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+{"text":" \n# Also by Julian Barnes\n\n# FICTION\n\nMetroland\n\nBefore She Met Me\n\nFlaubert's Parrot\n\nStaring at the Sun\n\nA History of the World in 10\u00bd Chapters\n\nTalking It Over\n\nThe Porcupine\n\nCross Channel\n\nEngland, England\n\nLove, Etc.\n\nThe Lemon Table\n\nArthur & George\n\nPulse\n\nThe Sense of an Ending\n\nThe Noise of Time\n\n# NONFICTION\n\nLetters from London, 1990\u20131995\n\nSomething to Declare\n\nThe Pedant in the Kitchen\n\nNothing to Be Frightened Of\n\nThrough the Window\n\nLevels of Life\n\nKeeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art\n\n# TRANSLATION\n\nIn the Land of Pain  \n _by Alphonse Daudet_\n\nTHIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2018 by Julian Barnes\n\nAll rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.\n\nOriginally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2018.\n\nwww.aaknopf.com\n\nKnopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nNames: Barnes, Julian, author.\n\nTitle: The only story \/ by Julian Barnes.\n\nDescription: First American edition. | New York : Knopf, 2018. | \"This is a Borzoi book.\"\n\nIdentifiers: LCCN 2017047844 | ISBN 9780525521211 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525521297 (ebook)\n\nSubjects: LCSH: Man-woman relationships\u2014Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION \/ Literary. | FICTION \/ Coming of Age. | FICTION \/ Psychological. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.\n\nClassification: LCC PR6052.A6657 O55 2018 | DDC 823\/.914\u2014dc23 LC record available at https:\/\/lccn.loc.gov\/\u200b2017047844\n\nEbook ISBN 9780525521297\n\n_Cover design by Carol Devine Carson_\n\nv5.2_r1\n\nep\n\n# Contents\n\nCover\n\nAlso by Julian Barnes\n\nTitle Page\n\nCopyright\n\nDedication\n\nEpigraph\n\nOne\n\nTwo\n\nThree\n\nA Note About the Author\n\nReading Group Guide\nto Hermione\n> Novel: A small tale, generally of love.\n> \n> \u2014Samuel Johnson, _A Dictionary of the English Language_ (1755)\n\n# ONE\nWould you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nYou may point out\u2014correctly\u2014that it isn't a real question. Because we don't have the choice. If we had the choice, then there would be a question. But we don't, so there isn't. Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn't love. I don't know what you call it instead, but it isn't love.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nMost of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBut here's the first problem. If this is your only story, then it's the one you have most often told and retold, even if\u2014as is the case here\u2014mainly to yourself. The question then is: Do all these retellings bring you closer to the truth of what happened, or move you further away? I'm not sure. One test might be whether, as the years pass, you come out better from your own story, or worse. To come out worse might indicate that you are being more truthful. On the other hand, there is the danger of being retrospectively anti-heroic: making yourself out to have behaved worse than you actually did can be a form of self-praise. So I shall have to be careful. Well, I have learned to become careful over the years. As careful now as I was careless then. Or do I mean carefree? Can a word have two opposites?\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe time, the place, the social milieu? I'm not sure how important they are in stories about love. Perhaps in the old days, in the classics, where there are battles between love and duty, love and religion, love and family, love and the state. This isn't one of those stories. But still, if you insist. The time: more than fifty years ago. The place: about fifteen miles south of London. The milieu: stockbroker belt, as they called it\u2014not that I ever met a stockbroker in all my years there. Detached houses, some half-timbered, some tile-hung. Hedges of privet, laurel and beech. Roads with gutters as yet unencumbered by yellow lines and residents' parking bays. This was a time when you could drive up to London and park almost anywhere. Our particular zone of suburban sprawl was cutely known as \"The Village,\" and decades previously it might possibly have counted as one. Now it contained a station from which suited men went up to London Monday to Friday, and some for an extra half-day on Saturday. There was a Green Line bus stop; a zebra crossing with Belisha beacons; a post office; a church unoriginally named after St. Michael; a pub, a general store, chemist, hairdresser; a petrol station which did elementary car repairs. In the mornings, you heard the electric whine of milk floats\u2014choose between Express and United Dairies; in the evenings, and at weekends (though never on a Sunday morning) the chug of petrol-driven lawnmowers.\n\nVocal, incompetent cricket was played on the Village green; there was a golf course and a tennis club. The soil was sandy enough to please gardeners; London clay didn't reach this far out. Recently, a delicatessen had opened, which some thought subversive in its offerings of European goods: smoked cheeses, and knobbly sausages hanging like donkey cocks in their string webbing. But the Village's younger wives were beginning to cook more adventurously, and their husbands mainly approved. Of the two available TV channels, BBC was watched more than ITV, while alcohol was generally drunk only at weekends. The chemist would sell verruca plasters and dry shampoo in little puffer bottles, but not contraceptives; the general store sold the narcoleptic local _Advertiser &_ _Gazette,_ but not even the mildest girlie mag. For sexual items, you had to travel up to London. None of this bothered me for most of my time there.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nRight, that's my estate agent's duties concluded (there was a real one ten miles away). And one other thing: don't ask me about the weather. I don't much remember what the weather has been like during my life. True, I can remember how hot sun gave greater impetus to sex; how sudden snow delighted, and how cold, damp days set off those early symptoms that eventually led to a double hip replacement. But nothing significant in my life ever happened during, let alone because of, weather. So if you don't mind, meteorology will play no part in my story. Though you are free to deduce, when I am found playing grass-court tennis, that it was neither raining nor snowing at the time.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe tennis club: Who would have thought it might begin there? Growing up, I regarded the place as merely an outdoor branch of the Young Conservatives. I owned a racket and had played a bit, just as I could bowl a few useful overs of off-spin, and turn out as a goalkeeper of solid yet occasionally reckless temperament. I was competitive at sport without being unduly talented.\n\nAt the end of my first year at university, I was at home for three months, visibly and unrepentantly bored. Those of the same age today will find it hard to imagine the laboriousness of communication back then. Most of my friends were far-flung, and\u2014by some unexpressed but clear parental mandate\u2014use of the telephone was discouraged. A letter, and then a letter in reply. It was all slow-paced, and lonely.\n\nMy mother, perhaps hoping that I would meet a nice blond Christine, or a sparky, black-ringleted Virginia\u2014in either case, one of reliable, if not too pronounced, Conservative tendencies\u2014suggested that I might like to join the tennis club. She would even sub me for it. I laughed silently at the motivation: the one thing I was not going to do with my existence was end up in suburbia with a tennis wife and 2.4 children, and watch them in turn find their mates at the club, and so on, down some echoing enfilade of mirrors, into an endless, privet-and-laurel future. When I accepted my mother's offer, it was in a spirit of nothing but satire.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI went along, and was invited to \"play in.\" This was a test in which not just my tennis game but my general deportment and social suitability would be quietly examined in a decorous English way. If I failed to display negatives, then positives would be assumed: this was how it worked. My mother had ensured that my whites were laundered, and the creases in my shorts both evident and parallel; I reminded myself not to swear, burp or fart on court. My game was wristy, optimistic and largely self-taught; I played as they would have expected me to play, leaving out the shit-shots I most enjoyed, and never hitting straight at an opponent's body. Serve, in to the net, volley, second volley, drop shot, lob, while quick to show appreciation of the opponent\u2014\"Too good!\"\u2014and proper concern for the partner\u2014\"Mine!\" I was modest after a good shot, quietly pleased at the winning of a game, head-shakingly rueful at the ultimate loss of a set. I could feign all that stuff, and so was welcomed as a summer member, joining the year-round Hugos and Carolines.\n\nThe Hugos liked to tell me that I had raised the club's average IQ while lowering its average age; one insisted on calling me Clever Clogs and Herr Professor in deft allusion to my having completed one year at Sussex University. The Carolines were friendly enough, but wary; they knew better where they stood with the Hugos. When I was among this tribe, I felt my natural competitiveness leach away. I tried to play my best shots, but winning didn't engage me. I even used to practise reverse cheating. If a ball fell a couple of inches out, I would give a running thumbs up to the opponent, and a shout of \"Too good!\" Similarly, a serve pushed an inch or so too long or too wide would produce a slow nod of assent, and a trudge across to receive the next serve. \"Decent cove, that Paul fellow,\" I once overheard a Hugo admit to another Hugo. When shaking hands after a defeat, I would deliberately praise some aspect of their game. \"That kicker of a serve to the backhand\u2014gave me a lot of trouble,\" I would candidly admit. I was only there for a couple of months, and did not want them to know me.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAfter three weeks or so of my temporary membership, there was a Lucky Dip Mixed Doubles tournament. The pairings were drawn by lot. Later, I remember thinking: Lot is another name for destiny, isn't it? I was paired with Mrs. Susan Macleod, who was clearly not a Caroline. She was, I guessed, somewhere in her forties, with her hair pulled back by a ribbon, revealing her ears, which I failed to notice at the time. A white tennis dress with green trim, and a line of green buttons down the front of the bodice. She was almost exactly my height, which is five feet nine if I am lying and adding an inch.\n\n\"Which side do you prefer?\" she asked.\n\n\"Side?\"\n\n\"Forehand or backhand?\"\n\n\"Sorry. I don't really mind.\"\n\n\"You take the forehand to begin with, then.\"\n\nOur first match\u2014the format was single-set knockout\u2014was against one of the thicker Hugos and dumpier Carolines. I scampered around a lot, thinking it my job to take more of the balls; and at first, when at the net, would do a quarter-turn to see how my partner was coping, and if and how the ball was coming back. But it always did come back, with smoothly hit groundstrokes, so I stopped turning, relaxed, and found myself really, really wanting to win. Which we did, 6\u20132.\n\nAs we sat with glasses of lemon barley water, I said,\n\n\"Thanks for saving my arse.\"\n\nI was referring to the number of times I had lurched across the net in order to intercept, only to miss the ball and put Mrs. Macleod off.\n\n\"The phrase is, 'Well played, partner.' \" Her eyes were grey-blue, her smile steady. \"And try serving from a bit wider. It opens up the angles.\"\n\nI nodded, accepting the advice while feeling no jab to my ego, as I would if it had come from a Hugo.\n\n\"Anything else?\"\n\n\"The most vulnerable spot in doubles is always down the middle.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Mrs. Macleod.\"\n\n\"Susan.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you're not a Caroline,\" I found myself saying.\n\nShe chuckled, as if she knew exactly what I meant. But how could she have?\n\n\"Does your husband play?\"\n\n\"My husband? Mr. E.P.?\" She laughed. \"No. Golf's his game. I think it's plain unsporting to hit a stationary ball. Don't you agree?\"\n\nThere was too much in this answer for me to unpack at once, so I just gave a nod and a quiet grunt.\n\nThe second match was harder, against a couple who kept breaking off to have quiet tactical conversations, as if preparing for marriage. At one point, when Mrs. Macleod was serving, I tried the cheap ploy of crouching below the level of the net almost on the centre line, aiming to distract the returner. It worked for a couple of points, but then, at 30\u201315, I rose too quickly on hearing the thwock of the serve and the ball hit me square in the back of the head. I keeled over melodramatically and rolled into the bottom of the net. Caroline and Hugo raced forward in a show of concern while from behind me came only a riot of laughter, and a girlish \"Shall we play a let?,\" which our opponents naturally disputed. Still, we squeaked the set 7\u20135, and were into the quarter-finals.\n\n\"Trouble up next,\" she warned me. \"County level. On their way down now, but no free gifts.\"\n\nAnd there weren't any. We were well beaten, for all my intense scurrying. When I tried to protect us down the middle, the ball went wide; when I covered the angles, it was thumped down the centre line. The two games we got were as much as we deserved.\n\nWe sat on a bench and fed our rackets into their presses. Mine was a Dunlop Maxply; hers a Gray's.\n\n\"I'm sorry I let you down,\" I said.\n\n\"No one let anyone down.\"\n\n\"I think my problem may be that I'm tactically naive.\"\n\nYes, it was a bit pompous, but even so I was surprised by her giggles.\n\n\"You're a case,\" she said. \"I'm going to have to call you Casey.\"\n\nI smiled. I liked the idea of being a case.\n\nAs we went our separate ways to shower, I said, \"Would you like a lift? I've got a car.\"\n\nShe looked at me sideways. \"Well, I wouldn't want a lift if you haven't got a car. That would be counterproductive.\" There was something in the way she said it that made it impossible to take offence. \"But what about your reputation?\"\n\n\"My reputation?\" I answered. \"I don't think I've got one.\"\n\n\"Oh dear. We'll have to get you one then. Every young man should have a reputation.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWriting all this down, it seems more knowing than it was at the time. And \"nothing happened.\" I drove Mrs. Macleod to her house in Duckers Lane, she got out, I went home, and gave an abbreviated account of the afternoon to my parents. Lucky Dip Mixed Doubles. Partners chosen by lot.\n\n\"Quarter-finals, Paul,\" said my mother. \"I'd have come along and watched if I'd known.\"\n\nI realised that this was probably the last thing in the history of the world that I wanted, or would ever want.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nPerhaps you've understood a little too quickly; I can hardly blame you. We tend to slot any new relationship we come across into a preexisting category. We see what is general or common about it; whereas the participants see\u2014feel\u2014only what is individual and particular to them. We say: how predictable; they say: what a surprise! One of the things I thought about Susan and me\u2014at the time, and now, again, all these years later\u2014is that there often didn't seem _words_ for our relationship; at least, none that fitted. But perhaps this is an illusion all lovers have about themselves: that they escape both category and description.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nMy mother, of course, was never stuck for a phrase.\n\nAs I said, I drove Mrs. Macleod home, and nothing happened. And again; and again. Except that this depends on what you mean by \"nothing.\" Not a touch, not a kiss, not a word, let alone a scheme or a plan. But there was already, just in the way we sat in the car, before she said a few laughing words and then walked off up her driveway, a complicity between us. Not, I insist, as yet a complicity to _do_ anything. Just a complicity which made me a little more me, and her a little more her.\n\nHad there been any scheme or plan, we would have behaved differently. We might have met secretly, or disguised our intentions. But we were innocent; and so I was taken aback when my mother, over a supper of stultifying boredom, said to me,\n\n\"Operating a taxi service now, are we?\"\n\nI looked at her in bewilderment. It was always my mother who policed me. My father was milder, and less given to judgement. He preferred to allow things to blow over, to let sleeping dogs lie, not to stir up mud; whereas my mother preferred facing facts and not brushing things under the carpet. My parents' marriage, to my unforgiving nineteen-year-old eye, was a car crash of clich\u00e9. Though I would have to admit, as the one making the judgement, that a \"car crash of clich\u00e9\" is itself a clich\u00e9.\n\nBut I refused to be a clich\u00e9, at least this early in my life, and so I looked across at my mother with blank belligerence.\n\n\"Mrs. Macleod will be putting on weight, the amount you're ferrying her around\" was my mother's unkindly elaboration of her original point.\n\n\"Not with all the tennis she plays,\" I answered casually.\n\n\"Mrs. Macleod,\" she went on. \"What's her first name?\"\n\n\"I don't actually know,\" I lied.\n\n\"Have you come across the Macleods, Andy?\"\n\n\"There's a Macleod at the golf club,\" he answered. \"Short, fat guy. Hits the ball as if he hates it.\"\n\n\"Maybe we should ask them round for sherry.\"\n\nAs I winced at the prospect, my father replied, \"There isn't enough call for that, is there?\"\n\n\"Anyway,\" continued my mother, tenacious of subject, \"I thought she had a bicycle.\"\n\n\"You suddenly seem to know a lot about her,\" I replied.\n\n\"Don't you start getting pert with me, Paul.\" Her colour was rising.\n\n\"Leave The Lad alone, Bets,\" said my father quietly.\n\n\"It's not _me_ who should be leaving him alone.\"\n\n\"Please may I get down now, Mummy?\" I asked with an eight-year-old's whine. Well, if they were going to treat me like a child...\n\n\"Maybe we _should_ ask them round for sherry.\" I couldn't tell if my father was being dense, or whimsically ironic.\n\n\"Don't _you_ start as well,\" my mother said sharply. \"He doesn't get it from me.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI went to the tennis club the next afternoon, and the next. As I started hacking away with two Carolines and a Hugo I noticed Susan in play on the court beyond. It was fine while I had my back to her game. But when I looked past my opponents and saw her rocking gently sideways on the balls of her feet as she prepared to receive serve, I lost immediate interest in the next point.\n\nLater, I offer her a lift.\n\n\"Only if you've got a car.\"\n\nI mumble something in reply.\n\n\"Whatski, Mr. Casey?\"\n\nWe are facing one another. I feel at the same time baffled and at ease. She is wearing her usual tennis dress, and I find myself wondering if its green buttons undo, or are merely ornamental. I have never met anyone like her before. Our faces are at exactly the same height, nose to nose, mouth to mouth, ear to ear. She is clearly noticing the same.