Chapter Ten: Istambul

Subject: Istambul
From: Randall Clay
Date: 04/20/15 01:27
To: Douglas Clay

Tyr thought hard till he hammered out a plan,
For he knew it was not right
(And it is not right) that The Beast should master Man;
So he went to the Children of the Night.
Rudyard Kipling, Song of the Men's Side

Of all the stops on my journey, this is the one I've most looked forward to, the one that would have been on my list even if dad hadn't done business here. This city is a monument to the sort of paperings-over and hypocricies that have made civilization possible, and I simply had to pay my homage here.
In the beginning, there was God. And God, being the jealous type, outlawed idolatry. "Don't go around making images of stuff." he said. "And if you find any graven images made by people who haven't gotten the word just yet, whatever you do, don't go and worship them."
And so it went, with Pagans and heretics and infidels having the monopoly on the entire representational art racket, even if they occasionally bowed down to the sculptures or sacrificed a goat to a painting now and then. Then, in the late Roman Empire, after they'd turned Christian and moved the capital to Constantinople, people decided that representational art was neat, and so they grove a lot of images- good, Christian images of Jesus and Mary and the Saints, but unmistakeably images and undoubtable graven.
Right here, about twelve hundred years ago, give or take, some folks decided that- hey, wait, God isn't all that cool with these images. So they went and burned them and threw them out windows and otherwise Clasted all of the Icons they could get their hands on. And so the early Catholic Church was split, between the Iconoclasts and the Iconodules. And then, a miracle happened: the Iconoclasts lost.
Because of this miracle, western civilization recieved two immense blessings: first, a rich and healthy tradition of representational art that would lead ultimately to, among other things, a working knowledge of human anatomy, and, second, the valuable precident of having a religious issue decided in favor of human conveniences and practicality, and in direct and blatant opposition to the clear meaning of the text.
Oh, there are rationalizations, and that's a good thing. But they don't really hold water, do they? I mean, if the only crime is in making a graven image and worshiping it, then if would be perfectly okay to worship someone else's Golden Bull. But try telling that to Moses. And if the worship is the only 'really' forbidden part, then why bother forbidding making graven images at all? No, it's clear that the text lost to the people, much to the long term benefit of Christendom.
And the new owners, the Turks, are no strangers to papering things over, as the beneficiaries of three campaigns of ethnic clensing, each one among the most complete and successful in history. At least they're getting more and more humane about it: the Greeks were better treated than the Armenians, even though the name of this city really is their business too, and the Kurds were bought out well enough that they were practically eager to go after the Partition of 2010. Bought off with other peoples land, but that's always the way of this kind of thing, isn't it?
Along with Egypt and Indonesia, Turkey is one of the few majority-Islamic nations that it's safe for westerners to travel in, here in the post-nuclear phase of the Long War. Even after the carrot of European membership vanished entirely, the nation's NATO ties and secular traditions endured. Turkey is neutral with regard to all three theaters of the War, and, taking advantage of that neutrality, has become a major player in the arms trade, supplying Indians and Pakistania, Kurds and Arabian, Iranians and even, by proxy, with Israel. Their edge starts with Dad, actually, and some work with Laser technology before it was militarizable, with the new battery technology and the end of nuclear deterrance. Once of the names, both in the notebook and on my general contact list for this area is Khemal Yusef, an engineer emritus with the Turkish branch of the company, and I managed to have a long talk with him over lunch as a fine outdoor eatery about lasers.
"There are some people who think that the laser will never be an efficient military weapon, that even with the portable energy currently availible you are better off accelerating a projectile than focusing coherent light. Your nation's military feels that way." said Khemal, once the introductions and formalities were taken care of.
"They do?" said I.
"Oh, they have some laser programs, but are still thinking in terms of large scale devices-antimissile defenses, orbital bombardment. For personal weapons to be carried by the everyday soldier their research is taking them strictly toward electromagnetically propelled projectiles. But even though you can propel large quantities of metal with such a weapon, that just means that he must carry large quantities of metal into battle with him. But with a laser weapon, all you need is the power."
"And how has it been going?"
"Well, I have been out of the program for more than a year now, but we were only a few years away from our goals when I left. We already have fixed laser antiaircraft weapons which are proving to be most effective on the field. You cannot outrun a beam of light or fool it with chaff. The only problem is that these are too large and heavy to be moved before the enemy can bomb them."
"But the problems are all engineering ones? Nothing in theory stopping it from working?"
"That is what our company has been banking on. Time will be the ultimate judge of the matter."
"What, exactly, was Aaron's involvement in this program?" I asked, getting finally to the point.
"Ah. He was very kind enough to offer us excellent terms on some of the latest laser research from some the European laboratories in France. They had been doing some excellent work in optics as pure science, but, with their government grants unlikely to be renewed, what with the state of the European economy in those days, they were willing to sell us several key patents."
"Did you know him personally?"
"Yes, I did. He seemed a good man, as fair as you'll ever see in that field. He showed me pictures of you and the others, although you've grown so much I can hardle ever recognize you."
It was at this point that our conversation was interrupted by a thunderous noise from the street behind us. A large group of young men were running down the street, whooping and laughing and, occasionally, firing guns into the air. (One more advantage the personal laser pistol would have would be that the laser beams, unlike bullets fired in this celebratory fashion, do not fall down, occasionally causing grievous injury to innocent bystanders.) Quickly enough we learned that this was in reaction to the news of the Pope's assassination. After enough time had passed that most people had gotten the news through one source or another, each time the celebrants passed down the street they were viewed by those people who preferred to go about their business with more contempt and disappointment. I settled up the bill on the expense account, and Khemal and I parted company.
I've spent some additional time here sightseeing and otherwise enjoying the prince of cities, but it is soon time to go, onward (by necessity via multiple airlines and stopovers) to the most dangerous spot on the trip, although with the current borders stretched out as far as they are from it things may be okay.
Next Stop: Jerusalem

