John Barnes - Directive 51

It was still night-dark when Zach, GreenCop, and SirWalksALot climbed out of the concrete pit, whose bottom was now covered with evenly spaced bombs. DarwinsActor handed him the laptop, and Zach logged into his secret account, clicked a couple of buttons, and said, “The weather stations are all reporting; the bottles are all reporting; they’ve confirmed messages between each other. We’re good to go. Arming now.”

He realized all six men were holding their breath, and he wanted to grumble that he had trusted the biologists to make the organisms, ChemEWalker to make the black powder, and everyone else to carry the tubs and not drop them. But he supposed they were entitled to nervousness too.

The list scrolled by. “They’re all armed and talking to each other. Let’s go.”

He started the computer’s hard drive reformatting on the laptop as they walked back, and left it under the front tire of the RV; when they pulled out, the brief, grinding crushing sound under the tire meant that nobody, ever, could retrieve the codes to disarm the system. “The sweet crunch of commitment,” DarwinsActor said, and for once, Zach didn’t find him irritating at all. Thank you, Lord, he thought, and almost jumped at the coincidence when Bugs said, “Amen.”

The local police called back in about two hours, and Armand Cooper thought that had to be a good sign; if they were in on the riot or had instigated it, they’d have pretended he’d never called them. “We would like you to stay down very low behind furniture,” the police captain said; his English was excellent, with a mild Delhi accent. “We are going to try to put a perimeter between your building and the crowd. We do not think they are serious because, you know, if they were, they would have broken down your door by now, but accidents can happen with such a crowd, you know, and we’d like to make sure it doesn’t.”

“I agree completely,” Cooper said.

The captain laughed. “Good, you are in good spirits. Have you been hurt?”

“No.”

“And you can reach food and water, without showing yourself through the window? We need to make sure you have no snipers before you stand up.”

“It’s dark in here, and shots have been bouncing off the windows,” he said. “I can chance it if there’s a reason, but I don’t think there’s much of one yet.”

“Well, the infrared scopes are cheap and standard now, and a shot upward from a handgun in the street might bounce off, but I would not want to bet the same thing would happen if it were to be a high-powered rifle coming straight through the glass.”

“I’ll trust your expertise.”

Another laugh. “Stay low. Wait for us. Don’t get hurt. We’ll be there soon. And sometime you and I will have lunch and talk about all this and laugh very much.”

“I’ll enjoy that.”

After they rang off, Cooper stretched and smiled. Police service this good could only mean one thing—the captain needed some favor an American consul could do. Maybe a visa to spend a year visiting a sister in LA, maybe a cousin in immigration trouble in New York, it didn’t matter much. Cooper’s father had been on the Board of Public Works in Terre Haute, and he’d often thought that was great preparation for the way things got done in Jayapura. Whatever he wants, he’s getting it.

Shortly, there were a few shots and some angry shouting, followed by some general uproar. Cooper crept over to the window and peeked through, looking down, and saw the cops with their helmets, batons, and shields shoving the crowd back. It was noisy but halfhearted somehow, the mark of a mostly-paid mob. Hunh. More projects for the next week. Find out who paid them and why. Yes indeed, that captain is getting whatever he wants.

Jason had slept well when he hadn’t expected to, and that made him hate Super 8 even more. Last night he had expected to be awake all night: too soft a bed, sheets that smelled totally chemical, no sound of wildlife, the couple in the next room watching TV and quarreling. No friendly snores from his buds. No Beth cuddled against him. But here he was, well-rested, seduced by comfort.

He opened the curtains on the big west-facing window, sat cross-legged on the bed, breathed, and meditated. Across the dark parking lot… why should there be so many cars? So many ripping-outs of the guts of the mother. So many people who didn’t need to go any where going every where. So many scars on the planet. His gaze rose steadily upward from the rows of shiny metal and plastic earth-trashers to the dark mountains against the just-lightening sky.

Dawn among the bones of the Earth, he thought, then tried:

Truth comes at dawn .

No, too Hemingway.

Creation begins in my inner unfogged eyes .

Oh, yeah, needed to remember that. Might be my first line. No! Whoa —prewriting the poem; monkey mind. He watched the slow forming of the light in the air and on the stone and pines, and let it be in his mind, without words.

You had it right there, the statement of everything:

the mountains and the parking lot.

Title, or first line? Let it be whichever it would be. Let it be like the Earth, let it be, just accept. He breathed it all in pairs,

mountains and parking lot,

trees and cars,

plastic and wood,

metal and stone

free elk and cheap plaztatic doublewides

beautiful bears and ugly wires

brave mountain goats and chickenshit tourists in buses

asshole sales directors like my dumb-ass father—

No. Corny, personal, not dichotomous. Besides, Dad sometimes googled Jason, read his poetry, and wrote annoying little notes about how talented he thought Jason was and how happy he was that Jason was keeping up with his writing.

Like I need support from an asshole sales director.

Damn monkey mind.

Shut up, brain, or I’ll stab you with a Q-tip. Not original, joking with himself. Congratulating himself on the jokes. Damn monkey. Damn monkey.

Supposedly you could eliminate monkey mind by paying it some extra attention, rewarding it even; ook ook ook, anybody want a banana with barbiturate?

His felt his mind dash about, demanding his attention, until once again, as lightly as a soap bubble, it rested in the V of indigo between the black mountains, balancing the seductive warmth of the hotel room and the humanity and spirit of the cold hillsides. The crystal of a first line—insistent, an elegant angel of truth, banishing the monkey—started to form in his mind.

Carefully, watching the stacked cardboard boxes in the corner as if they could leap out and attack, he pulled his laptop from his pack. It was in a double Ziploc with a scattering of Drano crystals in the bottom. He held the bag up to the light; the crystals were all still well formed, and the litmus paper was reassuringly blue.

He plugged his laptop in and set it on the little fakewood circular table facing the big window. He breathed reverently and slowly. The disk zummed to life. Software booted up, offered him menus, connected to the wi-fi, faithfully went about its work.

“I’m going to pull kind of a dirty trick on you,” he whispered to his laptop, “but it’s for a good cause and it has to be done. Just the same, I know I’ll miss you, little buddy.”

Silent mighty strength of the eternal mountains.

Little town of Eagle—little settlement, really, use a colonialist word for a colonialist thing, or pocket of people, nothing you could dignify with a grand word like village .