\n\n\"If I were wearing heels, I could see over the net,\" she says. \"As it is, we're seeing eye to eye.\"\n\nI can't work out if she is confident or nervous; if she is always like this, or just with me. Her words look flirty, but didn't feel so at the time.\n\nI have put the top of my Morris Minor convertible down. If I am operating a bloody taxi service, then I don't see why the bloody Village shouldn't see who the bloody passengers are. Or rather, who the passenger is.\n\n\"By the way,\" I say, as I slow and put the car into second. \"My parents might be asking you and your husband round for sherry.\"\n\n\"Lordy-Lordy,\" she replies, putting her hand in front of her mouth. \"But I never take Mr. Elephant Pants anywhere.\"\n\n\"Why do you call him that?\"\n\n\"It just came to me one day. I was hanging up his clothes and he's got these grey flannel trousers, several pairs of them, with an eighty-four-inch waistline, and I held up one pair and thought to myself, that looks just like the back half of a pantomime elephant.\"\n\n\"My dad says he hits a golf ball as if he hates it.\"\n\n\"Yes, well. What else do they say?\"\n\n\"My mother says you'll be getting fat, what with all the lifts I'm giving you.\"\n\nShe doesn't reply. I stop the car at the end of her driveway and look across. She is anxious, almost solemn.\n\n\"Sometimes I forget about other people. About them existing. People I've never met, I mean. I'm sorry, Casey, maybe I should have...I mean, it isn't as if...oh dear.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" I say firmly. \"You said a young man like me should have a reputation. It seems I've now got a reputation for operating a taxi service. That'll do me for the summer.\"\n\nShe remains downcast. Then says quietly, \"Oh Casey, don't give up on me just yet.\"\n\nBut why would I, when I was falling smack into love?\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nSo what words might you reach for, nowadays, to describe a relationship between a nineteen-year-old boy, or nearly-man, and a forty-eight-year-old woman? Perhaps those tabloid terms \"cougar\" and \"toy boy\"? But such words weren't around then, even if people behaved like that in advance of their naming. Or you might think: French novels, older woman teaching \"the arts of love\" to younger man, _ooh la la._ But there was nothing French about our relationship, or about us. We were English, and so had only those morally laden English words to deal with: words like scarlet woman, and adulteress. But there was never anyone less scarlet than Susan; and, as she once told me, when she first heard people talking about adultery, she thought it referred to the watering-down of milk.\n\nNowadays we talk about transactional sex, and recreational sex. No one, back then, had recreational sex. Well, they might have done, but they didn't call it that. Back then, back there, there was love, and there was sex, and there was a commingling of the two, sometimes awkward, sometimes seamless, which sometimes worked out, and sometimes didn't.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAn exchange between my parents (read: my mother) and me, one of those English exchanges which condenses paragraphs of animosity into a pair of phrases.\n\n\"But I'm _nine-teen._ \"\n\n\" _Exactly_ \u2014you're _only_ nineteen.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWe were each other's second lover: quasi-virgins, in effect. I had had my sexual induction\u2014the usual bout of tender, anxious scuffle-and-blunder\u2014with a girl at university, towards the end of my third term; while Susan, despite having two children and being married for a quarter of a century, was no more experienced than me. In retrospect, perhaps it would have been different if one of us had known more. But who, in love, looks forward to retrospect? And anyway, do I mean \"more experienced in sex\" or \"more experienced in love\"?\n\nBut I see I'm getting ahead of myself.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThat first afternoon, when I had played in with my Dunlop Maxply and laundered whites, there was a huddle in the clubhouse over tea and cakes. The blazers were still assessing me for suitability, I realised. Checking that I was acceptably middle class, with all that this entailed. There was some joshing about the length of my hair, which was mostly contained by my headband. And almost as a follow-on to this I was asked what I thought about politics.\n\n\"I'm afraid I'm not remotely interested in politics,\" I replied.\n\n\"Well, that means you're a Conservative,\" said one committee member, and we all laughed.\n\nWhen I tell her about this exchange, Susan nods and says, \"I'm Labour, but it's a secret. Well, it was until now. So what do you make of that, my fine and feathered friend?\"\n\nI say that it doesn't bother me at all.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe first time I went to the Macleod house, Susan told me to come in the back way and walk up through the garden; I approved such informality. I pushed open an unlocked gate, then followed an unsteady brick path alongside compost heaps and bins of leaf mould; there was rhubarb growing up through a chimney pot, a quartet of raggedy fruit trees and a vegetable plot. A dishevelled old gardener was double-digging a square patch of earth. I nodded to him with the authority of a young academic approving a peasant. He nodded back.\n\nAs Susan was boiling the kettle, I looked around me. The house was similar to ours, except that everything felt a bit classier; or rather, here the old things looked inherited rather than bought secondhand. There were standard lamps with yellowing parchment shades. There was also\u2014not exactly a carelessness, more an insouciance about things not being orderly. I could see golf clubs in a bag lying in the hallway, and a couple of glasses still not cleared away from lunch\u2014perhaps even the previous night. Nothing went uncleared-away in our house. Everything had to be tidied, washed, swept, polished, in case someone called round unexpectedly. But who might do so? The vicar? The local policeman? Someone wanting to make a phone call? A door-to-door salesman? The truth was that nobody ever arrived without invitation, and all that tidying and wiping was performed out of what struck me as deep social atavism. Whereas here, people like me called round and the place looked, as my mother would no doubt have observed, as if it hadn't seen a duster for a fortnight.\n\n\"Your gardener's jolly hardworking,\" I say, for want of a better conversational opener.\n\nSusan looks at me and bursts out laughing. \"Gardener? That's the Master of the Establishment, as it happens. His Lordship.\"\n\n\"I'm terribly sorry. Please don't tell him. I just thought...\"\n\n\"Still, I'm glad he looks up to snuff. Like a real gardener. Old Adam. Precisely.\" She hands me a cup of tea. \"Milk? Sugar?\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nYou understand, I hope, that I'm telling you everything as I remember it? I never kept a diary, and most of the participants in my story\u2014my story! my life!\u2014are either dead or far dispersed. So I'm not necessarily putting it down in the order that it happened. I think there's a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer. Do we have access to the algorithm of its priorities? Probably not. But I would guess that memory prioritises whatever is most useful to help keep the bearer of those memories going. So there would be a self-interest in bringing happier memories to the surface first. But again, I'm only guessing.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nFor instance, I remember lying in bed one night, being kept awake by one of those stomach-slapping erections which, when you are young, you carelessly\u2014or carefreely\u2014imagine will last you the rest of your life. But this one was different. You see, it was a kind of generalised erection, unconnected to any person, or dream, or fantasy. It was more about just being joyfully young. Young in brain, heart, cock, soul\u2014and it just happened to be the cock which best articulated that general state.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nIt seems to me that when you are young, you think about sex most of the time, but you don't reflect on it much. You are so intent on the who, when, where, how\u2014or rather, more often, the great if\u2014that you think less about the why and the whither. Before you first have sex, you've heard all sorts of things about it; nowadays far more, and far earlier, and far more graphically, than when I was young. But it all amounts to the same input: a mixture of sentimentality, pornography and misrepresentation. When I look back at my youth, I see it as a time of cock-vigour so insistent that it forbade examination of what such vigour was for.\n\nPerhaps I don't understand the young now. I'd like to talk to them and ask how things are for them and their friends\u2014but then a shyness creeps in. And perhaps I didn't even understand the young when I was young. That could be true too.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBut in case you're wondering, I don't envy the young. In my days of adolescent rage and insolence, I would ask myself: What are the old for, if not to envy the young? That seemed to me their principal and final purpose before extinction. I was walking to meet Susan one afternoon, and had reached the Village's zebra crossing. There was a car approaching, but with a lover's normal eagerness, I started to cross anyway. The car braked, harder than its driver had evidently wanted to, and hooted at me. I stopped where I was, right in line with the car's bonnet, and stared back at the driver. I admit I was perhaps an annoying sight. Long hair, purple jeans, and young\u2014filthy, fucking young. The driver wound down his window and swore at me. I strolled round to him, smiling, and keen on confrontation. He was old\u2014filthy, fucking old, with an old person's stupid red ears. You know those sorts of ears, all fleshy, with hairs growing on them inside and out? Thick, bristly ones inside; thin, furry ones outside.\n\n\"You'll be dead before I will,\" I informed him, and then dawdled off as irritatingly as I could manage.\n\nSo, now that I am older I realise that this is one of my human functions: to allow the young to believe that I envy them. Well, obviously I do in the brute matter of being dead first; but otherwise not. And when I see pairs of young lovers, vertically entwined on street corners, or horizontally entwined on a blanket in the park, the main feeling it arouses in me is a kind of protectiveness. No, not pity: protectiveness. Not that they would want my protection. And yet\u2014and this is curious\u2014the more bravado they show in their behaviour, the stronger my response. I want to protect them from what the world is probably going to do to them, and from what they will probably do to one another. But of course, this isn't possible. My care is not required, and their confidence insane.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nIt was a matter of some pride to me that I seemed to have landed on exactly the relationship of which my parents would most disapprove. I have no wish\u2014certainly not at this late stage\u2014to demonise them. They were products of their time and age and class and genes\u2014just as I am. They were hardworking, truthful and wanted what they thought was the best for their only child. The faults I found in them were, in a different light, virtues. But at the time...\n\n\"Hi, Mum and Dad, I've something to tell you. I'm actually gay, which you probably guessed, and I'm going on holiday next week with Pedro. Yes, Mum, that Pedro, the one who does your hair in the Village. Well, he asked me where I was going for my holidays, and I just said, 'Any suggestions?' and we took it from there. So we're off to a Greek island together.\"\n\nI imagine my parents being upset, and wondering what the neighbours would say, and going to ground for a while, and talking behind closed doors, and theorising difficulties ahead for me which would only be a projection of their own confused feelings. But then they would decide that times were changing, and find a little quiet heroism in their ability to accommodate this unanticipated situation, and my mother would wonder how socially appropriate it would be to let Pedro carry on cutting her hair, and then\u2014worst stage of all\u2014she would award herself a badge of honour for her newfound tolerance, all the while giving thanks to the God in whom she did not believe that her father hadn't lived to see the day...\n\nYes, that would have been all right, eventually. As would another scenario then popular in the newspapers.\n\n\"Hi, Parents, this is Cindy, she's my girlfriend, well, actually a little bit more than that, as you can see, she's going to be a 'gymslip mum' in a few months' time. Don't worry, she was dead legal when I swooped at the school gates, but I guess the clock's ticking on this one, so you'd better meet her parents and book the registry office.\"\n\nYes, they could have coped with that too. Of course, their best-case scenario, as previously noted, was that down at the tennis club I would meet a nice Christine or Virginia whose emollient and optimistic nature would have been to their taste. And then there could have been a proper engagement followed by a proper wedding and a proper honeymoon, leading to proper grandchildren. But instead I had gone to the tennis club and come back with Mrs. Susan Macleod, a married woman of the parish with two daughters, both older than me. And\u2014until such time as I shrugged off this foolish case of calf love\u2014there would be no engagement or wedding, let alone patter of tiny feet. There would only be embarrassment and humiliation and shame, and prim looks from neighbours and sly allusions to cradle-snatching. So I had managed to present them with a case so far beyond the pale that it could not even be admitted, much less sensibly discussed. And by now, my mother's original idea of inviting the Macleods round for sherry had been definitively junked.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThis thing with parents. All my friends at university\u2014Eric, Barney, Ian and Sam\u2014had it in varying amounts. And we were hardly a pack of stoned hippies in shaggy Afghan coats. We were normal\u2014normalish\u2014middle-class boys feeling the irritable rub of growing up. We all had our stories, most of them interchangeable, though Barney's were always the best. Not least because he gave his parents so much lip.\n\n\"So,\" Barney told us, as we reassembled for another term, and were exchanging dismal tales of Life at Home. \"I'd been back about three weeks, and it's ten in the morning and I'm still in bed. Well, there's nothing to get up for in Pinner, is there? Then I hear the bedroom door open, and my mum and dad come in. They sit on the end of my bed, and Mum starts asking me if I know what time it is.\"\n\n\"Why can't they learn to knock?\" asked Sam. \"You might have been in mid-wank.\"\n\n\"So, naturally I said that it was probably morning by my reckoning. And then they asked what I was planning to do that day, and I said I wasn't going to think about it till after breakfast. My dad gave this sort of dry cough\u2014it's always a sign that he's starting to boil up. Then my mum suggests I might get a holiday job to earn a little pin money. So I admit that it hadn't exactly crossed my mind to apply for temporary employment in some menial trade.\"\n\n\"Nice one, Barney,\" we chorused.\n\n\"And then my mum asked if I was planning to idle away my whole life, and you know, I was beginning to get annoyed\u2014I'm like my father in that, slow burn, except I don't give that little warning cough. Anyway, my dad suddenly loses it, stands up, rips open the curtains and shouts,\n\n\" 'We don't want you treating this place like a fucking hotel!' \"\n\n\"Oh, _that_ old one. We've all had that. So what did you say?\"\n\n\"I said, 'If this _was_ a fucking hotel, the fucking management wouldn't burst into my room at ten in the morning and sit on my fucking bed and bollock me.' \"\n\n\"Barney, you ace!\"\n\n\"Well, it was very provoking, I thought.\"\n\n\"Barney, you ace!\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nSo the Macleod household consisted of Susan, Mr. E.P., and two daughters, both away at university, known as Miss G. and Miss N.S. There was an old char who came twice a week, Mrs. Dyer; she had poor eyesight for cleaning but perfect vision for stealing vegetables and pints of milk. But who else came to the house? No friends were mentioned. Each weekend, Macleod played a round of golf; Susan had the tennis club. In all the times I joined them for supper, I never met anyone else.\n\nI asked Susan who their friends were. She replied, in a casually dismissive tone I hadn't noted before, \"Oh, the girls have friends\u2014they bring them home from time to time.\"\n\nThis hardly seemed an adequate response. But a week or so later, Susan told me we were going to visit Joan.\n\n\"You drive,\" she said, handing me the keys to the Macleods' Austin. This felt like promotion, and I was fastidious with my gear-changing.\n\nJoan lived about three miles away, and was the surviving sister of Gerald, who donkey's years previously had been sweet on Susan, but then had died suddenly from leukaemia, which was beastly luck. Joan had looked after their father until his death and had never married; she liked dogs and took an afternoon gin or two.\n\nWe parked in front of a squat, half-timbered house behind a beech hedge. Joan had a cigarette on when she answered the door, embraced Susan and looked at me inquisitively.\n\n\"This is Paul. He's driving me today. I really need my eyes testing, I think it's time for a new prescription. We met at the tennis club.\"\n\nJoan nodded, and said, \"I've shut the yappers up.\"\n\nShe was a large woman in a pastel-blue trouser suit; she had tight curls, brown lipstick, and was approximately powdered. She led us into the sitting room and collapsed into an armchair with a footstool in front of it. Joan was probably about five years older than Susan, but struck me as a generation ahead. On one arm of her chair was a face-down book of crosswords, on the other a brass ashtray held in place by weights concealed in a leather strap. The ashtray looked precariously full to me. No sooner had Joan sat down than she was up again.\n\n\"Join me in a little one?\"\n\n\"Too early for me, darling.\"\n\n\"You're not exactly driving,\" Joan replied grumpily. Then, looking at me, \"Drink, young sir?\"\n\n\"No thank you.\"\n\n\"Well, suit yourselves. At least you'll have a gasper with me.\"\n\nSusan, to my surprise, took a cigarette and lit up. It felt to me like a friendship whose hierarchy had been established long ago, with Joan as senior partner and Susan, if not subservient, at any rate the listening one. Joan's opening monologue told of her life since she'd last seen Susan, which seemed to me largely a catalogue of small annoyances triumphantly overcome, of dog-talk and bridge-talk, which resolved itself into the headline news that she had recently found a place ten miles away where you could get her favourite gin for some trifling sum less than it cost in the Village.\n\nBored out of my skull, half-disapproving of the cigarette Susan appeared to be enjoying, I found the following words coming out of my mouth:\n\n\"Have you factored in the petrol?\"\n\nIt was as if my mother had spoken through me.