Chapter Nine: Rites of Spring

Subject: Rites of Spring
From: Douglas Clay
Date: 04/09/15 20:11
To: Randall Clay
Here's one thing that we and the Shouters have in common: we both have a seasonal ritual involving the decoration of eggs. Of course, the eggs that the Shouters are decorating are their own. They are, as far as we can tell, hermaphrodites. We're not exactly certain of the mechanics of their reproduction-along with the lack of detailed biological information, at least that is within our power to translate at all, the Shouters did not put anything we can identify as pornography into their trans-stellar upload. So either they're prudish, or they're doing it right in plain sight in all kinds of peices and we can't yet recognize it. There are arguments for either direction. Anyhow, at certain times of the year, some of them will gestate briefly and then lay an egg. A big one, about the same size as a human baby. Then they bury their eggs in warm, nutrient rich soils that are part of the 'fungus' farms that provide much of their food, and, six months later, they dig them up, they hatch, and the young Shouters have arrive, to be raised by the elders of the community.
They decorate their eggs, as I said, applying patterns of texture and bumps on a thin but complex layer. The patterns are unique to each family-and family here goes exclusive through the 'mother' who laid the egg in question, suggesting that, however they are going about having sex, it leaves the idea of paternity in even greater doubt than it is for us. Anyhow, the point of the patterns is so that when the egg is dug up, it can be selected and thus raised by it's grandparent or great-grandparent. So the patterns, especially those of the rich and powerful amoung the Shouters, are designed to be complex and difficult to forge. Forgery does go on, however. Probably much more frequently in their drama than in real life, though, but it obviously has to happen sometime. And this egg handling is a very deeply-ingrained tradition among them, going forward all the way to the modern period when they could, if they wanted to, keep track of the eggs with their equivalent of GPS devices or perform routine DNA tests. Then again, we don't perform routine DNA tests here, do we? Who knows what the real gap between presumed paternity and actuality really is. Shouter egg-decoration is a deeply primal instinct-even their distant evolutionary 'forebears', the other animal species with the same general body plan, do it, although with far less sophistication. It could in fact be that the arms race between secure egg-covering patterns and forgers is what led the Shouters to acquire their intelligence itself.
All of this is, of course, by way of avoiding the subject of what has actually been going on over here during Jenny's much anticipated by me visit. Well, it began well. And it ended okay. But the middle part...
The Can't Believe It's Not Easter holiday runs as an extra-long weekend, with days off on Friday and Monday. Mom and Pope left Thursday afternoon for Pope's Uncle's beach house. (As a side note, he hasn't yet moved in, but they're still talking about it, with plans contingent on the expiration of his lease later this fall.) I've had the run of the place before, but not for this long. After a 'Don't invite the entire senior class over for a party and wreck the house because that's not nearly as fun or consequence free as it is in the movies' conversation which all three of us knew full well to be entirely unnecessary, they left. Two hours later I picked Jenny up at the airport, and ten minutes of driving just barely slow enough to avoid being roboticketed by any of the freeway cameras later, we were in bed.
They say, whoever 'they' are, that there's not really such a thing as bad sex, because even when it is bad, it's still pretty darn good. Which is probably true as far as it goes. But we were hoping for, expecting, even, to be having really great sex, as good as those hypercaffinate lovemaking sessions hiding from the proctors at XL camp the past summer. I guess that there's nothing like your first time, but I'd have been pretty darn happy with something as good as any of the second through sixth.
Of course, we knew each other a lot better now, from scores of late night conversations on telephones and instant messages. But while we had a fairly well developed mental and emotional intimacy, and a qucikly-resumed sexual intimacy, the rest of physical intimacy wasn't quite there. So, to recap, we were having a good time, but not as good as we'd liked to have had, and when we weren't making the beast with two backs we were fairly awkward together, all night. And the next morning. And afternoon, and evening, with a couple of meal breaks and a thoroughly ill-conceived attempt at showering together that almost destroyed the relationship all by itself, by which time exhaustion finally overcame libido and the strangeness of having someone else in the bed we were sleeping in. (We decided fairly early on that quantity would do a fair job of substituting for quality, and gave out only slightly before what I had originally planned to be a supply of condoms suffiicient for the entire visit did.)
So, on Saturday we arose, wisely opted to take seperate showers, had the sort of relationship conversation that the kinds of women's magazines we both would otherwise have made relentless fun of recommends to its readers, which was the source for all of the extremely self-aware stuff I mentioned in the last few bits of this letter, and decided to spend the day in a less intense and more outwardly-directed socially speaking manner, hanging out with and introducing her to my friends over here. The plan was to get together for a late lunch, then go see the Allan Quartermain sequel, which word from the premere said didn't such nearly as much as it had seemed earlier in production, and then head over the the Patricks' for a bit of pseudo partying over there, the pseudo part meaning full parental supervision and all that that entails.
The first part of the plan worked out well enough. We met at the food court, which was strangely less crowded and more subdued than we would have expected, and were declared by both Travis and Jess as a more nauseatingly cute couple than Connie Patrick (Travis' older sister. She is, without doubt, the top computer student in town) and Frank Langer (another senior in the XL class; no great shakes at the linguistics itself but he's started coming into his own as we've started to get enough tentative translations and gists to open up the field of Xenoanthropolgy. The two of them have been together since forever, apart from their approximately annual week-long break up and reconciliation drama.) I asked why things were so quiet.
"You guys haven't heard the news?" said Travis, skeptically.
"I don't think they've exactly been watching television, Trav." said Jess.
"Huh? Oh, uh, yeah." said Travis. "They blew up the Pope yesterday."
"What?" I asked.
"Who?" asked Jenny, more or less simultaneously.
"A bunch of suicide bombers, during Good Friday services." explained Connie. "Three of them went off in the crowds, then two more rushed the stage where Leo XIV was speaking."
"They said they were all in with European or British passports." added Frank.
"There was live footage, before the European Copyright Authority shut down all access it got played dozens of times." said Patrick. "They shouted 'Allahu Akbhar' before they went, and there's some kind of tape floating around the Arab media claiming responsibility."
"Which group?" asked Jenny, still shaken. Her family is Catholic- the American sort who haven't had much time for the doctrine form the last couple of Popes, but still Catholic.
"Nobody anyone had heard of before this week." said Jess. "They made a point of making no demands and just said that a state of war existed and would until they destroy the west."
"That got them denounced by just about every Arab government out there, even Iran and Arabia. Only South Iraq and the Syrian government-in-exile didn't have something bad to say about them, and even they're bright enough to keep quiet at least." added Frank.
We ate our lunch and talked about less depressing subjects after that. Jenny went on for a while about her particular Ur-Text, which is the Shouter Creation Myth. It's another thing of which it's sort of curious that they only have one, and it's a pretty depressing kind of myth at that. I mean, the biblical myth has a few disasters in it: the flood, the tower of Babel, the fall of Eden- but with the exception of the first, they're pretty mild, at least by comparison. The Shouter myth has the entire planet getting scourged of life time after time after time, with creation starting all over from the beginning after each time. And, just like the book of genesis appears to get the general order in which types of life showed up, it looks like this myth is basically right about the history of life on their planet: a lot of ecology- and evolutionary- level biology is just starting to be unlocked, linguistically, and the geneeral story is that if evolved at least five different times on their planet, and went almost completely extinct, with the only remnants residing in exotic locales, organelles, and the occasional parasite. The history of life on a planet comes with a lot of crisis points: for example, when plants evolved and started doing photosynthesis, they started pumping huge quantities of oxygen into the atmosphere, and oxygen was extremely toxic to every living thing around at the time. On Earth, life evolved around it. On the Shouter Homeworld, it didn't, and only a few anaerobic enclaves survived, and then, later, another primordial soup spewed out some microbes that liked oxygen just fine. It may seem like I'm drifting away from the narrative, but I'm really not: we were talking about these very things. I think my presentation is less tedious than a transcript of the actual conversation itself would have been, which was mostly Frank talking and occasionally asking a question to Jenny. Anyhow, eventually it was time for the movie, which was okay. The studio originally wanted to actually remake the Indiana Jones films, you know, but the Spielberg Estate couldn't be brought on board, and so the whole project was moved over the the Quartermain property. Well, the first film was okay, but no Raiders of the Lost Ark. But at least the second film, which we say that night, was no Temple of Doom.
After the film, on our way to the Patricks', we stopped by a convenience store to load up on sodas and snacks. And there my troubles began, as we were unlucky enough to be in that convenience store when two large pickup trucks pulled up and a dozen red-robed God's Red Sworders piled out, eager to wreak vengeance for the Pope (and those who had died in the audience) against the clerk. One would think that after more than a dozen years of living with the actual danger of foreign terrorism on US soil, at least by now the various groups of bigotted shit for brains types in the country would have by now learned the difference between Muslims and Sikhs, but no such luck. I did notice, from looking at their hands, which extended out of their robes and were not gloved, that this new organization ,for all it's similarity to the old Ku Klux Klan, has managed to recruit as many hispanic and black anti-Arab bigots as white, which probably says something or other about the state of modern race relations, although I'm not sure what.
What happened next was a practical demonstration of the fact that the rumors of the death of chivalry are greatly exaggerated, although anyone wanting to rectify that situation has my support. The Sworders advanced on the clerk. Jess, Jenny, and Connie took up positions between the two mismatched parties. The goons suggested, in extremely insulting terms, that they step aside. They stood their ground. Viler insults were hurled, and, when they proved ineffective, the goons approached, clearly intending mild violence at least upon the three young women followed by a huge additional helping of violence upon the clerk, who had by this point surmised that his silent alarm had been interfered with in some way.
And that is how I found myself in a fist fight-well, mostly fists, anyhow- outnumbered by at least four to one against men twice my age and nearly twice my size. My advantages were two: that I was better-motivated and consdierably more sober. I have to think that those two facts are the only possible explanation for the fact that I failed to suffer any broken bones. Bruises, yes, or more precicely, one large, body-shaped bruise, but nothing broken. And two of the other side lost their hoods in the fighting, allowing their faces to be captured on camera and presumably meaning that the police will eventually catch them. Provided the sheriff isn't too Catholic, I guess. No, that's too cynical, I'm sure they will. The fight (a much more dignified term than 'distractionary beating', I'd say) lasted all of nineteen minutes before a police car showed up, for a routine coffee stop, and the Sworders dispersed.
And so the rest of the holiday was spent convalescing, with Jenny by my side, and, despite the whole being in pain all over my body, somehow more comfortably than the first day. And then she had to go back home, and Mom and Pope Paulsen showed back up, and things went back to normal, or as normal as it gets around here.
Your Brother
Douglas

Chapter Eight: Taipei

Subject: Taipei
From: Randall Clay
Date: 03/21/15 19:21
To: Douglas Clay

When they scratched the reindeer-bone,
Someone made the sketch his own,
Filched it from the artist-then,
Even in those early days,
Won a simply Viceroy's praise
Through the toil of other men.
Rudyard Kipling, A General Summary

