The fireplace raged large in Spicer's pine-walled living room. The councilman, wearing a silk robe, sat deep in his overstuffed green chair and sipped sweet red wine. He was finishing the last pages of an early twenty-first century novel (a tale of science, conviction, and hope—dressed up with sex and violence). The old sybarite relished novels from past centuries, and he adored a raging fire. Across the room, Major Rollins sat ramrod straight, staring into the blaze in front of him. Spicer had watched for 48 hours as his niece’s guard maintained his post with indifference to boredom, hunger, or curiosity. The old man had offered food and drink, but only the minimum was accepted. The soldier’s stoicism fascinated and exasperated Spicer. Obliviousness to gain and comfort evinced to the councilman a deadened soul.
Outside, chimes tinkled and clanged in strong winds. This also pleased Spicer, and he put down his book to savor the sounds of wind and fire. He gazed at the closed doors that led to his guest bedroom. He listened closely and could faintly hear the squeaking bed, the occasional moans and gasps. The councilman indulged in a lurid smile. His eyes wandered back to Rollins; the one-armed soldier did not return the glance.
#
On the other side of the door, Todd and Irma made love on a huge bed with white sheets. The girl sat atop the muscular soldier, moving up and down. Her smile was full and open, her eyes closed tight. An inner light poured forth through her pearly-white skin; and the inner light shimmered in her body’s moisture.
Later, the night birds sang. A fire crackled in the fireplace across the room. In its amber light, hearts pounding, Todd and Irma lay naked across the bed, her cheek pressed against his black-haired leg. Irma whispered, "I feel better."
"That’s one of the objects of making love."
“I always thought ‘making love’ sounded dumb: sort of clumsy and evasive. I always thought ‘screwing’ was the best term. But not anymore.”
Todd said nothing; he merely grunted and watched her. Irma smiled and kissed his musky, fine-haired thigh. She sat up and looked at him completely, as a naked package. Then she looked into his receptive and subtle eyes and said, "For something so beautiful . . . out of nowhere . . . in the worst of times. . . . Like it was the intention of a greater something or other . . ?" She waited, but Todd said nothing. She patted his chest. “Not much of a talker, are ya?” She found his taciturnity attractive. His complete lack of frivolity added weight. She drew close to his face and kissed him repeatedly on the forehead and cheeks, then hugged herself to him and whispered, "Todd, this was meant to be. We are God’s work."
"You, maybe. I doubt that God thinks highly of me.”
She laughed softly, with her lips to his flesh. “What could He possibly have against you?”
“I’m a killer.”
The dullness of his tone, the matter-of-factness of his self-condemnation, struck her hard. "But that’s not you, is it? Not who you are. We have to defend ourselves and you are our leader . . . or leaders. It’s odd talking about just one Wentworth; people always say ‘the Wentworths.’"
"What I do is who I am," he said. Who I should be at this very moment, he thought. Self-reproach for absenting himself from harm’s way that day had bubbled up to the surface of his mind throughout those otherwise blissful hours. Occasionally, Irma saw this darkness in him and, after several of her promptings, he admitted that he was troubled. “I don’t feel guilty,” he told her. “I knew what I was doing. I regret that my men must fight without me at their side. But I don’t feel guilty.”
“I think,” Irma said cautiously, “that Wentworths are congenitally incapable of feeling guilt.”
“Perhaps. If so, I don’t regret that. I’m not even sure that guilt is a legitimate feeling. Shame, yes, but guilt . . . who can tell what causes events? History? Chemistry? Character? Only a fool thinks he knows. But we can be ashamed of what we have done, even without knowing why we did it. And, short of shame, we can regret.”
She said tenderly, "You do what you have to, but I think you have the heart of . . . of a saint."
He laughed, at first mirthlessly, but Irma joined his laughter with her own; Irma’s laughter filled the room, and it filled Todd until he, too, felt silly joy. Finally they fell silent. Outside, the birds’ songs soared amidst the tintinnabulation of the many chimes.
After some minutes, Irma said introspectively, "I really take to this, don’t I?"
"To what?"
"To lovemaking."
At a moment like that, even a dourly decorous young man will grin with the joy of his great fortune in discovering a lusty lover. "Like you were born to it."
"We all-- we’re made for it, I mean. But I think maybe-- It’s not very ladylike. I mean . . . I’m doing things I never even thought of, just like . . .” Irma pondered the past forty-eight hours. The new world of sex had profound meaning for her, and she wanted to understand herself in the wake of her initiation. She sensed that something deep within her had changed forever, that she had more gravity and more focus.