\n\nJoan looked at me with interest verging on approval. \"Now, how would I do that?\"\n\n\"Well, do you know how many mpg you get from your car?\"\n\n\"Of course I do,\" Joan replied, as if it were outrageous and spendthrift not to know. \"Twenty-eight on average around here, a bit over thirty on a longer trip.\"\n\n\"And how much do you pay for petrol?\"\n\n\"Well, that obviously depends on where I buy it, doesn't it?\"\n\n\"Aha!\" I exclaimed, as if this made the matter even more interesting. \"Another variable. Have you got a pocket calculator, by any chance?\"\n\n\"I've got a screwdriver,\" said Joan, laughing.\n\n\"Pencil and paper, at least.\"\n\nShe fetched some and came to sit next to me on the sofa, reeking of cigarettes. \"I want to see this in action.\"\n\n\"So how many off-licences and how many petrol stations are we talking about?\" I began. \"I'll need the full details.\"\n\n\"Anyone would think you're from the Inland Fucking Revenue,\" said Joan with a laugh and a thump on my shoulder.\n\nSo I took down prices and locations and distances, identifying one case of spurious false economy, and came up with her two best options.\n\n\"Of course,\" I added brightly, \"this one would be even more advantageous if you walked into the Village rather than drove.\"\n\nJoan gave a mock shriek. \"But walking's bad for me!\" Then she took my table of calculations, went back to her chair, lit up another cigarette, and said to Susan, \"I can see that he's a very useful young man to have around.\"\n\nAs we were driving away, Susan said, \"Casey Paul, I didn't know you could be so wicked. You had her eating out of your hand by the end of it.\"\n\n\"Anything to help the rich save money,\" I replied, carefully shifting gear. \"I'm your man.\"\n\n\"You _are_ my man, strange as it may seem,\" she agreed, slipping her flattened hand beneath my left thigh as I drove.\n\n\"By the way, what's wrong with your eyes?\"\n\n\"My eyes? Nothing, as far as I know.\"\n\n\"Then why did you go on about having them tested?\"\n\n\"Oh, that? Well, I have to have a form of words to cover you.\"\n\nYes, I could see that. And so I became \"the young man who drives me\" and \"my tennis partner,\" and later, \"a friend of Martha's\" and even\u2014most implausibly\u2014\"a kind of prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Gordon's.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI don't remember when we first kissed. Isn't that odd? I can remember 6\u20132; 7\u20135; 2\u20136. I can remember that old driver's ears in foul detail. But I can't remember when or where we first kissed, or who made the first move, or whether it was both of us at the same time. And whether perhaps it was not so much a move as a drift. Was it in the car or in her house, was it morning, noon or night? And what was the weather like? Well, you certainly won't expect me to remember _that._\n\nAll I can tell you is that it was\u2014by the modern speed of things\u2014a long time before we first kissed, and a long time after that before we first went to bed together. And that between the kissing and the bedding I drove her up to London to buy some contraception. For her, not me. We went to John Bell & Croyden in Wigmore Street; I parked round the corner while she went in. She returned with a brown, unbranded bag containing a Dutch cap and some contraceptive jelly.\n\n\"I wonder if there's a book of instructions,\" she says lightly. \"I'm a bit out of practice with all this.\"\n\nIn my mood\u2014a kind of sombre excitement\u2014I'm momentarily unsure if she's referring to sex, or to putting in the cap.\n\n\"I'll be there to help,\" I say, thinking that this covers both interpretations.\n\n\"Paul,\" she says, \"there are some things it's better for a man not to see. Or to think about.\"\n\n\"OK.\" This definitely means the second option.\n\n\"Where will you keep it?\" I ask, imagining the consequences of its discovery.\n\n\"Oh, somewhere-somewhere,\" she replies. None of my business, then.\n\n\"Don't expect too much of me, Casey,\" she goes on rapidly. \"Casey. That's K.C. King's Cross. You won't be a crosspatch, will you? You won't get all ratty and shirty with me, will you?\"\n\nI lean across and kiss her, in front of whatever interested pedestrians Wimpole Street contains.\n\nI know already that she and her husband have separate beds, indeed separate rooms, and their marriage has been unconsummated\u2014or rather, sex-free\u2014for almost twenty years; but I haven't pressed her for reasons or particulars. On the one hand, I am deeply curious about almost everybody's sex life, past, present and future. On the other, I don't fancy the distraction of other images in my head when I am with her.\n\nI am surprised that she needs contraception, that at forty-eight she is still having periods, and that what she refers to as The Dreaded has not yet arrived. But I am rather proud that it hasn't. This is nothing to do with the possibility that she might get pregnant\u2014nothing could be further from my thoughts or desires; rather it seems a confirmation of her womanliness. I was going to say girlishness; and perhaps that's more what I mean. Yes, she is older; yes, she knows more about the world. But in terms of\u2014what shall I call it? the age of her spirit, perhaps\u2014we aren't that far apart.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\n\"I didn't know you smoked,\" I say.\n\n\"Oh, just the one, occasionally. To keep Joan company. Or I go out into the garden. Do you disapprove terribly?\"\n\n\"No, it just came as a surprise. I don't disapprove. I just think\u2014\"\n\n\"It's stupid. Yes it is. I just take one of his when I'm fed up. Have you noticed the way he smokes? He lights up and puffs away as if his life depends upon it, and then, when he's halfway through, he stubs it out in disgust. And that disgust lasts until he lights up the next one. About five minutes later.\"\n\nYes, I have noticed, but I let it go.\n\n\"Still, it's his drinking that's more annoying.\"\n\n\"But you don't?\"\n\n\"I hate the stuff. Just a glass of sweet sherry at Christmas, so as not to be accused of being a spoilsport. But it changes people. And not for the better.\"\n\nI agree. I have no interest in alcohol, or in people getting \"merry,\" or \"whistled,\" or \"half seas over\" and all the other words and phrases which make them feel better about themselves.\n\nAnd Mr. E.P. was no exemplar of the virtues of drinking. While waiting for his dinner, he would sit at the table surrounded by what Susan called \"his flagons and his gallons,\" pouring from them into his pint mug with an increasingly unsteady hand. In front of him was another mug, stuffed with spring onions, on which he would munch. Then, after a while, he would belch quietly, covering his mouth in a pseudo-genteel manner. As a consequence, I have loathed spring onions for most of my life. And never thought much of beer either.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\n\"You know, I was thinking the other day that I haven't seen his eyes for years. Not really. Not for years and years. Isn't that strange? They're always hidden behind his glasses. And of course I'm never there when he takes them off at night. Not that I want to see them especially. I've seen enough of them. I expect it's the same for a lot of women.\"\n\nThis is how she tells me about herself, in oblique observations which don't require a response. Sometimes, one leads on to another; sometimes, she lets drop a single statement, as if clueing me in to life.\n\n\"The thing you have to understand, Paul, is that we're a played-out generation.\"\n\nI laugh. My parents' generation don't seem at all played out to me: they still have all the power and money and self-assurance. I wish they _were_ played out. Instead, they seem a major obstacle to my growing up. What's that term they use in hospitals? Yes, bed-blockers. They were spiritual bed-blockers.\n\nI ask Susan to explain.\n\n\"We went through the war,\" she says. \"It took a lot out of us. We aren't much good for anything anymore. It's time your lot took charge. Look at our politicians.\"\n\n\"You aren't suggesting I go into politics?\" I am incredulous. I despise politicians, who all strike me as self-important creeps and smoothies. Not that I've ever met a politician, of course.\n\n\"It's exactly because people like you don't go into politics that we're in the mess we are,\" Susan insists.\n\nAgain, I am baffled. I'm not even sure who \"people like me\" might be. For my school and university friends, it seemed like a badge of honour _not_ to be interested in all the matters which politicians endlessly discussed. And then their grand anxieties\u2014the Soviet threat, the End of Empire, tax rates, death duties, the housing crisis, trade union power\u2014would be endlessly regurgitated at the family hearth.\n\nMy parents enjoyed television sitcoms, but were made uneasy by satire. You couldn't buy _Private Eye_ in the Village, but I would bring it back from university and leave it provocatively around the house. I remember one issue whose cover had a floppy 33 rpm disk loosely attached to it. Peeling off the record revealed the photo of a man sitting on the lavatory, trousers and pants round his ankles, shirttails keeping him decent. On to the neck of this anonymous squatter was montaged the head of the Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, with a bubble coming out of his mouth saying, \"Put that record back at once!\" I found it supremely funny, and showed it to my mother; she judged it stupid and puerile. Then I showed it to Susan, who was overcome with laughter. So that was everything decided, in one go: me, my mother, Susan and politics.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nShe laughs at life, this is part of her essence. And no one else in her played-out generation does the same. She laughs at what I laugh at. She also laughs at hitting me on the head with a tennis ball; at the idea of having sherry with my parents; she laughs at her husband, just as she does when crashing the gears of the Austin shooting brake. Naturally, I assume that she laughs at life because she has seen a great deal of it, and understands it. \"By the way,\" I say, \"what's 'whatski'?\"\n\n\"What do you mean, 'What's whatski'?\"\n\n\"I mean, What's 'whatski'?\"\n\n\"Oh, do you mean, 'Whatski's whatski'?\"\n\n\"If you like.\"\n\n\"It's what Russian spies say to one another, silly,\" she replies.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe first time we were together\u2014sexually, I mean\u2014we each told the necessary lies, then drove across to the middle of Hampshire and found two rooms in a hotel.\n\nAs we stand looking down at an acreage of magenta candlewick bedspread, she says,\n\n\"Which side do you prefer? Forehand or backhand?\"\n\nI have never slept in a double bed before. I have never slept a whole night with someone before. The bed looks enormous, the lighting bleak, and from the bathroom comes a smell of disinfectant.\n\n\"I love you,\" I tell her.\n\n\"That's a terrible thing to say to a girl,\" she replies and takes my arm. \"We'd best have dinner first, before we love one another.\"\n\nI already have an erection, and there is nothing generalised about this one. It is very, very specific.\n\nShe has a shyness to her. She never undresses in front of me; she is always in bed with her nightdress on by the time I come into the room. And the light would be out. I couldn't care less about any of this. I feel I can see in the dark, anyway.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nNor does she \"teach me the arts of love,\" that phrase you read in books. We are both inexperienced, as I said. And she comes from a generation in which the assumption is made that on the wedding night the man \"will know what to do\"\u2014a social excuse to legitimise any previous sexual experience, however squalid, the man might have had. I don't want to go into the specifics in her case, though she does occasionally drop hints.\n\nOne afternoon, we are in bed at their house, and I suggest I ought to be going before \"Someone\" comes home.\n\n\"Of course,\" she replies musingly. \"You know, when he was at school, he always preferred the front half of the elephant, if you catch my meaning. And maybe after school. Who knows? Everyone's got a secret, haven't they?\"\n\n\"What's yours?\"\n\n\"Mine? Oh, he told me I was frigid. Not at the time. But later, after we'd stopped. When it was too late to do anything about anything.\"\n\n\"I don't think you're remotely frigid,\" I say, with a mixture of outrage and possessiveness. \"I think you're...very warm-blooded.\"\n\nShe pats my chest in reply. I know little about the female orgasm, and somehow assume that if you manage to keep going long enough, it will at some point be automatically triggered in the woman. Like breaking the sound barrier, perhaps. As I am unable to take the discussion further, I start to get dressed. Later, I think: she is warm, she is affectionate, she loves me, she encourages me into bed, we stay there a long time, _I_ don't think she's frigid, what's the problem?\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWe talk about everything: the state of the world (not good), the state of her marriage (not good), the general character and moral standards of the Village (not good) and even Death (not good).\n\n\"Isn't it strange?\" she muses. \"My mother died of cancer when I was ten and I only ever think of her when I'm cutting my toenails.\"\n\n\"And yourself?\"\n\n\"Whatski?\"\n\n\"Yourself\u2014dying.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" She goes silent for a bit. \"No, I'm not afraid of dying. My only regret would be missing out on what happens afterwards.\"\n\nI misunderstand her. \"You mean, the afterlife?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't believe in _that,_ \" she says firmly. \"It would all cause far too much trouble. All those people who spent their lives getting away from one another, and suddenly there they all are again, like some dreadful bridge party.\"\n\n\"I didn't know you played bridge.\"\n\n\"I don't. That's not the point, Paul. And then, all those people who did bad things to you. Seeing them again.\"\n\nI leave a pause; she fills it. \"I had an uncle. Uncle Humph. For Humphrey. I used to go and stay with him and Aunt Florence. After my mother died, so I would have been eleven, twelve. My aunt would put me to bed and tuck me in and kiss me and put out the light. And just as I would be getting off to sleep, there was a sudden weight on the side of the bed and it would be Uncle Humph, stinking of brandy and cigars and saying he wanted a goodnight kiss too. And then one time he said, 'Do you know what a \"party kiss\" is?' and before I could reply he rammed his tongue into my mouth and thrashed it around like a live fish. I wish I'd bitten it off. Every summer he did it, till I was about sixteen. Oh, it wasn't as bad as for some, I know, but maybe that's what made me frigid.\"\n\n\"You're _not,_ \" I insist. \"And with a bit of luck the old bastard will be in a very hot place. If there's any justice.\"\n\n\"There isn't,\" she replies. \"There isn't any justice, here or anywhere else. And the afterlife would just be an enormous bridge party with Uncle Humph bidding six no trumps and winning every hand and claiming a party kiss as his reward.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you're the expert,\" I say teasingly.\n\n\"But the thing _is,_ Casey Paul, it would be dreadful, entirely dreadful, if in some way that man was still alive. And what you don't wish for your enemies, you can hardly expect for yourself.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI don't know when the habit developed\u2014early on, I'm sure\u2014but I used to hold her wrists. Maybe it began in a game of seeing if I could encompass them with my middle fingers and thumbs. But it rapidly became something I did. She extends her forearms towards me, fingers making gentle fists, and says, \"Hold my wrists, Paul.\" I encompass them both, and press as hard as I can. What the exchange was about didn't need words. It was a gesture to calm her, to pass something from me to her. An infusion, a transfusion of strength. And of love.\n\nMy attitude to our love was peculiarly straightforward\u2014though I suspect a peculiar straightforwardness is characteristic of all first love. I simply thought: Well, that's the certainty of love between us settled, now the rest of life has to fall into place around it. And I was entirely confident that it would. I remembered from some of my school reading that Passion was meant to Thrive on Obstacles; but now that I was experiencing what I had only previously read about, the notion of an Obstacle to it seemed neither necessary nor desirable. But I was very young, emotionally, and perhaps simply blind to the obstacles others would find in plain sight.\n\nOr perhaps I didn't go by way of previous reading at all. Perhaps my actual thought was more like this: Here we are now, the two of us, and there is where we have to get to; nothing else matters. And though we did in the end get somewhere near to where I dreamed, I had no idea of the cost.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI said I couldn't remember the weather. And there's other stuff as well, like what clothes I wore and what food I ate. Clothes were unimportant necessities back then, and food was just fuel. Nor do I remember things I'd expect to, like the colour of the Macleods' shooting brake. I think it was two-tone. But was it grey and green, or perhaps blue and cream? And though I spent many key hours on its leather seats, I couldn't tell you their colour. Was the fascia panel made of walnut? Who cares? My memory certainly doesn't, and it's memory which is my guide here.\n\nOn top of this, there are things I can't be bothered to tell you. Like what I studied at university, what my room there was like, and how Eric differed from Barney, and Ian from Sam, and which one of them had red hair. Except that Eric was my closest friend, and continued so for many years. He was the gentlest of us, the most thoughtful, the one who put most trust in others. And\u2014perhaps because of these very qualities\u2014he was the one who had most trouble with girls and, later, women. Was there something about his softness, and his inclination to forgive, which almost provoked bad behaviour in others? I wish I knew the answer to that, not least because of the time I let him down badly. I abandoned him when he needed my help; I betrayed him, if you will. But I'll tell you about this later.\n\nAnd another thing. When I gave you my estate agent's sketch of the Village, some of it might not have been strictly accurate. For instance, the Belisha beacons at the zebra crossing. I might have invented them, because nowadays you rarely see a zebra crossing without a dutiful pair of flashing beacons. But back then, in Surrey, on a road with little traffic...I rather doubt it. I suppose I could do some real-life research\u2014look for old postcards in the central library, or hunt out the very few photos I have from that time, and retrofit my story accordingly. But I'm remembering the past, not reconstructing it. So there won't be much set-dressing. You might prefer more. You might be used to more. But there's nothing I can do about that. I'm not trying to spin you a story; I'm trying to tell you the truth.