To look at the city today, you would hardly know that it had been bombed almost to rubble five years ago. But that's one thing that modern China, old or New, has always been good at, clearing away old and useless concrete and putting up fresh and new slabs. Taipei didn't always look like Shanghai, after all.
When Dad went here, it was the capital of an independent nation. One that wasn't actually recognized as such by, well, anyone, but independent nonetheless. And definately a place for the 'cutting edge manufacturing techniques' side of his work rather than an inroad to cheap labour. I knew going in that this city might be the most difficult and least useful of my stops, but something compelled me to follow Dad's footsteps exactly, and not skip ahead and westward.
It turns out that Dad got what turned out to be some extremely good deals here, licensing exclusive use of patents in a manner that allowed MP NeoTech to continue using them more or less for free after China's US assets were frozen, and then further allowed the payments to be made at pennies on the dollar after the collapse of the Mao Dynasty and the takeover of the Xuesheng government. That much is public knowledge, and I was at a loss go to much deeper. The buildings Dad had signed the contracts in were gone, replaced with ugly new ones of completely orthogonal purposes, and the people he dealt with weren't availible either. Some had died in the bombardment and invasion, the rest had been relocated to re-education camps in the aftermath. Of those, some survived and the rest have, for the most part, taken positions supporting the new government somewhere back on the mainland. I, of course, blame the Olympics.
Every times that the Games of the Olympiad are held in a totalitarian or authoritarian dictatorship, that government is doomed to collapse and be replaced with something better inside of a decade. The Berlin games took down the Nazi's, the Moscow games the Soviet Union. South Korea stopped being a military dictatorship because of the Seoul games, for that matter, and China's Beijing games are clearly what doomed it to adventurism, collapse, and revolution. If only we could arrange for the next Olympiad to be held in Terhan...
So, I spent about a week in Taipei, walking the streets, attempting research-I had two names in the notebook here to look up, but with no success. Then I returned to my hotel room and found inside it, smoking a large and particularly pungent cigar, Martin Panzer.
"Funny," I said. "I could have sworn I'd asked for a non-smoking room." I had, Asia being pretty much the last region of the world in which one is still presented with the option.
"I was out this way on business and thought I'd stop by, see how you were doing." he said, ignoring my remark completely.
"Not so well. This entire island might as well have sunk beneath the ocean and been replaced with a new one since Aaron was here.
"You'd almost think that, wouldn't you? There's a couple of places that held up, and a lot of people who weren't worth the trouble to relocate after the invasion, but sure, I was just noticing myself that there's not a single person I'm working with here today that was on board back then."
"So what are you doing here now, if you don't mind my asking?"
"Not at all, not at all. The new governmnet's been around long enough that I'm willing to believe that it's going to be stable, while the rest of the world is still waitin' and seein' on the sidelines."
"Governments naming themselves after words meaning 'students' still make a lot of people nervous after the experiences in Afghanistan and Arabia, I imagine."
"Well, there's that, sure. 'Course, pro-democracy students are a different kettle of cod than militant Wahibis, any day."
"In which case the suspicious lack of actual elections beyond the local and provincial level are a cause for the concern."
"Ayup, and that's the nub of the thing. But I'm going to let you in on a little secret. And that is that the students aren't actually, completely in control. It's more of a provisional kind of thing."
"Really? Then who is?"
"The military. A group of about a dozen of the top generals. They were left holding the reins of power when the economy collapsed after we decided that invading Taiwan turned all of those US bonds they held into toilet paper, but they didn't actually want to rule. So they rounded up the current leaders of the student democracy movement and put them in charge of the country. Except that they kept a silent veto, which so far they've only used to stop them from doing anything that risked the Xuesheng going out of power."
"And you think this keep the Centurion's sword raised system is stable?"
"Well, near enough to it to work in. And there's a lot of idle hands on the mainland that ought to be doin' my work instead of the devil's."
"Well, good luck, then."
"Same to you," said Panzer, readying to leave the room. "Oh, one more thing. I think you might be interested in this." He tossed a small pouch to me, which I caught as he vanished out the door.
The pouch contained a small memory card. I decided that using the Hotel's terminal was the lesser risk than my own system, and checked what was on it. It was, I must say, more than a little disturbing to find that it contained the scans of the letters from Lili Valo's box, along with translations. Good ones, probably done by human professionals. Those scans were on my phone for only a few minutes before I offloaded them, and then only connected to any network again when I printed them out. So either one of those things is completely and utterly compromised, or else Panzer found, scanned, and had translated the documents while I was out of the room. I'm not sure which alternative is less frightening. Thankfully, I carry the small notebook of Dad's on my person at all times, and haven't committed any of its contents beyond what I've mentioned in these letters to any digital form.
As I suspected, the letters are written in an oblique and cryptic manner. The one accompanying my photograph claims that I am a relative of a family friend, and suggests showing me the sights of the city, while the one mentioning Dad and Min suggests that he had care of a package for Lili from her mother, and also asks Lili to get fashion advice from Min before attending any more school dances. So obviously the parties in question are using codes more sophisticated than the obscurity of the language itself. The addresses on the envelopes were interesting, at least, including matches to some of the notebook names, including a Sean Buzzi, who not only still resides in the next stop along the trip, but in fact has an current address findible on the net and a connection to Dad's actual business suffificent to create a sufficient pretext for a meeting.
Thus, I believe that I will cut the Asian leg of this journey short and move toward the periphery of Europe.
Next Stop: Istambul (Not Constantinople, of course, but nearly certainly Byzantine.)

Chapter Seven: The Pontification of Moss Landing

Subject: The Pontification of Moss Landing
From: Douglas Clay
Date: 03/14/15 21:38
To: Randall Clay
It has been a good while since I last mentioned Pope Paulsen, and if that has given you the idea that he has ceased to be a part of everyday living back here, allow me to correct that misapprehension right now: in fact, the situation has escalated, through the 'standing date every weekend' stage and now into the 'considering moving in together' and 'relationship that has a sufficient presence that one can actually talk about it as if it were a physical thing' stages. In short, the situation here is dire.
It is not that Pope is all that horrible of a person. I mean, I've known people with stepfathers who are much worse, even actually abusive. But if he were that bad, then Mom would have sent him packing long ago. No, what Pope is is something far more difficult to get rid of and almost as unpleasant to have to live around: he is an amiable buffoon with delusions of parenthood. The only good news is that he does seem to want kids of his own, which should be a non-starter with Mom and so might bring this whole thing crashing down. Hopefully before too many days like today.
The day began all right, a rainy Saturday morning with plenty of time to watch various versions of my Shouter Ur-Text, which I'm calling "The Adventures of King Strong-Hands" for lack of a better name. Now, this is a very old story, which means that it has been presented and re-interpreted many, many times, in all of the various forms of dramatic presentation that the Shouters employ in their art. The oldest versions are what we call a Narrative Trialog, in which the story is told by three voices, speaking simultaneously. The first describes the situations, the second the actions of the protagonist (and, sometimes, his close allies), and the third sort of acts like a Greek chorus, asking foreshadowing questions and occasionally commenting on the meaning of the actions.
Next in the history of Shouter literature is the Trialog with dance, which is as the above, except that at the same time, several more shouters are acting out the action of the piece, 'silently' (They're never actually silent, but in this case they are only speaking with the lower mouth, conveying stance and mood but not information.). Then, even later, the 'dances' occasionally speak lines of dialog at some points in the narrative, and finally, the form evolves into a full-out play, with action and speech, in dialogs and trialogs and larger groups, even, replacing all of the narration. The last form is, of course, more loosely related to the original work, since most of the lines are rewritten to conform to the more 'naturalistic' modes of speech. (Conversations involving only two participants, though the only kind present in the earliest forms, appear to be rare and overly formal in more modern works.
Anyhow, the story I'm covering is about a Shouter who's arms are much stronger than the average. Shouters have four arms, each long, agile, and ending in a 'hand' consisting of a sensing 'ear', a gripping claw and a manipulating thumb. But their arm strength is not one of their strong points: most of them need to use two arms to successfully grip any kind of heavy tool, like, say, a sword. But not this guy; he can fight one-handed (or, more specifically, with four swords instead of two.) Swords are very popular weapons in early Shouter history; used almost exclusively in warfare. Possilbly because the weak arms couldn't use a spear with enough strength to penetrate one another's skin. Swords almost have the same problem; it's extremely difficult for one Shouter to actually kill another shouter. So, when they went about fighting wars in their pre-firearms era, the general result was a lot of severed arms. One of the first high-probability-correctness terms I've put forward based on this was reading an equivalence between the terms for "three-armed" and "verteran". They can get by, in some social roles, with only two or even one arm, also, but losing the last is a death sentence, a slow and painful, both physically and psychologically death sentence at that. So all in all they were probably made a lot better off when they developed guns and could kill each other more quickly and painlessly.
So anyways, there I am, stepping through the original trialog, the dance, and a modernist 'based on' version, watching for the same words and phrases describiing the same sort of action, when Pope bursts in and announces that we're going to go out on a Picnic. 'As a family'. So that's a days work wasted, I can sense it. But I make the mistake of attempting to appeal to logic.
"Um, you are away that it's raining?" I said. And it was, still, not a mere sprinkle or shower but a good, solid later winter rainstorm, certain to instantly soak anything that ventures outside and with winds just itching to invert their quota of umbrellas before the sun comes out again.
"You know, boy-sorry, Doug, Martin Panzer said in his book that you don't let things you can't control interfere with your plans. No, instead you find a way to control them."
"So you can change the weather?"
"Better. 'We wouldn't have rooftops if it weren't for rain.'" he quoted, and lead me and Mom down to the car. Mom already had a basket prepared, and smiled weakly at me as we shut the doors and pulled out of the garage. Pope turned the stereo on, and it began playing off of his channel, loaded up with '90s bubblegum and boy-band music. Pope Paulsen is, probably, the only person alive who actually still enjoys the Spice Girls on a non-ironic level.
So, off we go toward the somewhat creepy office building in which Pope works. It's a fairly large office which is, most days, say nine out of ten workdays, almost completely unoccupied. And full to capacity the other day. They're big fans of telecommuting at this particular MP NeoTech branch, but need enough space for meeting day, on which everyone actually comes in to work but nothing useful actually gets accomplished. Anyhow, he scans in his ID and leads us in, then into the elevator, and up to the roof, on which there is some kind of greenhouse-like enclosed park. If the company wasn't part of the Fortune Ten, I'm sure that the police would be buy every other week to make sure nobody was growing weed up there.
Now, the rain is still coming down, hard, and making a constant stream of loud impacts on the glass ceiling. As a result, the only way that any of use can hear a word the others are saying is by shouting at pretty near the tops of our lungs. This is, of course, what Pope Paulsen believes is the perfect opportunity to start a political discussion, with him asking which of the Repbulican Primary candidates has the best chance of beating Parker in the general. I express a disbelief that Parker can, at this point, be defeated, and suggest that that is probably a good thing.
"Ah, Democrat, eh? Well, they say if you're not one at eighteen you've got no heart and all that. Still, what is it that makes you want to support the big taxers, eh?"
"Well, people who make more should pay their fairer share, right?"
"Well, sure, but what's a fair share? Let's say that you, me, and Martin Panzer were splitting a pizza, and the total cost of the pie was twenty-four dollars. Now it's pretty clear to me that the only fair way to divide that cost is if we each throw in eight bucks. Why should buying a government be any different?"
"Well," said I, quite possibly more just for the sake of disagreeing than anything else, "What if one person ends up eating almost all of it? If someone's going to be eating two or three slices for every one I get, they ought to pay more. And your rich people get more out of the government, since they've got more property for the police to be guarding."
"That's a pretty good argument, lad, a pretty good argument. But not a great one. Government isn't just about protecting property, now, is it? It's protecting your life itself, and your liberties as well, right." I reluctantly agreed. "And those are more important than property, aren't they? A lot more important. Probably thousands of times more important. So what you and me and Panzer are getting from government, each of our slices of the pizza, are going to be consisting mostly of our life-protecting and liberty-protecting parts, and those are all equal, right? You don't want to say a rich man's life or liberty is worth more than yours, do you? No. So next to that, the amount that comes from property-protecting is tiny, just a fraction of a peperoni."
"The trouble with trying to finance the government from taxing the poor is that, well, they really don't have a whole lot of money. So you've got to go and tax the rich if you want to actually do anything with it." I ventured.
"Oh ho, the Willie Sutton argument." I was nonplussed. "Willie Sutton. Famous criminal in the 19th century. Someone once asked him why he robbed banks. Know what he said?"
I didn't answer, so he continued.
"'Because that's where the money is'. Well, that's why Me and Barnham" (Barnham being, I gather, his favorite candidate for the primaries. "favor a flat percentage tax rather than a fixed sum."
"Oh. Because that would be silly." Paulsen failed his 'detect sarcasm' check. "Anyhow, it doesn't really matter what I think. I don't turn eighteen until well after the primaries. The general election will be my first time voting." And that pretty much ended that discussion. Besides, the food was pretty well done for. After that, Pope insisted on all of us going to a movie, and picked out She's Not Harold, which is probably the least funny comedic film about transvestism ever released upon the general public. Pope Paulsen, of course, was laughing loudly throughout.
Something obvious must be done, and quickly. Although...
Pope is planning on taking Mom on a romantic getaway over the 'oh, it's just a fantastic coincidence that it happens to fall on Easter Weekend' spring holiday, leaving me alone in the house, which is exceptionally cool, as it has prompted Jenny to make a cross country trip to visit me around then. As the Pontiff himself would probably say without thinking about it, it's an ill wind that blows nobody good. So any plans to break those two up will have to be put on hold for now.
Your Brother
Douglas

