or tragedies. That’s a lie. The truth is, or rather was, that a comedy is a tragedy which has not reached its end – because there is only one ending to all human stories – in the grave.
But this isn’t that kind of story. No cheap character death to add drama. The goal is no character death at all.
Take away death, and what else have you got? You pull the prop out from underneath the definition of humanity. There has to be a way to get rid of mortality, and still keep something that is human. And the only way is art. The subject of art can change, but the creative process remains the same. Literature has to extend beyond the point where comedy and tragedy intersect.
If humankind is incapable of imagining what lies beyond that horizon, then the human story will always be tragic. We have to be better than that.
Fortunately, it isn’t too difficult. The proper subject of art is sex. Not sex balanced against death as the two poles of mortal life, but sex as an end in itself, outside of reproduction. The thing is, everything that Derrida said about language is exactly true about sex. Any guy who has ever tried to read the signifiers between a bird’s lipstick and her hand tapping the rim of her cocktail glass knows exactly what I’m talking about. Also, deconstructing binary oppositions becomes exponentially more difficult with each martini consumed. The point is to stop fucking with text and make the context fucking. Vive la Différance.
We love, and maybe when we want to give an armful of flowers we give an armful of serpents sometimes. That’s all the comedy and tragedy we’ll ever need.