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nSusan's tennis game comes back to me. Mine\u2014as I may have said\u2014was largely a self-taught business, relying on wristiness, ill-prepared body position and a deliberate, last-minute change of shot which sometimes bamboozled me as much as my opponent. When playing with her, this structural laziness often compromised my intense desire for victory. Her game had schooling behind it: she got into the correct position, hit fully through her groundstrokes, came to the net only when circumstances were propitious, ran her socks off and yet laughed equally at winning and losing. This had been my first impression of her, and from her tennis I naturally extrapolated her character. I assumed that in life too she would be calm, well ordered and reliable, hitting fully through the ball\u2014the best possible backcourt support for her anxious and impulsive partner at the net.\n\nWe entered the mixed doubles in the club's summer tournament. There were about three people watching our first-round match against a couple of old hackers in their mid-fifties; to my surprise, one of the spectators was Joan. Even when we changed ends and she was out of my eyeline, I could hear her smoker's cough.\n\nThe old hackers hacked us to death, playing like a married couple who could instinctively read one another's next move, and never needed to speak, let alone shout. Susan played solidly, as ever, whereas my game was stupidly erratic. I went for overambitious interceptions, took balls I should have left, and then fell into a lethargic sulk as the hackers closed out set and match 6\u20134.\n\nAfterwards, we sat with Joan, two teas and a gin between the three of us.\n\n\"Sorry I let you down,\" I said.\n\n\"That's all right, Paul, I really don't mind.\"\n\nHer even temper made me more irritated with myself. \"No, but I do. I was trying all sorts of stupid stuff. I wasn't any help. And I couldn't get my first serve in.\"\n\n\"You let your left shoulder drop,\" said Joan out of the blue.\n\n\"But I serve right-handed,\" I replied rather petulantly.\n\n\"That's why the left shoulder has to be kept high. Holds you in balance.\"\n\n\"I didn't know you played.\"\n\n\"Played? Ha! I used to win the fucking thing. Until my knees went. You need a few lessons, young Master Paul, that's all. But you've got good hands.\"\n\n\"Look\u2014he's blushing!\" Susan observed unnecessarily. \"I've never seen him do that before.\"\n\nLater, in the car, I say, \"So what's Joan's story? Was she really a good player?\"\n\n\"Oh yes. She and Gerald won pretty much everything, up to county level. She was a strong singles player, as you can probably imagine, until her knees let her down. But she was even better at doubles. Having someone to support and be supported by.\"\n\n\"I like Joan,\" I say. \"I like the way she swears.\"\n\n\"Yes, that's what people see and hear, and like or don't like. Her gin, her cigarettes, her bridge game, her dogs. Her swearing. Don't underestimate Joan.\"\n\n\"I wasn't,\" I protest. \"Anyway, she said I had good hands.\"\n\n\"Don't always be joking, Paul.\"\n\n\"Well, I _am_ only nineteen, as my parents keep reminding me.\"\n\nSusan goes quiet for a bit, then, seeing a lay-by, turns into it and stops the car. She looks ahead through the windscreen.\n\n\"When Gerald died, I wasn't the only one who was hard hit. Joan was devastated. They'd lost their mother when they were little, and their father had to work every day in that insurance company, so they were thrown into depending on one another. And when Gerald died...she went off the rails a bit. Started sleeping with people.\"\n\n\"There's nothing wrong with that.\"\n\n\"There is and there isn't, Casey Paul. Depends on who you are and who they are. And who's robust enough to survive. Usually, that's the man.\"\n\n\"Joan seems pretty robust to me.\"\n\n\"That's an act. We all have an act. You'll have an act one day, oh yes you will. So Joan was a bad picker. And at first it didn't seem to matter, as long as she didn't get pregnant or anything like that. And she didn't. Then she fell like a ton of bricks for...his name doesn't matter. Married of course, rich of course, other girlfriends of course. Set her up at a flat in Kensington.\"\n\n\"Good Lord. Joan was...a kept woman? A...mistress?\" These were words, and sexual functions, I'd only come across in books.\n\n\"Whatever you want to call it. The words don't fit. They rarely do. What do you call you? What do you call me?\" I don't reply. \"And Joan was completely gone on the old bastard. Waiting for his visits, believing his promises, going off on the occasional weekend abroad. He strung her along like that for three years. Then at last, as he'd always promised, he divorced his wife. And Joan thought her ship had come home. She'd proved us all wrong, what's more. 'My ship's coming home,' she kept repeating.\"\n\n\"But it hadn't?\"\n\n\"He married another woman instead. Joan read the announcement in the papers. Piled up all the clothes he'd bought her in the sitting room of the flat, poured lighter fuel over them, lit a match, walked out, slammed the door, put the keys through the letterbox, went back to her father. Turned up on his doorstep. Smelt a bit singed, I expect. Her father didn't say anything or ask any questions, just hugged her. It took her months even to tell him. The only luck\u2014if there was luck\u2014was that she didn't set the whole block of flats on fire. Just burnt a hole in an expensive carpet. She could have ended up in prison for manslaughter.\n\n\"After that she took care of her father devotedly. Became interested in dogs. Had a go at breeding them. Learned how to pass the time. That's one of the things about life. We're all just looking for a place of safety. And if you don't find one, then you have to learn how to pass the time.\"\n\nI don't think this will ever be my problem. Life is just too full and always will be.\n\n\"Poor old Joan,\" I say. \"I'd never have guessed.\"\n\n\"She cheats at crosswords.\"\n\nThis seems a non sequitur to me.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"She cheats at crosswords. She does them out of books. She once told me that if she gets stuck, she fills in any old word, as long as it's the right number of letters.\"\n\n\"But that defeats the whole purpose...and anyway, all the answers are in the back of those books.\" I am at a loss, so just repeat, \"Poor old Joan.\"\n\n\"Yes and no. Yes and no. But don't ever forget, young Master Paul. Everyone has their love story. Everyone. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind, that doesn't make it any less real. Sometimes, it makes it more real. Sometimes, you see a couple, and they seem bored witless with one another, and you can't imagine them having anything in common, or why they're still living together. But it's not just habit or complacency or convention or anything like that. It's because once, they had their love story. Everyone does. It's the only story.\"\n\nI don't answer. I feel rebuked. Not rebuked by Susan. Rebuked by life.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThat evening, I looked at my parents and paid attention to everything they said to one another. I tried to imagine that they too had had their love story. Once upon a time. But I couldn't get anywhere with that. Then I tried imagining that each had had their love story, but separately, either before marriage or perhaps\u2014even more thrillingly\u2014during it. But I couldn't make that work either, so I gave up. I found myself wondering instead if, like Joan, I would one day have an act of my own, an act designed to deflect curiosity. Who could tell?\n\nThen I went back and tried to imagine how it might have been for my parents in those years before I had existed. I picture them starting off together, side by side, hand in hand, happy, confident, strolling down some gentle, soft, grassy furrow. All is verdant and the view extensive; there seems to be no hurry. Then, as life proceeds, in its normal, daily, unthreatening way, the furrow very slowly deepens, and the green becomes flecked with brown. A little further on\u2014a decade or two\u2014and the earth is heaped higher on either side, and they are unable to see over the top. And now there is no escape, no turning back. There is only the sky above, and ever-higher walls of brown earth, threatening to entomb them.\n\nWhatever happened, I wasn't going to be a furrow-dweller. Or a breeder of dogs.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\n\"What you have to understand is this,\" she says. \"There were three of us. The boys got the education\u2014that's how it was. Philip's took him all the way, but the money for Alec ran out when he was fifteen. Alec was the one I was closest to. Everyone adored Alec, he was just the best. Naturally, he joined up as soon as he could, that's what the best ones did. The Air Force. He ended up flying Sunderlands. They're flying boats. They used to go out on long patrols over the Atlantic, looking for U-boats. Thirteen hours at a time. They gave them pills to help them keep going. No, that's nothing to do with it.\n\n\"So, you see, on his last leave he took me to supper. Nowhere posh, just Corner House. And he took my hands in his and said, 'Sue darling, they're complicated beasts, those Sunderlands, and I often don't think I'm up to it. They're too bloody complicated, and sometimes, when you're out there over the water, and it all looks the same, hour after hour, you've no idea where you are, and sometimes even the navigator doesn't either. I always say a prayer at takeoff and landing. I don't believe, but I say a prayer nevertheless. And every time I'm just as bloody scared as the time before. Right, I've got that off my chest. Corners up from now on. Corners up in the Corner House.'\n\n\"That was the last time I saw him. He was posted missing three weeks later. They never found a trace of his plane. And I always think of him out there, over the water, being scared.\"\n\nI put my arm around her. She shakes it loose, frowningly.\n\n\"No, that's not all. There always seemed to be these men around. It was wartime and you'd think they'd all be off fighting, but there was a jolly lot of them around at home, I can tell you. The lesser men. So there was Gerald, who couldn't pass the medical, even though he tried twice, and then Gordon, who was in a reserved occupation, as he liked to say. Gerald was sweet-tempered and nice-looking, and Gordon was a bit of a crosspatch, but anyway I just preferred dancing with Gerald. Then we got engaged, because, well, it was wartime and people did things like that then. I don't think I was in love with Gerald, but he was a kind man, that's for sure. And then he went and died of leukaemia. I told you that. It was beastly luck. So I thought I might as well marry Gordon. I thought it might make him less of a crosspatch. And _that_ part of things didn't work out, as you may have observed.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\" _So,_ you see, we're a played-out generation. All the best ones went. We were left with the lesser ones. It's always like that in war. That's why it's up to your generation now.\"\n\nBut I don't feel part of a generation, for a start; and, moved as I am by her story, her history, her prehistory, I still don't want to go into politics.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWe were driving somewhere in my car, a Morris Minor convertible in a shade of mud-green. Susan said it looked like a very low-level German staff car from the war. We were at the foot of a long hill, with no traffic in sight. I was never a reckless driver, but I pushed hard down on the accelerator pedal to get a good run at the gradient. And after about fifty yards I realised something was seriously wrong. The car was accelerating at full throttle, even though I'd now taken my foot off the pedal. Instinctively, I rammed it on the brake. That didn't help much. I was doing two things at the same time: panicking, and thinking clearly. Don't ever believe those two states are incompatible. The engine was roaring, the brakes were screaming, the car was beginning to slew across the road, we were going between forty and fifty. It never occurred to me to ask Susan what to do. I thought, this is my problem, I've got to fix it. And then it came to me: take the car out of gear. So I put in the clutch, and moved the gear stick to neutral. The car's hysteria decreased and we coasted to a halt on the verge.\n\n\"Well done, Casey Paul,\" she says. Giving me both names was usually a sign of approval.\n\n\"I should have thought of that earlier. Actually, I should have just switched off the bloody ignition. That would have done it. But it didn't cross my mind.\"\n\n\"I think there's a garage over the hill,\" she says, getting out, as if such an event were entirely routine.\n\n\"Were you scared?\"\n\n\"No. I knew you'd sort it out, whatever it was. I always feel safe with you.\"\n\nI remember her saying that, and me feeling proud. But I also remember the feel of the car as it raced out of control, as it resisted the brakes, as it bucked and slewed across the road.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI must tell you about her teeth. Well, two of them, anyway. The middle front ones at the top. She called them her \"rabbit teeth\" because they were perhaps a millimetre longer than the strict national average; but that, to me, made them the more special. I used to tap them lightly with my middle finger, checking that they were there, and secure, just as she was. It was a little ritual, as if I was taking an inventory of her.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nEveryone in the Village, every grown-up\u2014or rather, every middle-aged person\u2014seemed to do crosswords: my parents, their friends, Joan, Gordon Macleod. Everyone apart from Susan. They did either _The Times_ or _The Telegraph;_ though Joan had those books of hers to fall back on while waiting for the next newspaper. I regarded this traditional British activity with some snootiness. I was keen in those days to find hidden motives\u2014preferably involving hypocrisy\u2014behind the obvious ones. Clearly, this supposedly harmless pastime was about more than solving cryptic clues and filling in the answers. My analysis identified the following elements: 1) the desire to reduce the chaos of the universe to a small, comprehensible grid of black-and-white squares; 2) the underlying belief that everything in life could, in the end, be solved; 3) the confirmation that existence was essentially a ludic activity; and 4) the hope that this activity would keep at bay the existential pain of our brief sublunary transit from birth to death. That seemed to cover it!\n\nOne evening, Gordon Macleod looked up from behind a cigarette smokescreen and asked,\n\n\"Town in Somerset, seven letters, ends in N.\"\n\nI thought about this for a while. \"Swindon?\"\n\nHe made a tolerant tut-tut. \"Swindon's in Wiltshire.\"\n\n\"Is it really? That's a surprise. Have you ever been there?\"\n\n\"Whether I have or not is hardly relevant to the business in hand,\" he replied. \"Look at it on the page. That might help.\"\n\nI went and sat next to him. Seeing a lineup of six blank spaces followed by an N didn't help me any the more.\n\n\"Taunton,\" he announced, putting in the answer. I noticed the eccentric way he did his capital letters, lifting the pen from the page to make each stroke. Whereas anyone else would produce an N from two applications of pen to paper, he made three.\n\n\"Continue mocking Somerset town. That was the clue.\"\n\nI thought about this, not very hard, admittedly.\n\n\"Taunt on\u2014continue mocking. Taunt on\u2014TAUNTON. Get it, young fellermelad?\"\n\n\"Oh, _I see,_ \" I said nodding. \"That's clever.\"\n\nI didn't mean it, of course. I was also thinking that Macleod must certainly have got the answer before he asked me. So then I added an extra clause to my analysis of the crossword\u2014or, as Macleod preferred to call it, The Puzzle: 3b) false confirmation that you are more intelligent than some give you credit for.\n\n\"Does Mrs. Macleod do the crossword?\" I asked, already knowing the answer. Two could play at this game, I thought.\n\n\"The Puzzle,\" he replied with some archness, \"is not really a female domain.\"\n\n\"My mum does the crossword with my dad. Joan does the crossword.\"\n\nHe lowered his chin and looked at me over his spectacles.\n\n\"Then let us posit, perhaps, that The Puzzle is not the domain of the womanly woman. What do you say to that?\"\n\n\"I'd say I don't have enough experience of life to come to a conclusion on that one.\" Though inwardly I was reflecting on the phrase \"womanly woman.\" Was it uxorious praise, or some kind of disguised insult?\n\n\"So that gives us an O in the middle of twelve down,\" he went on. Suddenly there was an \"us\" involved.\n\nI gazed at the clue. Something about an arbiter in work and a leaf.\n\n\"TREFOIL,\" Macleod muttered, writing it in, three strokes of his pen on the R, where others would construct it from two. \"You see, it's REF\u2014arbiter\u2014in the middle of TOIL\u2014work.\"\n\n\"That's clever too,\" I falsely enthused.\n\n\"Standard. Had it before a few times,\" he added with a touch of complacency.\n\n2b) the further belief that once you have solved something in life, you will be able to solve it again, and the solution will be exactly the same the second time around, thus offering assurance that you have reached a pitch of maturity and wisdom.\n\nMacleod decided, without my asking, to teach me the ins and outs of The Puzzle. Anagrams, and how to spot them; words hidden inside other combinations of words; setters' shorthand and their favourite tricks; common abbreviations, letters and words drawn from chess annotation, military ranks, and so on; how a word may be written upwards in the solution to a down clue, or backwards in an across clue. \" 'Running west,' you see, that's the giveaway.\"\n\nCorrection to 4). To begin: \"the hope that this arse-bendingly boring activity would keep...\"\n\nLater, I tried making an anagram out of WOMANLY WOMAN. I didn't get anywhere, of course. WANLY MOWN LOOM and other bits of nonsense were all I turned up.\n\nFurther addition: 1a) a successful means of taking your mind off the question of love, which is all that counts in the world.\n\nNonetheless, I continued to keep Macleod company while he puffed away at his Players and filled his grids with strangely mechanical pen strokes. He seemed to enjoy explaining clues to me, and took my occasional half-meant whistles and grunts as applause.\n\n\"We'll make a Puzzle-solver of him yet,\" he remarked to Susan over supper one evening.\n\nSometimes, we did things together, he and I. Nothing major, or for a long time, anyway. He asked me for my help with some rope-and-pin instrument in the garden, designed to ensure that the cabbages he was planting out were in regimental lines. A couple of times, we listened to a test match on the radio. Once, he took me with him to fill up the car with what he referred to as \"petroleum.\" I asked which garage he was intending to patronise. The nearest, he told me, unsurprisingly. I told him that I had done an analysis of price versus distance in the matter of Joan's gin, and what my findings had been.\n\n\"How incredibly boring,\" he commented, and then smiled at me.\n\nI realised that I had seen his eyes on more than one occasion recently. Whereas Susan hadn't seen them in years. Maybe she was exaggerating. Or maybe she hadn't been looking too hard in the first place.\n\nNOW ONLY MMWAA...no, that wasn't any good either.