Chapter Six: Seoul

Subject: Seoul
From: Randall Clay
Date: 02/16/15 09:27
To: Douglas Clay

When Nag, the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can
But his mate makes no such motion when she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Rudyard Kipling, The Female of the Species

Did you really say that the Shouters only have one language? An entire planet, and only one tongue in which to speak? That is, in it's way, one ofthe most disturbing thing I've heard about them. And sad, in a way, because walking in a city where everyone else is speaking a language you don't know is a refreshing, clarifying experience. You get to see human interactions through a more primal eye, not knowing the levels of rationalization piled atop the simple primate dominance and submission patterns at play; not being privy to the lies and challenges laid on top of mating rituals as old as DNA itself.
On the other hand, it must be nice to always be able to ask where the bathroom is.
The new Korea is one of MP NeoTech, and thus Dad's, bigger success stories. The new plants that they built were precicely poised to transform the post-unification economy from dependence on welfare and foreign aid to a major industrial competitor. Then, after the Message, Korea was in perfect position to start manufacturing bulk quantities of nanotwine, which has then been sold to the companies behind the Mount Kenya project and the San Antonio and Kyoto Skyhooks, mainly. Demand still outstrips supply, so the Venice Skyhook project hasn't been able to get off the ground, as it were. At least that's what the brochures all say.
I had a fairly pleasant conversation with some of the officers of MP NeoTech Korea, learning almost nothing that I didn't already know. Then I struck out on my own, doing some local research on Min Lee, one of the names listed in Dad's notebook. This name is not particularly uncommon in this neck of the woods, occupying roughly three full pages of the local phone book. So obviously I would need to narrow things down a bit. I decided to start with the assumption that it was somebody important and connected with the company or it's rivals and partners. A few translated-newsfeed searches later and I had a prime candidate: Min Lee, researcher for Glowing Star Incorporated, a small business that was eventually merged into MP NeoTech Korea. She was a brilliant materials engineer from the South, who had made some of the practical advances in manufacturing bucky-tube materials that would, in a world without the message, have been the first steps on a thirty or forty year path toward developing nanotwine for ourselves, and in this world, made it that much easier for factories using patents owned by Glowing Star and herself to ramp up production once that part of the message was unraveled. She also died, in a traffic accident, two weeks after Dad left Korea.
I was intrigued. I dug around for more information. Her personal phone number bore no easily-discerned relationship to the one in the book, but I had already decided that it was in code, and it would take more than one pair of code/real numbers to even think about breaking it. The accident that killed her was a hit and run, with no witnesses and no suspects. She drove a tiny car of local manufacture; from simulations of the collision the other car must have been several times more massive; not quite the size of a truck or bus, but at least a van or sports utility vehicle of some sort. She had no living heirs or relatives, but one close neighbor: she had lived in a small house that had been converted to a two-unit townhouse by its owners. The other unit was rented out, both then and now, to a European woman named 'Lili Valo', who described herself at the time to the papers as a student. To still be here after six years marked her as either a very serious or a very unserious one. Either way, she managed to stay out of the news other than with respect to Lee's death.
OF coure, 'Lili Valo' is hardly a John Smith-like name here in Korea. Or, even, for that matter, in her home back in Kosovo, as some general trawling of net sources reveals, along with a picture which reveals her as a quite attactive redhead of a somewhat atheletic build, and further references marked her as an intermittent fixture of the local nightclub scene. Thus was I comdemned to spend several nights mingling among the local late night party people, learning, in the process, enough Korean to order drinks for myself and others, ask for a dance, and to accept or decline similar offers from others gracefully. At least once a night, of course, I would find myself among a group of people bound and determined to practice their language skills, which ranged from the 'broken' to 'excellent' levels. I had been at it for almost a week, catching no glimpse of Lili whereever I might go, before one of these groups' conversation happened to mention her, in passing, at which another member regaled me with a story of a multi-club epic binge with which she celebrated her 24th birthday. I took advantage of the opportunity, and asked if anyone knew where she was hanging out these days, but none of them knew.
So, with nose back to the proverbial grindstone, I continued my efforts, learning in the process the additional Korean words required to order better drinks, to flirt clumsily (which has always seemed to work for me at least as well as flirting smoothly does), and successfully acquire a phone number at end of an encounter. Our family does seem to have quite a talent for languages. Dad spoke eleven, down to the legalese, and I've never had trouble with any I've tried. Maybe I should take an Asian language when I get back to college.
At any rate, it was almost a week after that first indirect contact, a Saturday night, as it happened, that I first caught sight of Lili, who was, if anything, more attractive in person than on digital photograph. It was just after two AM in a place called Nightside, and pretending to be smitten from across a crowded hall did not prove at all difficult. A brief walk through the jostling crowd later and I was asking her to dance, in Korean. She accepted, in English, and the game was, so to speak, afoot.
The morality of this endeavor is a question on which I had given some amount of thought, which is to say developed some fairly elaborate rationalizations. It is not, as I have told myself, as though I have not sought out one night stands with women considerably less attractive than Mrs. Valo in the past. She would mark the oldest such, but 'late twenties' hardly represents an insurmountable or inappropriate age difference. Still, conscience demands full disclosure of the fact that I had never, prior to this point, sought to seduce someone else for reasons other than the satisfaction of the self-evident urges. But was not the general quest on which I had embarked in fact not less but more noble than the slaking of base desires? And so the conversation went back and forth within. Someday I may be able to tell you how it turned out, but action precedes thought in these matters, and drags it along unwilling. In short, we danced all night, having a few brief conversations over drinks when our feet needed rest during which far more flirtation than information was exchanged. During this sort of conversation, there is always a simple cue to determine just how the evening is going, and that is what other person the woman mentions during that conversation. If she mentions her boyfriend, then one is obviously at a severe disadvantage. If she mentions an ex-boyfriend, well, that's much better, all things considered, although one should expect a great deal of baggage should things progress beyond the casual. Lili mentioned her sister Zana, of whom, despite being completely unlike me in every noticable way, I somehow reminded her.
At the end of the evening, we exchanged phone numbers and an almost but not quite entirely chaste kiss, then went our seperate ways, me back to my hotel and her, presumably, back to the house she had shared with Min Lee.
I slept late, well past noon, and spent the afternoon scouting restaurant reviews. That evening I called her number, being careful to use my cell to allow my name to appear on the call id, and she answered. A short negotiation of her class and homework schedule later and we had a dinner date for Wednesday night, at the nicest place I expected to be able to place a reservation for on three days' notice, a French-influenced Korean seafood place with a name I had to spend a not insignificant amount of time learning to pronounce. Monday I occupied purchasing formal dinner attire, something I had not thought to pack, and Tuesday and the early parts of Wednesday were spent mainly in anticipation.
We met at the restaurant: I arrived by taxicab, out of respect for the clothes more than general convenience; it was certainly close enough to walk, and her in a sleek and silent electric motorcycle: far too large and fast to call a scooter, regardless of any technical preferred distinction between the two terms.
The food was quite excellent. My main course was mostly shrimp; hers lobster, both extremely well-prepared and presented. While the meal unfolded, we each spent time talking about ourselves. I went with, more or less, the truth, emphasising the travelling around and seeing the world part over the detective work, and strongly implying that I had full access to the inheritance that careful investment of the proceeds from Dad's MP NeoTech options garnered rather than operating on an expense account, but other than those small deceptions, and of course no mention of Min Lee whatsoever, the truth.
Her story was also fascinating. She started college here on a diversity scholarship at a school that felt like having a few Eastern/Southern Europeans would improve the quality of the student body in general, studying physics and doing fairly well at it as I understand. Then came the Christmas Message, which, among other things, almost obsoleted her entire degree overnight when the bits about Pi-Fields were translated. It turned out that she could do better teaching English here than her actual chosen field anywhere else. After a couple years of that, she re-enrolled and has been learning the New Physics part-time.
Over the desert course, she told me that she was almost done, and had already decided to leave Korea as soon as the semester ended. She said that my story had inspired her, and she was strongly considering travelling extensively before settling down to a career back home (Southern Europe being continuously in the market for engineers familiar with the New Physics, one would apparently be waiting for her. I think family connections may also have been at play.) She invited me to come home and inspire her further, and, my ulterior and anterior motives being fully in concert, I accepted.
Without dwelling on the portions of my recent story on which no gentleman ought to dwell, an extremely good time was had by all, and in other circumstances Lili Valo may well have been on her way to becoming the...let me think, the fourth Great Love of my Life. It's truly a pity, then, that she's some kind of spy or something.
I found out on my third visit to her house, the first occasion on which I was left alone inside the place and could actually do any of the investigation that, hard as it was to remember at that point, was the entire point of having gotten here. She had, in her 'office', (more of a study room, actually), a small locked box. A fairly sophisticated lock, but you may recall that I became something of a locksmith as something to make Shop Class at least vaugely interesting, and have kept the skills up to date helping fellow students who've locked themselves out of their rooms or cars in the interim. This would mark the first time for using my powers for evil rather than good, though. The lock provided no serious challenge. The contents of the box was mostly letters, written in what I can only assume was Albanian, a language which is still sufficiently obscure as not to have a free web translator out there somewhwere. One of the letters, the most recent, was dated shortly after my arrival here, and it contained photographs, of me, taken at the Airports in Vancouver and Seoul. I stared at them for several moments, experiencing a few moments of vertigo.
The nice thing about living in the twenty-first century is that every citizen has access to tools only possessed by secret agents back in the 20th. To wit: my telephone has, cunningly unconcealed within it's framework, a small camera capable of taking pictures of sufficient resolution to duplicate documents. I did so with the letter with my picture in it. Then I looked through and found two letters from the time of my father's visit, including one which contained, stuck in the middle of the Albanian text, both Dad's name and Min Lee's. This was a very long letter, and after that there was little memory left in the phone. I filled the remainder with pictures of the return addresses on the remaining letters, and then carefully replaced everything as I had found it before returning to the hotel.
Even when has entered a relationship with less than pure motivations, learning that the other person involved seems to have motives considerably less pure and may in fact be some kind of corporate or national spy or another working for god knows who tends to put a damper on things, and, indeed, two days later it was clear to me that it was time to go. We parted pleasantly, exchanging email addresses (I created a new one for the purpose rather than overload this one), with her promising to look me up when her world tour commenced.
And thus, with some things that might be considered 'clues' in hand, although the word by word translations I could manage with Albanian-English dictionaries were just good enough to let me know that the letters were, at best, written obliquely and at worst were in fact in code, I booked my flight to the intellectual capital of the New China.
Next Stop: Taipei!