Todd was uncomfortable with giving words to private feelings. He said, "There’s a reason we make love with our eyes closed."
"I don’t even do that. But God, I just love it . . . really!"
They fell silent. Irma gazed slowly across Todd’s lean-muscled body. Her hand traveled lightly across his stomach. They each drifted into their own exquisite thoughts.
#
At that same night and hour, across the dank and moonlit wreckage of the Shambles, Ambassador Isoka studied a half-empty chessboard. Two small candles lit the room. The light fluttered in drafts; outside, the wind pounded, while drunken soldiers and their girls laughed and squabbled. Their uncouth voices and the blustering winds filled the grim and bloody night.
Isoka fingered a pawn; then he took his hand away and narrowed his eyes. He pondered the shadowy board, oblivious to time or surroundings. He blinked. Suddenly, the diplomat saw the struggle clearly, as if he were standing on a small red square in the midst of its battle. Within this miniature perspective, he imagined that his life itself was at stake. And, out of fear, he suddenly understood the advantages he had; he saw his rook’s favorable lie vis-à-vis the enemy bishop. The ambassador’s fingers moved without further thought. He cornered the bishop; on the next move, he would kill it. He looked up and smiled. But his face dropped quickly. The wine-stained vice mayor had vacated the game for his nightly stupor. His victory now pointless, Isoka noticed that the vice mayor did not snore. This surprised him. He looked up at the picture of the vice mayor’s wife, which that man had put by his bed every night of the campaign, whether camping on a mud flat or, like now, in a semipermanent abode. Isoka thought, he doesn’t snore and he never forgets his wife. I guess the poor woman overlooks the rest.
He said aloud, "I drew that out just a smidgen too long." He stood and walked over to the vice mayor’s cot. He took a army-green blanket off the bed and draped the blanket over the leader of the Army of Los Angeles. Carefully, he tucked the blanket around the slack body.
By all accounts, the vice mayor was a sot, indifferent to the needs of others, dedicated only to self-promotion. His men thought as much; so did his wife, his child, his parents, and his mistress. Yet Isoka treated him with love and devotion. Others could not understand his affection, but his motivation was simple: The vice mayor embodied the social order, and for the ambassador, social order was the wet nurse of felicity.
The communal order of Los Angeles was, like its embodiment the vice mayor, grievously flawed--mean, avaricious, and incestuous. Nonetheless, amidst the anarchy of the twenty-second century, the city-state enjoyed prosperity, sanitation, safe streets, secure borders, and a modicum of legal order placed on commerce and human rights. Isoka attributed LA’s lonely state of grace to the harmonic effect of an organically-stratified society wherein human activity had predictable ramifications. For the most part, those ramifications further enforced order and civil health.
It was far from perfect, far from just. Yet the citizenry accepted the affordable kleptocracy at the top as the price of a civil structure. In turn, the common folk enjoyed ease and freedom in their personal lives. For now, the rule of the oligarchy held chaos at bay. Nothing in the ambassador’s value system was more important than that safety or exceeded the virtue of mere social order.
Loyalty to the chain of command by men like Isoka was the glue that preserved this order-- as surely gravity holds together the distant heavens, as love maintains families, and as faith seals religion. The invisible preserved and gave life to the visible. For that reason alone, Isoka would serve the vice mayor unto death. In fact, he would do much more than that: Isoka would accept the damnation of his own soul, if that were needed to save Los Angeles.
With these thoughts in mind, he went to the wall map of California. Without expression but with a burning heart, he slid his hand over the bright patch of blue that was Los Angeles. He stood there for several moments. When he took his hand away, he sensed an anger within him begin to surface. His thoughts turned to Abe Benharash, the absentee general. In Isoka’s well-sorted world, the general’s insistence that his will prevail over the design of his superior, the vice mayor, had brought an unruly poison into the ALA camp. The vain man’s stubbornness undermined the faith of the troops, encouraged the weak enemy, and prolonged the shameful stalemate. Benharash’s individualism sabotaged the communal good.
A few moments later, surrounded by five bodyguards, Isoka drifted off toward his own tent. He had no idea how to reverse the situation. Yet the urgency was growing. The General Staff needed bodyguards in their own camp. Their superior forces were suffering daily defeats. As he walked, he tried to think his way out of the trouble.