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHere is something I often thought at this time: I've been educated at school and university, and yet, in real terms, I know nothing. Susan barely went to school, but she knows so much more. I've got the book-learning, she's got the life-learning.\n\nNot that I always agreed with her. When she was talking about Joan, she'd said: \"We're all just looking for a place of safety.\" I pondered these words for a while afterwards. The conclusion I came to was this: maybe so, but I'm young, I'm \"only nineteen,\" and I'm more interested in looking for a place of danger.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nLike Susan, I had euphemistic phrases to describe our relationship. We just seem to have this rapport across the generations. She's my tennis partner. We both like music and go up to London for concerts. Also, art exhibitions. Oh, I don't know, we just get on somehow. I have no idea who believed what, and who knew what, and how much my pride made it all flauntingly obvious. Nowadays, at the other end of life, I have a rule of thumb about whether or not two people are having an affair: if you think they might be, then they definitely are. But this was decades ago, and perhaps, back then, the couples you thought might be, mainly weren't.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAnd then there were the daughters. I wasn't much at ease with girls at that time of my life, neither the ones I met at university, nor the Carolines at the tennis club. I didn't understand that they were mostly just as nervous as I was about...the whole caboodle. And while boys were good at coming up with their own, homemade bullshit, girls, in their understanding of the world, often seemed to fall back on The Wisdom of Their Mothers. You could sniff the inauthenticity when a girl\u2014knowing no more than you did about anything\u2014said something like: \"Everyone's got twenty-twenty vision with hindsight.\" A line which could have issued word for word from the mouth of my mother. Another piece of appropriated maternal wisdom I remember from this time was this: \"If you lower your expectations, you can't be disappointed.\" This struck me as a dismal approach to life, whether for a forty-five-year-old mother or a twenty-year-old daughter.\n\nBut anyway: Martha and Clara. Miss G. and Miss N.S. Miss Grumpy and Miss Not So (Grumpy). Martha was like her mother physically, tall and pretty, but with something of her father's querulous temperament. Clara was plump and round, but entirely more equable. Miss Grumpy disapproved of me; Miss Not So was friendly, even interested. Miss Grumpy said things like, \"Haven't you got a home of your own to go to?\" Miss Not So would ask what I was reading and once, even, showed me some poetry she'd written. But I wasn't much of a judge of poetry, then or now, so my response probably disappointed her. This was my preliminary assessment, for what it was worth.\n\nIf I was uneasy with girls generally, I was the more so with ones who were a bit older than me, let alone ones whose mother I was in love with. This awkwardness of mine seemed to emphasise the insouciance with which they moved about their own house, appeared, disappeared, spoke or failed to speak. My reaction to this was possibly a bit crude, but I decided to be no more interested in them than they were in me. This seemed to amount to less than a passing 5 percent. Which was fine by me, because more than 95 percent of my interest was in Susan.\n\nSince Martha disapproved of me the more, it was to her, in a spirit of either challenge or perversity, that I said:\n\n\"I think I should explain. Susan's a kind of mother-substitute for me.\"\n\nNo, it wasn't very good, in any way. It probably sounded false, a slimy attempt at ingratiation. Martha took her time about replying, and her tone was acerbic.\n\n\"I don't need one, I've already got a mother.\"\n\nDid I mean any part of my lie? I can't believe that I did. Strange as it may seem I never reflected on our age difference. Age felt as irrelevant as money. Susan never seemed a member of my parents' generation\u2014\"played-out\" or not. She never pulled any sort of rank on me, never said, \"Ah, when you're a bit older, you'll understand\" and stuff like that. It was only my parents who harped on about my immaturity.\n\nAha, you might say, but surely the fact that you told her own daughter that for you she was a mother-substitute is a complete giveaway? You may claim it was insincere, but don't we all make jokes to allay our inner fears? She was almost exactly the same age as your mother, and you went to bed with her. So?\n\nSo. I see where you're going\u2014bus number 27 to a crossroads near Delphi. Look, I did not want, at any point, on any level, to kill my own father and sleep with my own mother. It's true that I wanted to sleep with Susan\u2014and did so many times\u2014and for a number of years thought of killing Gordon Macleod, but that is another part of the story. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think the Oedipus myth is precisely what it started off as: melodrama rather than psychology. In all my years of life I've never met anyone to whom it might apply.\n\nYou think I'm being naive? You wish to point out that human motivation is deviously buried, and hides its mysterious workings from those who blindly submit to it? Perhaps so. But even\u2014especially\u2014Oedipus didn't _want_ to kill his father and sleep with his mother, did he? Oh yes he did! Oh no he didn't! Yes, let's just leave it as a pantomime exchange.\n\nNot that prehistory doesn't matter. Indeed, I think prehistory is central to all relationships.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBut I'd much rather tell you about her ears. I missed my first sight of them at the tennis club, when she had her hair pulled back by that green ribbon which matched the piping and buttons of her dress. And normally, she wore her hair down, curling over her ears and descending to mid-neck. So it wasn't until we were in bed and I was rummaging and rootling around her body, into every nook and cranny, every overexamined and underexamined part of her, that, crouched above, I swept back her hair and discovered her ears.\n\nI'd never thought much about ears before, except as comic excrescences. Good ears were ears you didn't notice; bad ears stuck out like bat wings, or were cauliflowered from a boxer's punch, or\u2014like those of that furious driver at the zebra crossing\u2014were coarse and red and hairy. But her ears, ah, her ears...from the discreet, almost absent lobe they set off northwards at a gentle angle, but then at the midpoint turned back at the same angle to return to her skull. It was as if they had been designed according to aesthetic principle rather than the rules of auditory practicality.\n\nWhen I point this out to her, she says, \"It's probably so all that _rubbish_ scoots past them and doesn't go inside.\"\n\nBut there was more. As I explored them with the tips of my fingers, I discovered the delicacy of their outer rim: thin, warm, gentle, almost translucent. Do you know the word for that outermost whorl of the ear? It's called the helix. Plural: helices. Her ears were part of her absolute distinctiveness, expressions of her DNA. The double helix of her double helices.\n\nLater, turning my mind to what she might have meant by the \"rubbish\" that scooted past her astonishing ears, I thought: well, being accused of frigidity, that's a major piece of rubbish. Except that this word had gone straight into her ears and thence her brain and was lodged there, permanently.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAs I said, money had no more relevance to our relationship than age. So it didn't matter that she paid for things. I had none of that foolish masculine pride in such circumstances. Perhaps I even felt my lack of money made my love for Susan the more virtuous.\n\nAfter a few months\u2014maybe longer\u2014she announces that I need a running-away fund.\n\n\"What for?\"\n\n\"For running away. Everyone should have a running-away fund.\" Just as every young man should have a reputation. Where had this latest idea come from? A Nancy Mitford novel?\n\n\"But I don't want to run away. Who from? My parents? I've more or less left them anyway. Mentally. You? Why should I want to run away from you? I want you to be in my life forever.\"\n\n\"That's very sweet of you, Paul. But it's not a specific fund, you see. It's a sort of general fund. Because at some point everyone wants to run away from their life. It's about the only thing human beings have in common.\"\n\nThis is all way above my head. The only running away I might contemplate is running away with her rather than from her.\n\nA few days later, she gives me a cheque for \u00a3500. My car had cost me \u00a325; I lived for a term at university on under \u00a3100. The sum seemed both very large and also meaningless. I didn't even think it \"generous.\" I had no principles about money, either for or against. And it was entirely irrelevant to our relationship\u2014that much I knew. So when I got back to Sussex, I went into town, opened a deposit account at the first bank I came to, handed over the cheque and forgot about it.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThere's something I probably should have clarified earlier. I may be making my relationship with Susan sound like a sweet summer interlude. That's what the stereotype insists, after all. There is a sexual and emotional initiation, a lush passage of treats and pleasures and spoilings, then the woman, with a pang but also a sense of honour, releases the young man back into the wider world and younger bodies of his own generation. But I've already told you that it wasn't like this.\n\nWe were together\u2014and I mean together\u2014for ten or a dozen years, depending on where you start and stop counting. And those years happened to coincide with what the newspapers liked to call the Sexual Revolution: a time of omni-fucking\u2014or so we were led to believe\u2014of instant pleasures, and loose, guilt-free liaisons, when deep lust and emotional lightness became the order of the day. So you could say that my relationship with Susan proved as offensive to the new norms as to the old ones.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI remember her, one afternoon, wearing a print dress with flowers on it, going over to a chintz sofa and plumping herself down on it.\n\n\"Look, Casey Paul! I'm disappearing! I'm doing my disappearing act! There's nobody here!\"\n\nI look. It is half-true. Her stockinged legs show clearly, as do her head and neck, but all the middle parts are suddenly camouflaged.\n\n\"Wouldn't you like that, Casey Paul? If we could just disappear and nobody could see us?\"\n\nI don't know how serious, or how merely skittish, she is being. So I don't know how to react. Looking back, I think I was a very literal young man.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI told Eric that I had met this family and fallen in love. I described the Macleods, their house and their way of life, relishing my characterizations. It was the first grown-up thing that had happened to me, I told him.\n\n\"So which of the daughters have you fallen in love with?\" Eric asked.\n\n\"No, not one of the daughters, the mother.\"\n\n\"Ah, the mother,\" he said. \"We like that,\" he added, giving me marks for originality.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nOne day, I notice a dark bruise on her upper arm, just below where the sleeve of her dress ends. It is the size of a large thumbprint.\n\n\"What's that?\" I ask.\n\n\"Oh,\" she says carelessly, \"I must have knocked it against something. I bruise easily.\"\n\nOf course she does, I think. Because she's sensitive, like me. Of course the world can hurt us. That's why we must look after one another.\n\n\"You don't bruise when I hold your wrists.\"\n\n\"I don't think the wrists bruise, do they?\"\n\n\"Not if I'm holding you.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe fact that she was \"old enough to be my mother\" did not go down well with my mother. Nor my father; nor her husband; nor her daughters; nor the Archbishop of Canterbury\u2014not that he was a family friend. I cared no more about approval than I did about money. Though disapproval, whether active or theoretical, ignorant or informed, did nothing but inflame, corroborate and justify my love.\n\nI had no new definition of love. I didn't really examine what it was, and what it might entail. I merely submitted to first love in all its aspects, from butterfly kisses to absolutism. Nothing else mattered. Of course there was \"the rest of my life,\" both present (my degree course) and future (job, salary, social position, retirement, pension, death). You could say that I put this part of my life on hold. Except that's not right: she _was_ my life, and the rest wasn't. Everything else could and must be sacrificed, with or without thought, as and when necessary. Though \"sacrifice\" implies loss. I never felt a sense of loss. Church and state, they say, church and state. No difficulty there. Church first, church always\u2014though not in a sense the Archbishop of Canterbury would have understood it.\n\nI wasn't so much constructing my own idea of love as first doing the necessary rubble clearance. Most of what I'd read, or been taught, about love, didn't seem to apply, from playground rumour to high-minded literary speculation. \"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart \/ 'Tis woman's whole existence.\" How wrong\u2014how gender-biased, as we might now say\u2014was that? And then, at the other end of the spectrum, came the earthy sex-wisdom exchanged between profoundly ignorant if yearningly lustful schoolboys. \"You don't look at the mantelpiece while poking the fire.\" Where had that come from? Some bestial dystopia full of nocturnal, myopic grunting?\n\nBut I wanted her face there all the time: her eyes, her mouth, her precious ears with their elegant helices, her smile, her whispered words. So: I would be flat on my back, she would be lying on top of me, her feet slipped between mine, and she would place the tip of her nose against the tip of mine, and say,\n\n\"Now we see eye to eye.\"\n\nPut it another way. I was nineteen, and I knew that love was incorruptible, proof against both time and tarnish.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI have a sudden attack of\u2014what?\u2014fear, propriety, unselfishness? I say to her, thinking she will know more,\n\n\"You see, I haven't been in love before, so I don't understand about love. What I'm worried about is that, if you love me, it will leave you less for the other people you love.\"\n\nI don't name them. I meant her daughters; and perhaps even her husband.\n\n\"It's not like that,\" she answers at once, as if it is something she too has thought about, and has solved. \"Love's elastic. It's not a question of watering down. It adds on. It doesn't take away. So there's no need to worry about that.\"\n\nSo I didn't.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\n\"There's something I need to explain,\" she begins. \"E.P.'s father was a very nice man. He was a doctor. He collected furniture. Some of these things were his.\" She points vaguely at a heavy oak coffer and a grandfather clock I have never yet heard strike the hour. \"He actually hoped E.P. would become a painter, so he gave him the middle name of Rubens. Which was a bit unfortunate because some of the boys at school assumed he must be Jewish. Anyway, he did the usual schoolboy sketches, which everyone said were promising. But he never became more than promising, so was a disappointment to his father in that department. Jack\u2014the father\u2014was always very kind to me. He used to twinkle at me.\"\n\n\"I can't say I blame him for that.\" I wonder what might be coming next. Surely not some intergenerational imbroglio?\n\n\"We'd only been married a couple of years when Jack got cancer. I'd always thought he would be someone I could go to if I got in any trouble, and now he was going to be taken from me. I used to go and sit with him, but I would get so upset that it usually ended up with him consoling me rather than the other way round. I asked him once what he thought about it all, and he said, 'Of course I'd prefer it otherwise, but I can't complain that I haven't had a fair crack of the whip.' He liked me being with him, maybe because I was young and didn't know very much, and so I stayed there till the end.\n\n\"That day\u2014the last day\u2014the doctor\u2014the one looking after him, who was a good friend as well\u2014came in and said quietly, 'It's time to put you under, Jack.' 'You're right,' came the reply. He'd been in terrible pain for too long, you see. Then Jack turned to me and said, 'I'm sorry our acquaintance has been so brief, my dear. It's been wonderful knowing you. I'm aware that Gordon can be a difficult row to hoe, but I'll die happy knowing that I leave him in your safe and capable hands.' And then I kissed him and left the room.\"\n\n\"You mean, the doctor killed him?\"\n\n\"He gave him enough morphine to put him to sleep, yes.\"\n\n\"But he didn't wake up?\"\n\n\"No. Doctors used to do that in the old days, especially among themselves. Or with a patient they'd known a long time, where there was trust. Easing the suffering is a good idea. It's a terrible disease.\"\n\n\"Even so. I'm not sure I'd want to be killed.\"\n\n\"Well, wait and see, Paul. But that's not the point of the story.\"\n\n\"Sorry.\"\n\n\"The point of the story is 'safe and capable.' \"\n\nI think about this for a while. \"Yes, I see.\" But I'm not sure that I did.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\n\"Where do you usually go for your holidays?\" I ask.\n\n\"Paul, that's such a hairdresser's question.\"\n\nIn reply, I lean over and tuck her hair behind her ears, stroking the helices gently.\n\n\"Oh dear,\" she goes on. \"All these conventional expectations people have of one. No, not you, Casey Paul. I mean, why does everyone have to be the same? We did have a few holidays once, when the girls were young. About as successful as the Dieppe Raid, I'd say. E.P. was not at his best on holidays. I don't see what they're for, really.\"\n\nI wonder if I shouldn't press any further. Perhaps something catastrophic had happened on one of their holidays.\n\n\"So what do you say when hairdressers ask you that question?\"\n\n\"I say, 'We're still going to the usual place.' And that makes them think we've talked about it before and they've forgotten, so they usually let me off after that.\"\n\n\"Maybe you and I should have a holiday.\"\n\n\"You might have to teach me what they're for.\"\n\n\"What they're _for,_ \" I say firmly, \"is for being with someone you love a few hundred miles away from this sodding Village where we both live. Being with them all the time. Going to bed with them and waking up with them.\"\n\n\"Well, put like that, Casey...\"\n\nSo you see, there were some things I knew and she didn't.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWe are sitting in the cafeteria of the Festival Hall before a concert. Susan has noticed early on that when my blood sugar drops I become, in her words, \"a bit of a grumpus,\" and she is now feeding me up to prevent this. I am probably having a something-and-chips; she will content herself with a cup of coffee and a few biscuits. I love these escapes we make up to London, just for a few hours, being together, away from the Village, from my parents and her husband and all that stuff, in the noise and crush of the city, waiting for the silence and then the sudden floatingness of music.