Chapter Five:Invaders

Subject: Invaders
From: Douglas Clay
Date: 02/11/15 08:38
To: Randall Clay
Well, this was a very exciting say, to say a little about it. Before I forget, though: yes, the Shouters would make sure that their batteries made noise. Silence is the same thing as death to them, and something moving around or doing things without making noise would generally freak them out. When one of them, or for that matter anything in their entire ecosystem, wants to hide, they do it by camoflauge, sounding like something else.
It was the night of the lottery adn draft assigning the major Shouter Ur-Texts, and, for some reason, thewhole thing was being done on East Coast Time, so we were all of us in school way after hours, watching the action online, when the power went out.
This didn't keep us disconnected for any appreciable amount of time- most of us had laptops or other wireless device, and that connection was fine. It did, however, keep us mostly in the dark, but for the illuminated screens of those computers.
The lottery potion hapened soon enough. I got the number five pick, Travis the number 12, and Jack Snowden managed something in the middle of the 'second round' in picks fifty through one hundred. There was, according to the schedules, a thirty-minute break at that point before the draft commenced, during which some pre-draft dealing could theoretically have happened. I don't think we would have been interested in any such thing, but quickly enough the issue became moot.
Mrs. Lincoln had left to find a battery-powered light. We hadn't particularly noticed that she hadn't returned until, shortly after the lottery finished, we heard the loud sound of breaking glass, once, twice, three times, from somewhere down the hall.
I left John in charge of the class, and Travis, Frank Langer, Jess Leary, and I went out to see what was happening. Someone had akeychain with an LED flashlight in it, which we shone down the corridor.
"Mrs. Lincoln?" I called, to no response.
"The soundwas from down toward the auditorium, right?" asked Travis.
"Probably the fishbowl window" said Frank. The Fishbowl is the new computer lab, build just after you graduated. It's characterized by giant windows looking out on the hallway, which has another pair opposite, looking out on the campus ground. Or, more importantly, looking in- visitors to the school, students on a free period, and random passers-by seem to always be staring in, observing anyone unlucky enough to have to work there. Hence the name. Jess was already ahead of us, so the rest of us followed her dowqn to that lab. Our sweeping flashlight spotted the safety-glass pebbles on the ground, confirming our suspicions, and we quickend our pace, stil seeing no sign of Mrs. Lincoln.
We did see the source of the glass, three large bricks. The outer glass was shattered, the inner one had taken a hit and broken up between the films, but the films had held. It was at that time we heard signs of a scuffle, outside, on the grounds. Frank took out his phone and punched 911; a second later, Jess had looked up and dialed the campus security station, all while all four of us were in motion, twoard whatever was happening. I turned off the flashlight- the moon and lights on the emergency circuits were enough to see by and didn't advertize our position.
A few minutes later we could see them; about eight to ten men, dressed in red robes and hoods, covering their faces, dragging a bound and gagged Mrs. Lincoln along the ground, toward the tall tree, where they had already rigged up...something. Not a makeshift gallows, this was more complesx, with pulleys and a harness. They didn't get to do whatever they were planning on; it was about that time that the sirens became audible, signalling the imminent arrival of the police. The men scattered, dropping the ropes that entangled Mrs. Lincoln. Travis and I untied her while Frank adn Jess took as many pictures of the attackers as they could.
We spent the next two hours making statements for the police- Mrs. Lincoln was took shaken up to contribute anything, so we were all they had. We learned that these were, at least by uniform, members of God's Red Sword, a fairly new organization dedicated primarily to hatred of Arabs and Muslims (and not making any pariticular distinction between the two groups), and secondarily to a blief that the Message derived either directly from the mouth of Satan himself, or at least was an alien memetic virus that was turning the brains of our youth into alien pod people of some sort. They liked to cite the Whorfian Hypothesis that language shaspes the kind of thoughts a person can or will think.
Laughable, of course. Nobody's ever going to speak Shouter natively. No human, at least. We're not going to ever get to where we even have to worry about side effects of thinking in it; it's made for different sorts of brains. A different underlying Chomskian universal grammer, most likely. Translation will always be a high-level, front of the brain kind of process. To natively understand Shouter would involve simultaneously processing three different threads of conversation, taking place mostly in frequencies inaudible to human ears, and that's just the simpler parts.
Anyhow, John ran Travis' and my picks by proxy. We'd talked about what our preferences were enough beforehand that he could accurately make the picks. I got a really old one, one of the early- we're guessing, here, from the sonar/video portion of some presentations, but it's probably some kind of heroic god-king epic, along the lines of King ARthus or Gilgamesh. Travis got something more recent, an extremely influential story based on a large-scale war. And John got, well, we're a lot less sure what that one is about, but he thinkgs it's a murder mystery. We'll all be busy with them for a good long time, even without people with nothing better to do but try and dangle our teachers upside down from trees.
Your Brother
Douglas

Chapter Four: Vancouver

Subject: Vancouver
From: Randall Clay
Date: 01/11/15 13:16
To: Douglas Clay

I do not look for holy saints to guide me on my way,
Or male and female devilkins to lead my feet astray.
If there are added, I rejoice- if not, I shall not mind,
So long as I have leave and choice to meet my fellow-kind.
Rudyard Kipling, A Pilgrim's Way

I just got finished driving one of those cars a few hundred miles in the snow and wet. A Rental, of course. I can't say I miss the noise and the smell of internal combustion, but I do sort of miss stopping for gasoline. It was good to have an interruption in the task of driving, one that doesn't seem so self-indulgent as a stop for rest or food: the car, it needs fuel, and I must stop. I may use the facilities, or grab a snack or two at the station, but that is mere efficiency; I did not stop strictly for my own needs. Alas, no more; every stop that I made along the journey was purely for my own benefit and nothing more.
I rode one of the earlier versions of this technology a couple of years back, as it happens, and the current models are a huge improvement. Where this care is as close to silent as a machine that propels itself at sixty five miles per hour down a spottily-maintained asphault surface can be, its predecessors were not. I'm told that the batteries were the source of the distracting humming noise, and that it was only recently that engineers realized that they didn't have to make that noise in order to function. Is this true? I am relying on your superior knowledge of the state of our knowledge of Shouter psychology here.
Since I was in Vancouver, I felt a pressing need to visit the Miracle Monument, just because that's what you do when you visit Vancouver these days. The monument, to be honest, is not nearly as dignified as it appears on television, and brings to mind just how shabby the events that get classified as Miraculous are in this era. A shoddily-constructed nuclear device built by North Koreean scientists and engineers who probably had the equivalent of one decent meal during the months over which it was built fails to properly detonate, leaving behind a lump of highly radioactive slag rather than a detonating critical mass? I say never attribute to divine intervention that which can adequately be explained by incompetence. The second 'miracle' was even less miraculous: one is fairly certain, if one has a brain with which to reason, that Dear Leader Kim's sudden heart attack was induced not by God Himself but by poisoners not relishing a second Korean War. So beyond the awakening of the Canadian national might toward eradicating international terror networks like the one that bought the device and picked them as their target, nothing requiring a belief in providence actually happened back in '09. Of course, the 'Close Call Monument' would not, I'm fairly certain, draw in nearly so much of a tourist trade, nor would it, one supposes, be as respectful to the memories of the three poor souls who took lethal radiation doses during the cleanup.
So, after doing the touristy thing, I got on with the business of this stop, and paid a visit to Thadeuss Bones, Dad's accountant and executor. I don't know if you'll remember Tad, but if you do, he hasn't changed a bit. He looks, well, old but active, a constant appearance of being just under 65 that he has had since before he turned forty and will no doubt have into his late 90s. He was not particularly talkative, but he was at least cooperative. Especially since I'd secured funding for my trip through MP NeoTech, and didn't need to try and extract money from my Trust, only the keys to the old house.
Nobody lives in the house, permanently. Dad bought it shortly after the divorce and lived in it, when he wasn't travelling around the world, until his disappearance. When he was travelling, he arranged to have a college student do some house-sitting to keep the place maintained, and Tad has kept the practice up since thie disappearance, but this month was one of the periods of non-occupation, so it was empty when I came around.
I'm not exactly sure why I felt the need to go here, other than that Dad's last trip started here and so, on some level, should mine. It was, and still is, a mostly impersonal dwelling, with no art or photos or furniture old enough to drive. Other than our photos on an otherwise bare desk (Dad's computers were taken away once it was clear that he wasn't coming back soon, as part of the police investigation, and I believe that the company wound up with them after the police stopped working on the case.), no sign of the owner was left, in the above-ground floors at least.
The basement, though, was another story. These rooms were locked off, but I had those keys, and so ventured down the stairs into some severely dusty rooms. The workshop showed the danger of allowing tools to fall into disuse: rusted metal and warped wood and plastic dominated. The playroom had done much better, with dust alone being the nemesis. I got a kick out of seeing the city-that old, futuristic city Dad built to roughly the scale of our action figures out of wood and plexiglass. I looked it over, looking for the hidden oibliette that I always thought was the most interesting feature of the town, wondering if Mace Windu or Green Lantern was still trapped in there after all these years. After a few minutes' search, I found the spot, blew clear the dust to reveal the hairline faults in the wood, and tried to trigger the trapdoor. Nothing happened. I tried a couple more times; it was definately stuck. Possibly the wood had expanded a bit, or the hinge had rusted shut. Either way, I couldn't get enough leverage to spring it with my hands.
I started to head back upstairs, defeated, but, passing the workshop entrance, it occurred to me that I had access to any number of simple tools, and was stubborn enough not to admit a trivial defeat to an ancient, inanimate object. Thus, one screwdriver, as thin-edged and non-rusty as could be wrangled, went from pegboard to hand and then accompanied me back to the City of Tomorrow, and, after a quick application of Archimedes' work on leverage, the compartment opened, revealing not a long-imprisoned superhero but rather several quite interesting objects.
The first was a billfold, stuffed with large amounts in various currencies. Some of it is, of course, completely worthless these days, in Euros or Yuan, but there was about a thousand dollars, and around the same amount in Yen, and again in Rupees.
The second was a set of Canadian passports-probably fakes, but very good fakes. One with his own picture under the name 'Adam Weissel', and two more, without pictures but listing ages appropriate for each of us, as 'Rudy' and 'Daniel' Weissel. Let me know if you have an address you'd like me to send yours to; it might be reassuring to have a backup identity ready for whatever contingencies might occur, down the line.
The third is a small notebook, containing nothing other than a handful of names, each one listing beside it a city and a phone numbers. I suspect that the numbers are in code of some sort; some of the exchanges simply do not make sense. And finally, taped to the last page of the notebook are two keys. So, all in all, I'm quite glad that I came out here, even setting aside how much less hassle it is to fly internationally out of Canada than it is out of America. I'll probably spend a couple more days here, touristing about and seeing if I can crack Dad's code, then head off to the first city on Dad's last journey, home of two of the people in the notebook as it happens.
Next stop: Seoul!