\n\nI am about to say all this when a woman comes and sits at our table without a pretence of asking if we mind. A woman of middle age, by herself; that is all she was, though in memory I might have translated her into some version of my mother\u2014at any rate, a woman who could be counted upon to disapprove of my relationship with Susan. And so, after a couple of minutes, knowing exactly what I am doing, I look across and say to Susan, in a clear, exact voice,\n\n\"Will you marry me?\"\n\nShe blushes, covers her ears and bites her lower lip. With a bang and a push and a stomp, the invader picks up her cup and makes for another table.\n\n\"Oh, Casey Paul,\" says Susan, \"you are mighty wicked.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI was having supper at the Macleods'. Clara was there too, back from university. Macleod was at the head of the table with his flagon of whatever, a mugful of spring onions in front of him like a jar of tulips.\n\n\"You might be aware,\" he said to Clara, \"that this young man appears to have joined our household. So be it.\"\n\nI couldn't tell from his tone whether he was being pedantically welcoming or slyly indicating his disdain. I looked across at Clara, but got no help with interpretation.\n\n\"Well, we shall see, shan't we?\" he continued, appearing to contradict his first pronouncement. He took in a mouthful of spring onion and shortly afterwards burped gently.\n\n\"One of the things the young man is kindly, if belatedly, addressing is the question of your mother's musical education. Or, should I say, lack thereof.\"\n\nThen, turning to me: \"Clara was named after Clara Schumann, which was perhaps a little ambitious on our part. She has never, alas, displayed much aptitude for the pianoforte, has she?\"\n\nI couldn't tell if the question was addressed to mother or daughter. As for me, I had never heard of Clara Schumann, so felt at even more of a disadvantage.\n\n\"Maybe, if your mother had begun her musical education earlier, she might have been able to pass on to you some of her now late-flowering enthusiasm.\"\n\nI had never before been in a household in which the male presence was so overbearing and yet so ambiguous. Perhaps this happens when there is only one man around: his understanding of the male role can expand unchallenged. Or perhaps this was just what Gordon Macleod was like.\n\nStill, my inability to grasp tone was a lesser matter that evening. The greater problem was that, at nineteen, I was unskilled at knowing how to behave socially at the table of a man whose wife I was in love with.\n\nDinner and conversation proceeded. Susan seemed half-absent; Clara was quiet. I asked a few polite questions and answered some rather more direct ones in return. As I had told the tennis club's high representatives, I had absolutely no interest in politics; though I did follow current events. So this would have been a few years after the Sharpeville massacre, to which I must have alluded; and doubtless my words contained some element of pious condemnation. Well, I did think it was wrong to massacre people.\n\n\"Do you even know where Sharpeville is?\" The Head of the Table had evidently identified me as a mewling pinko.\n\n\"It's in South Africa,\" I replied. But as I did so, I suddenly wondered if this was a trick question. \"Or Rhodesia,\" I added; then thought again. \"No, South Africa.\"\n\n\"Very good. And what is your considered judgement on the political scene there?\"\n\nI said something about being against shooting people.\n\n\"And what might you advise the police forces of the world to do when confronted with a rioting mob of Communists?\"\n\nI hated the way adults asked you questions in a way which implied that they already knew the answer you were going to give, and that it would always be a wrong or stupid one. So I said something, perhaps facetious, to the effect that just because they were dead, this didn't prove they were Communists.\n\n\"Have you ever _been_ to South Africa?\" Macleod roared at me.\n\nSusan stirred at this point. \"We've none of us been to South Africa.\"\n\n\"True, but I think I know more about the situation there than the two of you put together.\" It seemed that Clara was excused from complicity in ignorance. \"If we were to pile his knowledge on top of your knowledge\u2014Pelion on Ossa, as it were\u2014it still wouldn't amount to a hill of beans.\"\n\nThe long silence was broken by Susan asking if anyone wanted any more to eat.\n\n\"Have you got any beans, Mrs. Macleod?\"\n\nYes, I could be a cheeky bastard, I now realise. Well, I was only nineteen. I hadn't a clue who or what Pelion and Ossa might be; I was more struck by the notion of piling my knowledge on top of Susan's. That was what lovers did, after all: they added to one another's understanding of the world. Also, to \"know\" someone, in the Bible anyway, meant to have sex with them. So I had already piled my knowledge on top of hers. Even if it didn't amount to more than a hill of beans. However tall a hill of beans might be.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nShe told me that her father had been a Christian Science practitioner with many adoring female acolytes. She told me that her brother who had disappeared in the war had gone to a prostitute a few weeks before his last flight because he wanted to \"find out what it was all about.\" She told me that she couldn't swim because she had heavy bones. Things like this tumbled out of her in no particular order, and in response to no particular enquiry on my part, other than the tacit one of wanting to know everything about her. So she laid them out, as if expecting me to make sense, to make order, of her life, and of her heart.\n\n\"Things aren't what they look like, Paul. That's about the only lesson I can teach you.\"\n\nI wonder if she is talking about the sham of respectability, the sham of marriage, the sham of suburbia, or...but she carries on.\n\n\"Winston Churchill, did I tell you about seeing him?\"\n\n\"You mean, you went to Number Ten?\"\n\n\"Silly, no. I saw him in a backstreet in Aylesbury. What was I doing there? Not that it matters. He was sitting in the rear seat of an open-topped car. And his face was all covered in makeup. Red lips, bright pink face. He looked bizarre.\"\n\n\"You're sure it was Churchill? I didn't realise he was...\"\n\n\"...one of them? No, it's nothing like that, Paul. You see, they were waiting to drive him through the city centre\u2014it was after we won the war, or maybe it was the General Election, and he was made up for the cameras. Path\u00e9 News and all that.\"\n\n\"How weird.\"\n\n\"It was. So quite a few people saw this strange painted mannequin in the flesh, but far more saw him on the newsreels, when he looked like they expected him to.\"\n\nI think about this for a while. It strikes me as a comic incident, rather than a general principle of life. Anyway, my interests are elsewhere.\n\n\"But you're what you look like, aren't you? _You're_ exactly what you look like?\"\n\nShe kisses me. \"I hope so, my fine and feathered friend. I hope so for both our sakes.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI used to prowl the Macleod house, part anthropologist, part sociologist, wholly lover. At first I naturally compared it to my parents' house, which I therefore found wanting. Here there was style, and ease, and none of that absurd house-pride. My parents had better, more up-to-date kitchen equipment, but I gave them no credit for this; nor for the fact that their car was cleaner, their gutters recently sluiced, their soffits regularly painted, their bathroom taps buffed to a shine, their lavatory seats hygienically plastic rather than warmingly wooden. In our house, the television was taken seriously, and stood centrally; at the Macleods', they called it the goggle-box and hid it behind a firescreen. They owned no such thing as a fitted carpet or a fitted kitchen, let alone a three-piece suite or a bathroom set in matching colours. Their garage was so full of tools, discarded sports equipment, gardening implements, old motor mowers (one working) and unwanted furniture that there was no room in it for the Austin. At first all this seemed stylish and idiosyncratic. I was initially seduced, then slowly disenchanted. My soul no more belonged in a place like this than in my parents' house.\n\nAnd, more importantly, I believed that Susan didn't belong here either. It was something I felt instinctively, and only understood much later, over time. Nowadays, when more than half the country's children are born out of wedlock (wed-lock: I've never noticed the two parts of that term before), it's not so much marriage that ties couples together as the shared occupation of property. A house or a flat can be as beguiling a trap as a wedding certificate; sometimes more so. Property announces a way of life, with a subtle insistence on that way of life continuing. Property also demands constant attention and maintenance: it's like a physical manifestation of the marriage that exists within it.\n\nBut I could see, all too well, that Susan had not been the recipient of constant attention and maintenance. And I'm not talking about sex. Or not just.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHere's something I need to explain. In all the time Susan and I were lovers, I never thought that we were \"deceiving\" Gordon Macleod, Mr. E.P. I never thought of him as being represented by that peculiar old word \"cuckold.\" Obviously, I didn't want him to _know._ But I thought that what took place between Susan and me had nothing to do with him; he was irrelevant to it all. Nor did I have any contempt for him, any young-buck superiority because I was sexually active with his wife and he wasn't. You may think this is just a normal lover's normal self-delusion; but I don't agree. Even when things...changed, and I felt differently about him, this aspect didn't change. He had nothing to do with us, do you see?\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nSusan, perhaps thinking that I was undervaluing her friend Joan, had told me, in a gently admonitory tone, that everyone had their own love story. I was happy to accept this, happy for everyone else to be or have been blessed, even if confident that they couldn't possibly be as blessed as I was. But at the same time, I didn't want Susan to tell me whether she had had her love story with Gerald, or with Gordon, or was having it with me. Whether there were one, two or three stories to her life.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI am round at the Macleods' one evening. It is getting late. Macleod has already gone to bed, and is snoring away his flagons and his gallons. She and I are on the sofa; we have been listening to some music we recently heard at the Festival Hall. I look at her in a way which makes my attentions and desires plain.\n\n\"No, Casey. Kiss me hardly.\"\n\nSo I kiss her hardly, just a brush on the lips, nothing to raise her colour. We hold hands instead.\n\n\"I wish I didn't have to go home,\" I say self-pityingly. \"I hate home.\"\n\n\"Then why do you call it home?\"\n\nI haven't thought of this.\n\n\"Anyway, I wish I could stay here.\"\n\n\"You could always pitch a tent in the garden. I'm sure there's some spare tarpaulin in the garage.\"\n\n\"You know what I mean.\"\n\n\"I know exactly what you mean.\"\n\n\"I could always climb out of a window afterwards.\"\n\n\"And be arrested for burglary by a passing copper? That _would_ land us in the _Advertiser &_ _Gazette._ \" She paused. \"I suppose...\"\n\n\"Yes?\" I hope she is coming up with a master plan.\n\n\"This thing actually turns into a sofa bed. We could put you up here. If E.P. finds you before he goes to work, we'll say\u2014\"\n\nBut just at that moment the phone rings. Susan picks it up, listens, looks at me, says, \"Yes,\" pulls a solemn face and places her hand over the mouthpiece.\n\n\"It's for you.\"\n\nIt is, of course, my mother, demanding to know where I am, which I find an otiose question, given that my current address would be right next to the number in the phone book which she must have just consulted. Also, she wants to know when I shall be back.\n\n\"I'm a bit tired,\" I say. \"So I'm staying here on the sofa bed.\"\n\nMy mother has recently had to put up with a certain amount of insolent lying from me; but insolent truth-telling is pushing things too far.\n\n\"You'll be doing no such thing. I'll be outside in six minutes.\" And then she puts the phone down.\n\n\"She'll be outside in six minutes.\"\n\n\"Lawks-a-mercy,\" says Susan. \"Do you think I should offer her a glass of sherry?\"\n\nWe giggle away the next five-and-three-quarter minutes until we hear a car out in the road.\n\n\"Off you go now, you dirty stop-out,\" she whispers.\n\nMy mother was behind the wheel in her pink dressing gown over her pink nightdress. I didn't check to see if she was driving in bedroom slippers. She was halfway down a cigarette, and before putting the car into gear, flicked the glowing stub out onto the Macleods' driveway.\n\nI got in, and as we drove my mood switched from pert indifference to furious humiliation. An English silence\u2014one in which all the unspoken words are perfectly understood by both parties\u2014prevailed. I got into my bed and wept. The matter was never referred to again.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nSusan's innocence was the more surprising because she never tried to hide it. I'm not sure she ever tried to hide anything\u2014it was against her nature. Later\u2014well, what came later, came later.\n\nBut, for instance\u2014and I can't remember how the subject came up\u2014she once said that she wouldn't necessarily have gone to bed with me if it hadn't been for the known fact that it was bad for a man not to have \"sexual release.\" This is all that remains of the words spoken between us, that simple phrase.\n\nPerhaps it was more ignorance than innocence. Or call it folk wisdom; or patriarchal propaganda. And it set me wondering. Did this mean that she didn't desire me as much as I desired her\u2014constantly, naggingly, utterly? That sex for her meant something different? That she was only going to bed with me for therapeutic reasons, because I might explode like a hot-water cylinder or car radiator if I didn't have this necessary \"release\"? And was there no equivalent of this in female sexual psychology?\n\nLater, I thought: But if that's how she imagines male sexuality to operate, what about her husband? Did she never wonder about his need for \"release\"? Unless, of course, she had seen him explode and so realised the consequences. Or perhaps E.P. went to prostitutes in London\u2014or to the front half of some pantomime elephant? Who knew? Perhaps this explained his oddity.\n\nHis oddity, her innocence. And of course I didn't tell her in reply that young men\u2014all young men in my experience\u2014when deprived of female company, didn't have a problem with \"sexual release,\" for the simple reason that they are, were and always would be wanking away like jackhammers.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHer innocence, my overconfidence; her naivety, my crassness. I was going back to university. I thought it would be funny to buy her a large fat carrot as a farewell present. It would be a joke; she would laugh; she always laughed when I laughed. I went to a greengrocer's and decided a parsnip would be funnier. We went for a drive and stopped somewhere. I gave her the parsnip. She didn't laugh at all, just threw it over her shoulder, and I heard it thump against the back seat of the shooting brake. I have remembered this moment all my life, and though I haven't blushed for many years, I would blush, if I could, about that.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWe managed a brief holiday. I can't remember what lies we told in order to have a few days of truth together. It must have been out of season. We went somewhere near the south coast. I can't remember a hotel, so perhaps we rented a flat. What we said, thought, discovered about one another\u2014all gone. I do remember a broad, empty beach somewhere. Perhaps it was Camber Sands. We photographed one another with my camera. I did handstands on the beach for her. She is wearing a coat and the wind is whipping her hair back, and her hands, holding her coat closed at the neck, are enclosed in large, black false-fur gloves. Behind her is a distant row of beach huts, and a one-storey, shuttered caf\u00e9. No one else is in sight. You could, if you wanted, look at these photographs and deduce the season; also, no doubt, the weather. At this distance, both are meaningless to me.\n\nI was wearing a tie, that's another detail. I had taken off my jacket to do handstands for her. The tie falls straight down the middle of my upturned face, obscuring my nose, dividing me into two halves. Backhand and forehand.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI didn't get much post in those days. Cards from friends, letters from the university reminding me about stuff, bank statements.\n\n\"Local postmark,\" said my mother, handing me an envelope. The address was typed, and there was a heartening \"Esq.\" after my name.\n\n\"Thanks, Mum.\"\n\n\"Aren't you going to open it?\"\n\n\"I shall, Mum.\"\n\nShe huffed off.\n\nThe letter came from the secretary of the tennis club. He was informing me that my temporary membership had been terminated with immediate effect. Further, that \"due to the circumstances,\" none of the membership fee I had paid was refundable. The \"circumstances\" were not specified.\n\nSusan and I had arranged to meet at the club for a pick-up foursome. So after lunch I took my racket and sports bag and set off as if for the courts.\n\n\"Was the letter interesting?\" my mother asked impedingly.\n\nI waved my racket in its press.\n\n\"Tennis club. Asking if I want to join on a permanent basis.\"\n\n\"That's gratifying, Paul. They must be pleased with your game.\"\n\n\"Sounds like it, doesn't it?\"\n\nI drive to Susan's house.\n\n\"I got one too,\" she says.\n\nHer letter is much the same as mine, except more strongly worded. Instead of her membership being terminated \"due to the circumstances\" it is terminated \"due to the evident circumstances of which you will be fully aware.\" The adjusted wording is for Jezebels, for scarlet women.\n\n\"How long have you been a member?\"\n\n\"Thirty years, I suppose. Give or take.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. It's my fault.\"\n\nShe shakes her head in disagreement.\n\n\"Shall we protest?\"\n\nNo.\n\n\"I could burn the place down.\"\n\nNo.\n\n\"Do you think we were spotted somewhere?\"\n\n\"Stop asking questions, Paul. I'm thinking.\"\n\nI sit down beside her on the chintz sofa. What I don't like to say, or not immediately, is that part of me finds the news exhilarating. I\u2014we\u2014are a cause of scandal! Love persecuted yet again by small-minded petty officialdom! Our expulsion might not have been an Obstacle on which Passion Thrives, but the moral and social condemnation implicit in the phrase \"due to the circumstances\" act, to my mind, as an authentication of our love. And who does not want their love authenticated?\n\n\"It's not as if we were caught snogging in the long grass behind the roller.\"\n\n\"Oh, do be quiet, Paul.