Chapter Three: Shouter Studies

Chapter Three
Subject: Shouter Studies
From: Douglas Clay
Date: 01/09/15 19:38
To: Randall Clay
There are disadvantages to being in the top twenty (he said modestly) of an emerging field of study, as I learned this week back at school. Just when I thought I had a comfortable Senior Slide ahead of me, things got...complicated. Maybe I should start from the beginning. Way back when the Christmas Message first appeared,there was a brief period of time when people thought that translating the thing was going to be easy. That's because a big chunk of the message was in what we call Technical, which is the Shouter's closest equivalent to a written language.
Thing is, Technical is, as a language, extremely incomplete. You can do math and geometry in it, and you can do physics and chemistry too, but go too far beyond that, and you start to run out of vocabulary. You might be able to manage biology, but the Shouters didn't put all that much biology in the message, so that's moot. So we were able to get enough information to be able to build the shouter batteries and nano-twine and the Pi-field generators that stop nuclear explosions and make fusion power practical, but that part was only a tiny, tiny percentage of the Message. They went and uploaded their entire culture into the message, and it's been extremely tough getting any of it out again.
This is because the Shouter language is, to human ears and brains, extremely difficult. How difficult? Well, it wasn't until two years ago that we proved that there's only one language present in the message. (And I mean we literally, here; my name is on the paper in question.) First off, each shouter has two mouths (in addition to the thing that they eat with, which we call the maw to avoid confusion). The top one produces the 'trills', the major information component of their spoken language, but the bottom one is important too. It's main function is producing a beat that their sonar senses use to perceive their environment, but that beat has different modes to it, a combination of 'stances' and 'moods' that go into determining the meaning of what they're saying with the trills. On top of that, Shouters don't have conversations like you and me. They don't ever wait for the other person to finish talking, no, and almost every conversation has at least three speaklers. All talking at the same time. With two voices each. So yes, it's a difficult language.
So dificult, in fact, that it's been impossible for anyone much older than me to make any kind of progress on at all. Theory is that human brains are much better at learning new languages when they're younger, and the last few years have borne that out, as most of the forward motion on translation has been done by people in my age cohort, give or take a couple of years. There's a top tier of about twenty of us in the United States, and two of us-me and Travis Patrick are going to school right here in Moss Landing. Along with, I'd say, another five or so of the next hundred or so. So we've got an excellent 'program', if that's what you want to call it, and Moss Landing High. Which brings us to the problem.
See, over Christmas break someone decided that it was at least a decent bet that the performance here was not just simple luck but rather the hard work of our teacher, Curt Lamont. Could be they're right; he's certainly the best teacher at the place, although that could be subject bias on my part speaking. Anyhow, that someone was the dean of some private school out East, and he basically offered Lamont more money than he could in good conscience refuse to pack up and sign on over there, starting with this semester.
The practical result of this is that the new teacher is, for all intents and purposes, just a chaperone for the class, and, since I'm a senior and Travis isn't, I'm the one who's going to wind up doing the teacher job this year. Principal Thomas gave me the pitch that getting in early teaching experience would give me a leg up against the other Tenure-Track Freshmen at the UW next year, and he may well be right at that, but I'm sure it's going to be a rough couple of months. Let me tell you about my first day.
To start with, I find out about Lamont's desertion, straight from the principal's mouth, at 9 AM. By 9:20 he's talked me into doing the teaching. At 9:40 I check online and it turns out I'm not alone, and about half of the top high schools have had their teachers sniped during the holiday vacation. The ones at private schools usually managed to snag another teacher somewhere down the line, but the other public schools generally went with the same kind of option. And then the class I've got to teach started, 10:00 AM.
I decided to stick to that Lamont had planned on covering for the first week, which I was lucky enough to know in advance, and, after explaining the situation to the class, I spent about fifteen minutes going on about the idea of Ur-texts: works of literature in a language that are quoted and referenced by so many speakers that the turns of phrases they contain become cliches and buried metaphors deep within the language itself. For Greek, for example, Homer's works are an Ur-Text. In modern English, we're talking Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and the twenty-five season run of The Simpsons. One of the current projects that the world's xenolinguistics students are working on right now is identifying the Shouter Ur-Texts, which means finding phrases that repeat in multiple works, and then tracing them back to their earliest occurances, and seeing which of the oldest works influenced phrasing the most. We've finally settled on a dozen or so transliterations of the recorded Shouter speech that we think are good enough; that don't lose key information content or code in too much noise, and that's the next step. After that, we'll start trying the translate them, using a combination of the sonar-video context and wild-assed guessing, and refine the guesses based on how much or little sense the more recent Shouter documents start making. But first, the work is on identifying the Ur-texts, which is database busywork enough to keep things fairly calm.
It didn't hurt, I guess, that our chaperone/teacher was Mrs. Lincoln, a librarian who's general pleasant demeanor and, when enraged, vicious temper were both well know. Even if she seemed to be almost taking a nap, her presence kept order. I expected some resistance from Travis, but none came. He's a year younger than me, and frighteningly talented at this. It's a good thing that there aren't Xenolinguistic duels, or else he'd have called me out and I don't know if I'd have come out on top, but luckily, seniority still wins the day. My vauge plan is to turn the rest of the class into the equivalent of graduate research assistants, and split them up with him. Maybe Jack Snowden, too, not sure. And after that, put them to work helping with the translation of whatever Ur-Text I wind up with in the loterry next month.
At least now I have even more of an excuse for letting my other classes slide.
Outside of school, not much is happening down here. Mom is still going out with Pope Paulsen now and again, although I don't think it's gotten particularly serious. I ran into your ex- Sharon earlier in the week. Amazingly, she's still together with Peter Hammond, who's started working at his dad's auto repair shop. Apparently he's taking night classes learning how to service the new Hybrids and Electric cars based on the Shouter battery tech that are supposed to start going down in price any day now, so they'll probably be doing okay.
Your Brother,
Douglas

Chapter Two: Seattle

Subject: Seattle
From: Randall Clay
Date: 12/26/14 09:43
To: Douglas Clay

Let us honour, O my brothers, Christmas Day!
Call a truce, then, to our labours-let us feast with friends and neighbors,
And be merry as the custom of our case;
For if "faint and forced the laughter," and if sadness follows after,
We are richer by one mocking Christmas past.
-Rudyard Kipling, "Christmas in India"

Deal.
There are, of course, two halves to the why of what I'm doing out here. The first is why I'm doing it in general, which is fairly simple to answer: our father, Aaron Clay, vanished, apparently without a trace, around six years ago. Once he's missing for seven years, he can be declared legally dead, which would be all well and good for us, inheritance-wise, but much less so for mom, if the way dad set up the trusts is anything to go by. However, dad did have a substantial life insurance policy out through his employers at MP NeoTech. Unfortunately, it won't pay out on a missing person case unless we can show a certain amount of due diligence trying to find him. So that's what I'm going to do. Besides, I already wanted to take a semester or two off and travel abroad on general principles. So I intend to go to where he had been and was headed toward when he vanished, and find out what happened to him. If he's dead, I'll then give him a decent burial, and if he's alive, I'll give him a shift kick to the groin, because either way he'll deserve it.
But, I can hear you asking, why now? Why not start this grand globetrotting quest in January, with the new year? And I'll tell you why: because dad's old boss is a complete and utter bastard.
I'd been trying to arrange for a meeting, some kind of interview with some of the people who worked with dad for months, since I decided to take time off of college in the first place. I didn't expect to get a sit-down with Martin Panzer himself, mind you, but I thought there might be some upper-middle management types from dad's time that could find a little time for me. No such luck; I was getting stonewalled at every turn. Until last Friday, the 19th, when the phone rang, just after I'd finished packing up my luggage to come home.
I picked it up, and heard a quintessentially secretarial voice say "Have I reached Randall Clay?" I said that she had, and she continued. "Mister Panzer has an opening in his schedule, and would like to give you the interview you've been asking about."
I told her that was great, and that I'd be happy to come out there. Then I asked what time it was for, and she said "2 PM this coming Thursday." For a while I said nothing, doing the math in my head.
"That's Christmas day," I said.
"Yes, Mister Clay." she assented. "I understand you're in Eugene Oregon now?" Without pausing for an answer, she continued "Mr. Panzer has booked a flight to Seattle leaving this evening for you, and made reservations at the Westview Hotel. He'll send a driver to the Hotel on the day of the meeting. Thank you for your time." And then she was gone, and I was on the line with dead air.
And then I was pretty much trapped, wasn't I. I mean, I'm sure that Senators and CEOs have had their lives reduced to dust for less than standing up Martin Goddamn Panzer in a meeting, haven't they? So what chance did I have?
So, that pretty much explains how I found myself in downtown Seattle with a couple of winter days to kill. On one of them, I went down to the UW, to do a little bit of research on the Digital Stacks; see if there was any interesting information about dad there. Not a productive move; Dad was MP NeoTech's lead international contract lawyer back in his day, and so his name shows up on just about every international contract that the company made at that time, which, let me tell you, is quite a large number of contracts. And, alas, search engine technology has not yet advanced to the point where one can simply apply a "Not: Boring" filter to one's search.
So there I was, flipping absently through a series of hypnotically uninteresting contract abstracts, when a young woman I'd never seen before in my life walked up to me and said "Excuse me. You're Randall Clay, right? Douglas's brother?"
I have to say that you do have excellent taste, brother of mine. She struck me immediately as being quite attractive, with a whole 'sexy librarian' thing going on. The glasses work for her, which certainly isn't always the case. At any rate, I admitted to being your brother and, desparate for any excuse to escape the virtual stack of old contracts before me, I agreed to grab a quick coffee with her.
As far as I was concerned, the first order of business was finding out just how it was that she instantly knew who I was and who I was related to. Well, it turns out that the people who ought to have been working on that anti-boredom web filter I mentioned above have recently added another new feature to the wonderful Web-what is it supposed to be now? 3.5? 4.7? 6.0? Whichever, it's newest and greatest tool is something called 'Faceback', which is a reverse image directory specialized to human faces. Just upload a picture of a face, taken, no doubt, surrupticiously with the camera hidden subtly in one's phone, and, voila! It will tell you, with about 85% accuracy, exactly who that face belongs to, after which more traditional searches can bring about further information such as that person's immediate geneological background. Once again, the advance of internet technology conspires to obsolete the honest labors of the private investigator and personal stalker alike. This is not to say, of course, that your friend Jenny goes around Facebacking every stranger she should happen to meet on the street. Far from it; she assures me, and I have every reason in the world to believe her, that she noticed in my face a family resemblance which piqued her curiosity and used the freshly availible tool merely to confirm an intuitive suspicion. So that's all right, then.
So, the two of us had a pleasant afternoon's conversation, during the course of which I don't quite think that I managed to reveal every embarassing story from when we were growing up together. Have to save a few for Mom to tell when you introduce them to each other, right?
Not much more happened up here between then and the big meeting, apart from weather, of which the city produced a prodigious quantity, particularly of the cold, wet, and windy varieties in all their assorted permutations. It was the combination of all three aspects that prevailed on Christmas morning itself, which made me immensely grateful for the provided driver even if it was going so short a distance that in any other circumstance I'd have preferred to go on foot.
The Seattle offices of MP NeoTech were almost completely deserted, contrary to the mental image I had formed of a modern-day Ebeneezer Scrooge driving an entire crew of cube-dwellers to eek out their daily ration of productivity with a half-day's ration of heating coal: of the droves normally at work in those offices, only three remained. Martin Panzer himself, the secretary who had called me (who, I am pleased to report, had an appearance every bit as quintessentially secretarial as her voice, no doubt requiring a not inconsiderable amount of daily maintenance.), and one other, a towering human being- or perhaps I should keep safe and simply say 'primate', as the theory of an evolutionary regression to Homo Habilis or Homo Erectus was not at all without explanatory power with regard to this specimen. He did not speak but simply loomed slightly to Martin Panzer's side throughout the interview. Panzer introduced him as Arthur Krov, a name which, taken in comparison with the thing itself, seemed distinctly lacking in an embedded nickname, preferably one that implied or overtly stated something violent. Surely his friends and enemies alike called him Art "The Hammer" Krov or Art "Crusher" Krov, or the like.
Art "Puppy-Mangler" Krov pulled back a seat for me in front of Martin Panzer's desk, and I sat down in it. For a short while there was only silence between us, as I pondered my opening. It occured to me that this entire meeting was some kind of test, and I wondered whether by showing up I had passed or failed it. I remembered a story Grandfather once told about a Naval Admiral, interviewing people to potentially serve directly under him. The Admiral, so the story goes, asked the applicant if he had a girlfriend, and the applicant responded in the affirmative; that he not only had a girlfriend but was in fact engaged to the woman in question. The Admiral told the applicant that he preferred to have only bachelors in his service, and handed him the phone to call his fiancee on the spot if he wanted the position. The applicant did so, at which point the Admiral booted him straight out of his office, as he did not want to have anyone in his service who displayed such a small and pitiful amount of backbone. The question was, what did Martin Panzer want to see? Was he interested in someone who wants information about his father enough to sacrifice his holidays, or disgusted by someone who would neglect the family members he has to chase after closure with one who has been gone a long while running?
Almost as if he had been reading my thoughts, Martin Panzer said "I'm not surprised t'see you here, if that's what your wondering. Blood tells, and Aaron wouldn'ta thunk twice about it."
"So, can you help me?" I asked.
"Well, sure. What do you wantto know?" said Panzer.
"First off, what was Aaron working on when he vanished?"
"Hard to say, hard to say" said Panzer. "We weren't much more than a glorified start-up at that time, working on putting cutting edge manufacturing processes together with cheap labor, so we had a lot of pies all over the world. Aaron went all the way around twice, three times a year, working on abouta dozen projects each time."
"And the trip where he vanished?"
"Let me check my notes" said Martin, who did just that. "Looks like he made it halfway that time. Flew out to Seoul, then his Taipei before bounching around Europe a bit, and vanished somehwere on the way to Cairo. There was one more stop planned, in Kenya, but he never made it there."
"What was he doing in Cairo? And right before?"
"Cairo was all about a contract to reconfigure some oil processing facilities away from fuels and toward chemical precursors. Lost that one to Beltra, and that was a cryin' shame."
"And before that?"
"Paris."
"Renouned for its cheap labor" I blurted. Martin Panzer tensed for a second, and Art "Imapler" Krov seemed to loom a few inches taller. Or maybe he was just leaning.
"Coul have been, actually" said Panzer, relaxing. "City's got thousands of unemployed- what's the current phrase- North Africans, right? Actually, I think current practice is t' just not mention 'em at all. Unassimilated Muslim immigrants. We were gonna put the all to work, start integrating them into the economy, but the goddamn frogs would rather keep them isolated in no-go zones and on the dole. Bunch of damned cowards, if y' ask me. You ever hear of a brave Frenchie this side of Joan of Arc?"
"Well, there was the resistance." I said. There was some reason I wasn't actually nearly as intimidated as rationality ought to have demanded, under the circumstances. I think part of it was a growing conviction that when he named his book 'You Think I Was Born With This' one of the things he was talking about was his accent.
"Okay,but they're pretty damn overrated, and don't say near as nuch about the national character as people want to think. See, in the War, they were fighting the fucking Nazis. Pardon my...French." Martin Panzer managed to make that word sound considerably more obscene than anything else he'd said recently. "And when you're fighting a bunch of fucking Nazis, you've got a rock solid moral god damn obligation to fight right down to the last man, woman, child, and dog. Which they clearly did not do. So sure, after the cravens in the government showed their bellies, a few, asmall few, did what decent morality required. That just means that, on the other hand, that most of them didn't.
"Besides, even of them that did fight, almost half of them were really only fighting to make sure that when the future became a boot stomping on a human face, forever, that that book would be manufactured in Moscow rather than Berlin. So no, I've not got all that much respect for the Resistance."
Having finished this tirade, Martin was silent, waiting for me to make some reply. Eventually, I broke in with "What was the Kenya visit going to be about?"
"What? Oh, that. Just some real-estate deal. I think we would up getting that one after all. Anyways, I don't have all day here, so let me get to my point. When Aaron went off the map, I worked like hell to find him He was damned good at what he did. None of my guys ever found a lick of evidence one way or the other, if he ran off or just up and died. But I've decided that I like you, and that you're going to go off down his trail not matter what I do, os I'm going to give you some support. Basically, for tax purposes, hire you, as a contract investigator to do what you're already going to do. Not going to pay much more than squat, mind, but you'll have plane tickets wherever you want to go and an expense account. Interested?"
Now, I'm fully aware that any time I use the tickets or the corporate charge card good old Martin Panzer is going to know exactly what I'm doing. But let's be serious: even if I weren't, the third richest man on the planet is going to be able to find out just as much with only fractionally more effort. It's hard enough to go privacy-mode, off the grid in one country; flying around doing it would be ipossible. So I checked thecontract over as best as my mid-Junior Year Pre-law major eyes could manage, and signed on the dotted line. By which time the airport was snowed under, so no chance of a heroic last minute arrival down there. So the next leg of the trip will be by car, up to Dad's old house.
Next Stop: Vancouver.

Chapter One:Five Years After Christmas

Subject: Five Years After Christmas
From: Douglas Clay
Date: 12/25/14 20:18
To: Randall Clay

So, I told mom that I missed you, and she called me a liar, and that pretty much was Christmas back here in Moss Landing. Except a bit later I got to thinking, and it could be that she was right, and maybe I haven't know you well enough to really miss you for years. When we were on the phone this morning I barely had two works to say to each other. I certainly don't know you well enough to understand why you're in up in Seattle today instead of back here with us.
I think the last time I really did was Christmas- The Christmas, that is, five years back, when the news that aliens from a star called HD 98618 had sent us a message was all over thetv. Of course, you knew about it a week before, which meant I knew about it then too. It was news to mom, though, and to the millions of people who weren't plugged in to the SETI community. It was nice, to share a secret like that.
On the other hand, that was also around the time we found out that dad had gone missing. I mean, he missed visiting around the holidays before, even the year just before that one, but he never forgot to send gifts any of those times.
Anyhow, after that you started the whole track and field thing and practically turned into a jock, and I wound up spending all of my time joining the first generation of serious XL geeks, and our worlds almost completely stopped intersecting. So I'm starting to think that mom was wrong after all, and I've been missing you for a long, long time.
So how about we stop being strangers, allright? Even if you're going to be all over the place on this whole 'search for dad' thing, this is the age of long distance communications, after all. If humanity and the Shouters can make a connection over 126 light years, what's a contintent or two between brothers?
So I'll let you know what's happening here, and you can tell me about your mission and all, and maybe by the time we're done we'll know each other a lot better. Deal? I'll start.
First off, this year's present haul: Best gift: an SSP8600 card for my computer. That's the top of the line, industry grade sonar data processor, capable of resolving Shouter 'movies' from the Message into 3D visual images at close to real time. From mom, paid for with money from the Trust and I had to pick it out of the catalog, but too damn cool in general to grudge any of that.
Worst gift: a copy of Martin Panzer's book Do You Think I Was Born With This? Not that it's that horrible of a book, I don't guess, the guy's got to be able to afford a damned good ghostwriter, but it's who it came from, Pope Paulsen, this goofy looking middle manager guy who mom's gone on maybe two, three dates with, and all of the sudden he thinks he should be getting me Christmas presents? Thank God mom didn't invite him over for dinner at least.
Dinner was just the two of us, prime rib and Yorkshire pudding and some broccoli to put a little green on the table and plates. That's were the dialog I mentioned up at the start of this mail happened, and after that we were down to 'pass the butter' and 'thank you' for the rest of the meal. And through the clean-up afterward. I spent an hour or so thinking about it, and making up my mind to write this.
Then came the highlight of the day: an email from Jenny. I don't know if I've ever mentioned her to you, though apparently she ran into you earlier this week, and I certainly want the full story of that when you write me back. We met last summer, up at the Xenolinguistics Camp that the UW ran, and got to know each other pretty well during those three weeks, and we've sort of had a long distance relationship thing going since then. We figure we're both high enough up in the list of the top students studying the Shouter language that we each can get into any college we want (which is probably going to end up being the UW; they look to be having the strongest program as far as we can tell), so we'll be able to cut out the long distance part soon enough. So anyhow, we chatted for about a half hour. She was envious as hell of my SSP8600, although she gets to play with the university's hardware whenever she wants to already. Not during the holidays, though, and not at home. So that was nice. Frustrating, of course, not being able to actually, physically touch your girlfriend, but a good kind of frustrating, if you understand what I'm saying.
And that was what's been happening here, with me. Your turn now.
Your Brother,
Douglas