\"\n\nSo I sit there quietly, my thoughts noisy. I try to remember cases of boys expelled from my school. One for pouring sugar into the petrol tank of a master's car. One for getting his girlfriend pregnant. One for being drunk after a cricket match, urinating in a train compartment and then pulling the communication cord. At the time, all this seemed pretty impressive stuff. But my own rule-breaking struck me as thrilling, triumphant, and, most of all, grown-up.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\n\"Well, now look what the cat's brought in\" was Joan's greeting as she answered the door a few afternoons later. I hadn't warned her of my visit. \"Just give me a moment to shut up the yappers.\"\n\nThe door closed again, and I stood by an elderly boot scraper thinking about the distance that had grown between Susan and me since the tennis club's dismissal of us. I had let my exhilaration show too clearly, which displeased her. She said that she was still \"thinking.\" I couldn't see what there was to think about. She told me there were complications I didn't understand. She told me not to come round until the weekend. I felt downcast, like one awaiting judgement even though no crime that I could see had been committed.\n\n\"Sit yourself down,\" Joan instructed as we reached the fag-fogged, gin-scented den that was nominally her sitting room. \"You'll have something to put a few hairs on your chest?\"\n\n\"Yes, please.\" I didn't drink gin\u2014I hated the smell of it, and it made me feel even worse than wine or beer did. But I didn't want to come across as a prig.\n\n\"Good man.\" She handed me a tumblerful. There was a smear of lipstick at its rim.\n\n\"That's an awful lot,\" I said.\n\n\"We don't pour fucking pub measures in this establishment,\" she replied.\n\nI sipped at the thick, oily, lukewarm substance which didn't smell at all like the juniper berries on the bottle.\n\nJoan lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in my direction as if to nudge me.\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"So. Well. Perhaps you've heard about the tennis club.\"\n\n\"The Village tom-tom speaks of nothing else. The drumheads have been taking a real pasting.\"\n\n\"Yes, I thought you\u2014\"\n\n\"Two things, young man. One, I don't want to know any details. Two, how can I help?\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" I was genuinely touched, but also puzzled. How could she help if she didn't know the details? And what counted as a detail? I thought about this.\n\n\"Come on. What are you here to ask me?\"\n\nThat was the problem. I didn't know what I'd come to ask. I somehow thought that what I wanted from Joan would become clear to me when I saw her. Or she would know anyway. But it hadn't, and she apparently didn't. I tried to explain this, haltingly. Joan nodded, and let me sip my gin and ponder.\n\nThen she said, \"Try lobbing me the first question that comes into your head.\"\n\nI did so without reflecting. \"Do you think Susan would leave Mr. Macleod?\"\n\n\"My, my,\" she said quietly. \"You are aiming high, young man. That's a pair of balls you've got on you. Talk about one step at a time.\"\n\nI grinned inanely at what I took to be a compliment.\n\n\"So have you asked her?\"\n\n\"Gosh, no.\"\n\n\"And, to start at the beginning, what would you do for money?\"\n\n\"I don't care about money,\" I replied.\n\n\"That's because you've never had to.\"\n\nThis was true; but not in the sense that I was rich. My state education had been free, I received a council grant to attend university, I lived at home in the holidays. But it was also true that I didn't care about money\u2014indeed, in my world view, to care about money meant deliberately to turn your eyes away from the most important things in life.\n\n\"If you're going to be a grown-up,\" said Joan, \"you've got to start thinking about grown-up things. And number one is money.\"\n\nI remembered what I'd been told about Joan's early life\u2014her being a \"kept woman\" or whatever, living no doubt from cash handouts and rent-payings and gifts of clothes and holidays. Is that what she meant by being grown-up?\n\n\"I suppose Susan's got some.\"\n\n\"Have you asked her?\"\n\n\"Gosh, no.\"\n\n\"Well, maybe you should.\"\n\n\"I've got a running-away fund,\" I said defensively, without explaining where it had come from.\n\n\"And how much rattles around in your little piggy bank?\"\n\nIt was odd how I never took offence at anything Joan said. I just assumed that beneath her brusqueness she was kindhearted and on my side. But then lovers always assume that people are on their side.\n\n\"Five hundred pounds,\" I said proudly.\n\n\"Yes, well, you could certainly run away on that. It'll keep you for a few weeks in Le Touquet\u2013Paris\u2013Plage as long as you don't go near the casino. And then you'll come running back to England.\"\n\n\"I suppose so.\" Even if I'd never thought of Le Touquet\u2013Paris\u2013Plage as a destination. Was that where fleeing lovers went?\n\n\"You're going back to college next month, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And you're going to keep her in a kitchen cupboard there? A wardrobe?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nI felt stupid and hopeless. No wonder Susan was \"thinking\" about it all. Was I merely entertaining some romantic notion of flight, a ladder with no steps attached?\n\n\"It's a bit more complicated than working out how to save me on the gin and the petrol.\"\n\nI had been brought solidly down to earth, as Joan no doubt intended.\n\n\"Can I ask you something different?\"\n\n\"Off you go.\"\n\n\"Why do you cheat at crosswords?\"\n\nJoan laughed loudly. \"You cheeky bugger. I suppose Susan told you. Well, it's a fair question, and one I can answer.\" She took another pull of her gin. \"You see\u2014I hope you never get there yourself\u2014but some of us get to the point in life where we realise that nothing matters. Nothing fucking matters. And one of the few side benefits of that is you know you're not going to go to hell for filling in the wrong answers in the crossword. Because you've been to hell and back already and you know all too well what it's like.\"\n\n\"But the answers are in the back of the book.\"\n\n\"Ah, but you see, to me that _would_ be cheating.\"\n\nI felt absurdly fond of her. \"Is there anything I can do for you, Joan?\" I found myself asking.\n\n\"Just don't cause Susan any harm.\"\n\n\"I'd rather cut my own throat,\" I replied.\n\n\"Yes, I think you might even mean that.\" She smiled at me. \"Now, off with you, and mind your driving. I can see you're not yet hardened to the gin.\"\n\nI was about to put the car into gear when there was a tap at the window. I hadn't heard her behind me. I wound the window down.\n\n\"Don't ever care what they say about you,\" Joan said, looking at me intently. \"For instance, some kindly neighbours assume I'm just a ghastly old lezzer living alone with my dogs. So, a failed lezzer at that. Water off a duck's back. That's my advice if you want it.\"\n\n\"Thank you for the gin,\" I replied, and released the handbrake.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nJoan was demanding that I be grown-up. I was prepared to try if it helped Susan; but I still regarded adulthood with some horror. First, I wasn't sure that it was attainable. Secondly, even if attainable, I wasn't sure it was desirable. Thirdly, even if desirable, then only by comparison with childhood and adolescence. What did I dislike and distrust about adulthood? Well to put it briefly: the sense of entitlement, the sense of superiority, the assumption of knowing better if not best, the vast banality of adult opinions, the way women took out compacts and powdered their noses, the way men sat in armchairs with their legs apart and their privates heavily outlined against their trousers, the way they talked about gardens and gardening, the spectacles they wore and the spectacles they made of themselves, the drinking and the smoking, the terrible phlegmy racket when they coughed, the artificial smells they applied to conceal their animal smells, the way men went bald and women shaped their hair with aerosols of glue, the noxious thought that they might still be having sex, their docile obedience to social norms, their snarky disapproval of anything satirical or questioning, their assumption that their children's success would be measured by how well they imitated their parents, the suffocating noise they made when agreeing with one another, their comments about the food they cooked and the food they ate, their love of stuff I found disgusting (especially olives, pickled onions, chutneys, piccalilli, horseradish sauce, spring onions, sandwich spread, stinky cheese and Marmite), their emotional complacency, their sense of racial superiority, the way they counted their pennies, the way they hunted for food trapped between their teeth, the way they weren't interested enough in me, and the way they were too interested in me when I didn't want them to be. This was just a short list, from which Susan was naturally and entirely exempt.\n\nOh, and another thing. The way, doubtless through some atavistic terror of admitting to real feelings, they ironised the emotional life, turning the relationship between the sexes into a silly running joke. The way men implied that women ran everything really; the way women implied that men didn't really understand what was going on. The way men pretended they were the strong, and women had to be petted and indulged and taken care of; the way women pretended that, regardless of the accumulated sexual folklore, they were the ones who had the common sense and practicality. The way each sex blubbingly admitted that, for all the other's faults, they still needed one another. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. And they lived with 'em in marriage, which, as one wit put it, was an institution in the sense of mental institution. Who first said that, a man or a woman?\n\nUnsurprisingly, I looked forward to none of this. Or rather, hoped it would never apply to me; indeed, believed I could make it not apply to me.\n\nSo, actually, when I said, \"I'm nineteen!\" and my parents triumphantly replied, \"Yes, you're _only_ nineteen!\" the triumph was also mine. Thank God I'm \"only\" nineteen, I thought.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nFirst love fixes a life forever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence. It may serve as model, or as counterexample. It may overshadow subsequent loves; on the other hand, it can make them easier, better. Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.\n\n\"We were chosen by lot.\" I don't believe in destiny, as I may have said. But I do believe now that when two lovers meet, there is already so much prehistory that only certain outcomes are possible. Whereas the lovers themselves imagine that the world is being reset, and that the possibilities are both new and infinite.\n\nAnd first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.\n\nSo (and this would have happened earlier, but I am only remembering it now): I am visiting her one afternoon. I know that at three o'clock, by which time her thieving daily will have left and there will be three-and-a-half hours before Mr. E.P. returns, she will be waiting in bed for me. I drive to the Village, park, and set off along Duckers Lane. I am not in the least self-conscious. The more disapproval, real or imagined, from \"the neighbours,\" the better. I do not approach the Macleod house via the back gate and the garden. I turn down their driveway, walking openly and crunching the gravel, rather than discreetly, adulterously, on the grass edge alongside. The house is red-brick, symmetrical, with a central porch, above which is Susan's narrow little bedroom. On each side of the porch, as a decorative feature, every fourth course of brick has been laid to jut out half a brick's width. A couple of tempting inches, I now see, of handhold and foothold.\n\nThe lover as cat burglar? Why not? The back door has been left open for me. But as I walk towards the porch, a lover's confidence infuses me, and I decide that if I go at it with enough initial speed, I might be able to scoot up the ten feet or so of wall, which will get me to the flat, leaded roof on top of the porch. I take a run at it, filled with bravado, ardour and decent hand-eye coordination. Easy-peasy\u2014and here I am, suddenly crouched on the leading. I have made enough noise to bring Susan to the window, first in alarm, then in surprised glee. Someone else would have rebuked me for my folly, told me I might have broken my skull, expressed all their fear and protectiveness: in short, made me feel a foolish and guilty boy. All Susan does is yank up the window and pull me in.\n\n\"I could always get out the same way if Trouble Comes,\" I say pantingly.\n\n\"That would be a lark.\"\n\n\"I'll just go down and lock the back door.\"\n\n\"Ever the thoughtful one,\" says Susan, getting back into her single bed.\n\nAnd that's true, too. I _am_ the thoughtful one. That's part of my prehistory, I suppose. But it's also about what I could have said to Joan: that I am prepared to be grown-up if it will help Susan.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI am a boy; she is a married woman of middle years. I have the cynicism, and the purported understanding of life though I am the idealist as well as the cynic, convinced that I have both the will and the power to mend things.\n\nAnd she? She is neither cynical nor idealistic; she lives without the mental clutter of theorising, and takes each circumstance and situation as it comes. She laughs at things, and sometimes that laughter is a way of not thinking, of avoiding obvious, painful truths. But at the same time I feel that she is closer to life than I am.\n\nWe don't talk about our love; we merely know that it is there, unarguably; that it is what it is, and that everything will flow, inevitably and justly, from this fact. Do we constantly repeat \"I love you\" in confirmation? At this distance, I can't be sure. Though I do remember that when, after locking the back door, I climb into bed with her, she whispers,\n\n\"Never forget, the most vulnerable spot is down the middle.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThen there's that word Joan dropped into our conversation like a concrete fence post into a fishpool: practicality. Over my life I've seen friends fail to leave their marriages, fail to continue affairs, fail even to start them sometimes, all for the same expressed reason. \"It just isn't practical,\" they say wearily. The distances are too great, the train schedules unfavourable, the work hours mismatched; then there's the mortgage; and the children, and the dog; also, the joint ownership of things. \"I just couldn't face sorting out the record collection,\" a non-leaving wife once told me. In the first thrill of love, the couple had amalgamated their records, throwing away duplicates. How was it feasible to unpick all that? And so she stayed; and after a while the temptation to leave passed, and the record collection breathed a sigh of relief.\n\nWhereas it seemed to me, back then, in the absolutism of my condition, that love had nothing to do with practicality; indeed, was its polar opposite. And the fact that it showed contempt for such banal considerations was part of its glory. Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.\n\nYou might ask how deep my understanding of love was at the age of nineteen. A court of law might find it based on a few books and films, conversations with friends, heady dreams, aching fantasies about certain girls on bicycles and a quarter-relationship with the first woman I went to bed with. But my nineteen-year-old self would correct the court: \"understanding\" love is for later, \"understanding\" love verges on practicality, \"understanding\" love is for when the heart has cooled. The lover, in rapture, doesn't want to \"understand\" love, but to experience it, to feel the intensity, the coming-into-focus of things, the acceleration of life, the entirely justifiable egotism, the lustful cockiness, the joyful rant, the calm seriousness, the hot yearning, the certainty, the simplicity, the complexity, the truth, the truth, the truth of love.\n\nTruth and love, that was my credo. I love her, and I see the truth. It must be that simple.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWere we \"any good\" at sex? I've no idea. We didn't think about it. Partly because any sex then seemed by definition good sex. But also because we rarely talked about it, either before, during or after; we did it, believed in it as an expression of our mutual love, even if, physically and mentally, it might have given us different satisfactions. After she had mentioned her supposed frigidity, and I had\u2014from my vast sexual experience\u2014airily dismissed it, the matter was not discussed again. Sometimes, she would murmur, \"Well played, partner,\" afterwards. Sometimes, more seriously, more anxiously, \"Please don't give up on me just yet, Casey Paul.\" I didn't know what to say to that either.\n\nFrom time to time\u2014and not in bed, I must point out\u2014she would say, \"Of course you'll have girlfriends. And that's only right and proper.\" But it didn't seem right, or proper, to me, or even relevant.\n\nOn another occasion, she mentioned a number. I can't remember the context, let alone the number; but I slowly realised that she must be talking about how many times we had made love.\n\n\"You've been counting?\"\n\nShe nodded. Again, I was baffled. Was I meant to have been counting too? And if so, what was I meant to count\u2014the number of times we'd been to bed together, or the number of my orgasms? I wasn't in the least interested, and I wondered why the notion had crossed her mind. There seemed something fatalistic about it\u2014as if she would have something tangible, calculable, to hold on to if I suddenly wasn't there. But I wasn't suddenly going to be not there.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWhen, once again, she made reference to my future girlfriends, I said, very clearly and firmly, that she would always be in my life: whatever happened, there would always be a place for her.\n\n\"But where would you put me, Casey Paul?\"\n\n\"At the very worst, in a well-appointed attic.\"\n\nI meant it metaphorically, of course.\n\n\"Like a piece of old lumber?\"\n\nI was hating this conversation. \"No,\" I repeated, \"you'll always be there.\"\n\n\"In your attic?\"\n\n\"No, in my heart.\"\n\nI meant it, I truly meant it\u2014both the attic and the heart. All my life.\n\nI didn't realise that there was panic inside her. How could I have guessed? I thought it was just inside me. Now, I realise, rather late in the day, that it is in everyone. It's a condition of our mortality. We have codes of manners to allay and minimise it, jokes and routines, and so many forms of diversion and distraction. But there is panic and pandemonium waiting to break out inside all of us, of this I am convinced. I've seen it roar out among the dying, as a last protest against the human condition and its chronic sadness. But it is there in the most balanced and rational of us. You just need the right circumstances, and it will surely appear. And then you are at its mercy. The panic takes some to God, others to despair, some to charitable works, others to drink, some to emotional oblivion, others to a life where they hope that nothing serious will ever trouble them again.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThough we were cast out of the tennis club like Adam and Eve, the expected scandal failed to break. There was no denunciation from the pulpit of St. Michael's, no exposure in the _Advertiser &_ _Gazette._ Mr. Macleod seemed oblivious; Misses G. and N.S. were abroad at the time. My parents never mentioned the matter. So by a very English combination of ignorance, true or feigned, and embarrassment, no one\u2014apart from Joan, and that at my invitation\u2014acknowledged the story's existence. The Village tom-tom might have been beating, but not everyone chose to hear its message. I was both relieved by this and disappointed. Where was the merit, and the joy, in scandalous behaviour if the Village declined to be scandalised except behind closed doors?\n\nBut I was relieved, because it meant Susan brought her \"thinking\" period to an end. In other words, we took a deep breath and started going to bed together again, taking as many risks as before. I stroked her ears and tapped her rabbity teeth. Once, to demonstrate that all was still the same, I sprang up the jutting brickwork onto the porch and through her bedroom window.\n\nAnd, as it turned out, she had a running-away fund too. With more than five hundred pounds in it.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI keep saying that I was nineteen. But sometimes, in what I've told you so far, I was twenty or twenty-one. These events happened over a period of two years and more, usually during my student vacations. In term time, Susan would often come and visit me in Sussex, or I would go up and stay at the Macleods'. Six minutes' drive from my parents, yet I never told them I was there. I would get off the train at a previous station, and Susan would pick me up in the Austin. I slept on the sofa bed, and Mr. Macleod seemed to tolerate my presence. I never went into the Village, though I did occasionally think of burning down the tennis club, just for old times' sake.\n\nSusan got to know my circle of friends at Sussex\u2014Eric, Ian, Barney and Sam\u2014and from time to time one or more of them would also stay at the Macleods'. Perhaps they were another kind of cover story\u2014at this distance, I can't remember. They all considered my relationship with Susan an excellent thing. We were on one another's side when it came to relationships\u2014any relationship, really. They also liked the freewheelingness of Susan's household. She used to cook big meals, and they liked that too. We always seemed to be hungry back then; also, pathetically incapable of making a meal for ourselves.\n\nOne Friday\u2014well, it was probably a Friday\u2014Mr. Macleod was chomping on his spring onions, I was playing with my knife and fork and Susan was bringing in the food, when he asked, with more than the usual edge of sarcasm,\n\n\"And how many fancy boys are you providing yourself with this weekend, if I may make so bold as to ask?\"\n\n\"Let me see,\" Susan replied, holding the stew dish in front of her as she appeared to ponder, \"I think it's just Ian and Eric this weekend. And Paul of course. Unless the others turn up as well.\"\n\nI thought this amazingly cool of her. And then we ate dinner normally.\n\nBut in the car the next day, I asked her, \"Does he always call me that? Us that?\"\n\n\"Yes. You're my fancy boy.\"\n\n\"I'm not _that_ fancy. I'm a bit penny plain at times, I think.\"\n\nBut the word hurt. Hurt me for her, you understand. For myself, I didn't care. No, really: perhaps I was even pleased. To be noticed\u2014even to be insulted\u2014was better than to be ignored. And a young man needed a reputation, after all.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI tried to assemble what I knew about Macleod. I could no longer think of him as Mr. E.P. than I could as Old Adam or the Head of the Table. He was called Gordon, though Susan only used that name when speaking of the distant past. He looked a few years older than her, so must have been in his mid-fifties. He worked as a civil servant, though I had no idea in which department, nor was I interested. He hadn't had sex with his wife for many years, though in the old days, when he was Gordon, he had done so, and two daughters were the proof of this. He had declared his wife frigid. He might, or might not, fancy the front half of a pantomime elephant. He believed that rioting mobs of Communists should be shot by the police or army. His wife hadn't seen his eyes, or not properly, for many years. He played golf, and hit the ball as if he hated it. He liked Gilbert and Sullivan. He was good at disguising himself as a shabby but efficient gardener; though according to his own father he could be a difficult row to hoe. He didn't like or take holidays. He liked to drink. He didn't like going to concerts. He was good at crosswords and had pedantic handwriting. He didn't have any friends in the Village, except, presumably, at the golf club, a place I had never entered, and had no intention of doing so. He didn't go to church. He read _The Times_ and _The Telegraph._ He had been friendly and polite with me, but also sarcastic and rude; mainly, I would say, indifferent. He seemed to be cross with life. And was part of what may or may not have been a played-out generation.\n\nBut there was another thing about him, which I felt rather than observed. It seemed to me\u2014I'm sure Macleod wasn't conscious of it, hadn't given it a thought\u2014but it felt to me as if he\u2014he in particular\u2014was somehow standing in the way of me growing up. He wasn't at all like my parents or their friends, but he represented even more than they did the adulthood I regarded with some horror.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nA few stray thoughts and memories:\n\n\u2014Shortly after the Sharpeville Incident, Susan reported that Macleod had called me \"a very acceptable young man.\" Desperate for praise, like anyone else of my age, I took it at face value. Perhaps more than that: because he had first shouted at me, then later come to sober judgement, I considered the comment all the more valuable.\n\n\u2014I realise that I had absolutely no notion how the Macleods behaved with one another when I was not there. I was probably too absolutist to give it a thought.\n\n\u2014I also realise that, in comparing the two households, I might have made it sound as if at home we ate peas off a knife while scratching our bottoms. No, we were well brought-up. Our standard of table behaviour was on the whole better than that on display at the Macleods'.\n\n\u2014Also, not all my parents' friends were as passively disapproving of my generation as I may have portrayed them. Some were actively so. One holiday weekend, we all went over to Sutton for dinner with the Spencers. The wife had known my mother since training college days; the husband was a small, aggressive mining engineer, of Belgian origin, who specialised in locating and appropriating the mineral wealth of Africa on behalf of some international company. It must have been a sunny day (though not necessarily) because, peeking from my top pocket, was a recently acquired pair of mirrored sunglasses. I had bought them from Barney, who specialised in the bulk purchase and import of exotic items for resale to those wishing to quietly demonstrate their essential hipsterdom. He had sourced the glasses from somewhere behind the Iron Curtain\u2014Hungary, I think. Anyway, we had scarcely got out of the car when Mine Tiny Host approached me and, ignoring my outstretched hand, ripped the sunglasses from my pocket with the words, \"These are a piece of shit.\" Unlike, say, his own cable-knit sweater, corduroy trousers, signet ring and deaf aid.\n\n\u2014She makes a big cake for the Fancy Boys. Big in the sense of wide and long. When the mixture is poured into the tin, it is three-quarters of an inch deep. By the time it comes out of the oven, it has risen slightly to a height of about an inch. There is mixed fruit inside, all of which has sunk to the bottom.\n\nEven I, back then, can recognise that it is not, by average baking standards, a success. But she has a way of making it so.\n\n\"What sort of cake is that, Mrs. Macleod?\" asks one of the FBs.\n\n\"It's an upside-down cake,\" she replies, flipping it over on its wire rack. \"Look how the fruit has all risen to the top.\"\n\nThen she cuts us big slices, which we scoff.\n\nShe can probably turn base metal into gold, I think.\n\n\u2014I said how my credo was love and truth; I loved her, and I saw the truth. But I must also admit that this coincided with the period when I lied to my parents more often than before or since. And, to a lesser degree, to almost everybody else I knew. Though not to Joan.\n\n\u2014While I do not analyse my love\u2014the whence, why, whither of it\u2014I do sometimes try, when alone, to think about it lucidly. This is difficult; I have no previous experience, and am quite unprepared for the full engagement of heart and soul and body that being with Susan involves\u2014the intensity of the present, the thrill of the unknown future, the discarding of all the mingy preoccupations of the past.\n\nI lie in bed at home, trying to put feelings into words. On the one hand\u2014and this is the part to do with the past\u2014Jove feels like the vast and sudden easing of a lifelong frown. But simultaneously\u2014this is the part to do with the present and the future\u2014it feels as if the lungs of my soul have been inflated with pure oxygen. I only think like this when alone, of course. When I am with Susan, I'm not thinking what it's like to love her; I'm just being with her. And maybe that \"being with her\" is impossible to put into any other words.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nSusan never minded my solo visits to Joan; she wasn't possessive about one of the few friends her marriage seemed to permit. I came to enjoy the mugfuls of cut-price gin; after a while, Joan allowed the yappers in, and I got used to the distraction of Yorkshire terriers grazing on my shoelaces.\n\n\"We're leaving,\" I told her one July afternoon.\n\n\"We? You and I? Where are we going, young Master Paul? Do you have your belongings tied up in a red-spotted handkerchief on a stick?\"\n\nI should have known she wouldn't let me get away with earnestness.\n\n\"Susan and I. We're off.\"\n\n\"Off where? For how long? A cruise, is it? Send me a postcard.\"\n\n\"There'll be lots of postcards,\" I promised.\n\nIt was odd, my relationship with Joan was a kind of flirting. Whereas my relationship with Susan barely had any flirting in it at all. We must have gone through all that preliminary stuff without noticing\u2014smack into love\u2014and so had no need for it. We had our jokes and our teases and our private phrases, of course. But I suppose it all felt\u2014was\u2014too serious for flirting.\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"You know what I mean.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know what you mean. I've been wondering about it for some time. Given the circumstances. Half wanting it to happen, half not. But you've got guts, the pair of you, I'll say that.\"\n\nI didn't think of it in terms of guts. I thought of it in terms of inevitability. Also, doing what we both deeply wanted.\n\n\"And how is Gordon taking it all?\"\n\n\"He calls me her fancy boy.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised he doesn't call you her fucking fancy boy.\"\n\nYes, well, probably that too.\n\n\"I shan't say I hope you know what you're doing because it's perfectly obvious neither of you has any idea what you're doing. Now, don't pull that face at me, Master Paul. No one ever does, not in your position. And I'm not going to say, Look after her, and all that stuff. I'm just going to keep my thumbs bloody hard crossed for you.\"\n\nShe came out to the car with me. Before getting in, I moved towards her. She raised a palm.\n\n\"No, none of that fucking huggy-huggy stuff. There's too much of it around, everyone suddenly behaving like foreigners. Be off with you before I shed a tear.\"\n\nLater, I went over what she had and hadn't said to me, and wondered if she'd been spotting parallels I'd missed. No one ever knows what they're doing, not in your position. Off up to London, eh? Fancy boy, kept woman. And who's got the money? Yes, Joan was ahead of me.\n\nExcept that it wasn't going to be like that. I could hardly imagine Susan back on the Macleod doorstep in three years' time, tongue-tied, emotionally blasted, begging silently to be taken in, her life essentially over. I was confident _that_ wasn't going to happen.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThere was no exact Moment of Leaving, neither a surreptitious midnight skedaddle, nor some formal departure with luggage and waving handkerchiefs. (Who would have waved?) It was a long-drawn-out detaching, so that the moment of rupture was never clearly marked. Which didn't stop me trying to mark it, with a brief letter to my parents:\n\n> Dear Mum and Dad,\n> \n> I am moving up to London. I shall be living with Mrs. Macleod. I shall send you an address as and when.\n> \n> Yours, Paul\n\nThat seemed to cover it. I thought the \"as and when\" sounded properly grown-up. Well, so I was. Twenty-one. And ready to fully indulge, fully express, fully live my life. \"I'm alive! I'm living!\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWe were together\u2014under the same roof, that is\u2014for ten or more years. Afterwards, I continued to see her regularly. In later years, less often. When she died, a few years ago, I acknowledged that the most vital part of my life had finally come to a close. I shall always think of her well, I promised myself.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAnd this is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can't.\n\n# TWO\nSusan's running-away fund contained enough to buy a small house in Henry Road, SE15. The price was low\u2014gentrification, and juice bars, lay far in the future. The place had been in multi-occupation: a euphemism for locks on every door, asbestos panelling, a squalid kitchenette on a half-landing, personal gas meters and personal stains in every room. Through that late summer and early autumn we stripped it all back, joyfully, the dandruff of distemper in our hair. We threw out most of the old furniture, and slept on a double mattress on the floor. We had a toaster, a kettle, and dined off takeaways from the Cypriot taverna at the end of the road.\n\nWe needed a plumber, electrician and gas man, but did the rest ourselves. I was good at rough carpentry. I made myself a desk from two broken-up chests of drawers topped with cut-down wardrobe doors; then sanded, filled and painted it until it stood, immovably heavy, at one end of my study. I cut and laid coconut matting, and tacked carpet up the stairs. Together we ripped off the parchmenty wallpaper, back to the leprous plaster, then roller-painted it in cheery, non-bourgeois colours: turquoise, daffodil, cerise. I painted my study a sombre dark green, after Barney told me that the labour wards of hospitals were that colour, to calm expectant mothers. I hoped it might have the same effect on my own laborious hours.\n\nI had taken to heart Joan's sceptical \"And, to start at the beginning, what would you do for money?\" Given that I didn't care about the stuff, I could have lived off Susan; but, given that our relationship was going to last a lifetime, I acknowledged that at some point I would have to support her rather than the other way round. Not that I knew how much money she had. I never asked about the finances of the Macleod household, nor whether Susan had a traditional Auntie Maud who would conveniently leave her all she had.\n\nSo I decided to become a solicitor. I had no exaggerated ambitions for myself; my exaggerated ambitions were all for love. But I thought of the law because I had an orderly mind, and a capacity to apply myself; and every society needs lawyers, doesn't it? I remember a woman friend once telling me her theory of marriage: that it was something you should \"dip into and out of as required.\" This may sound dismayingly practical, even cynical, but it wasn't. She loved her husband, and \"dipping out\" of marriage didn't mean adultery. Rather, it was a recognition of how marriage worked for her: as a reliable ground bass to life, as something you jogged along with until such time as you needed to \"dip into\" it, for succour, expressions of love and the rest. I could understand this approach: there is no point demanding more than your temperament requires or provides. But as far as I understood my life at this time, I required the opposite equation. Work would be something I jogged along with; love would be my life.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI began my studies. Each morning, Susan cooked me breakfast; each evening, supper\u2014unless I fetched us a kebab or sheftalia. Sometimes, when I arrived back, she would sing at me, \"Little man, you've had a busy day.\" She also took my washing to the launderette and brought it home for ironing. We still went to concerts and art exhibitions. The mattress on the floor became a double bed, in which we slept together night after night, and where some of my cinematic assumptions about love and sex became subject to adjustment. For instance, the notion of lovers falling blissfully asleep in one another's arms resolved itself into the actuality of one lover falling asleep half on top of the other, and the latter, after a certain amount of cramp and interrupted circulation, gently shifting out from beneath while trying not to wake her. I also discovered that it wasn't only men who snored.\n\nMy parents didn't reply to my change-of-address letter; nor did I invite them to visit the house in Henry Road. One day I returned from college to find Susan in agitated mood. Martha Macleod, Miss Grumpy herself, had descended without warning for a tour of inspection. She was bound to have noted that whereas in the Village her mother had slept in a single bed, now she had a double one. Fortunately, in my dark green study, the sofa bed had been pulled out, and left unmade by me that morning. But then, as Susan remarked, two doubles hardly make a single. My own attitude to Martha Macleod's likely disapproval of our sleeping arrangements was\u2014would have been\u2014one of pride and defiance. Susan's was more complicated, though I admit I didn't spend much time on its nuances. After all, were we living together or were we not?\n\nWhen she reached the two undecorated attic rooms at the top of the house, Martha had apparently said,\n\n\"You should have lodgers.\"\n\nWhen Susan had demurred, her daughter's reply, delivered either as argument or instruction, was:\n\n\"It would be good for you.\"\n\nQuite what she meant by this we debated that evening. True, there was an economic argument for lodgers: they would make the house more or less self-sufficient. But what was the moral argument? Perhaps that lodgers would give Susan something more to do than wait for the return of her shameless lover. Martha might also have intended that lodgers would somehow dilute my noxious presence, and camouflage the reality of number 23 Henry Road\u2014of Fancy Boy Number One living brazenly with an adulteress still more than twice his age.\n\nIf Martha's visit had troubled Susan, it also, on further thought, troubled me. I had failed to consider her future relations with her daughters. My focus had all been on Macleod, on getting Susan away from him, and now, from a safe distance, divorcing him. For our joint sake, but mainly for hers. She had to scrub this mistake from her life and give herself the legal as well as the moral freedom to be happy. And being happy consisted of living with me, alone and unfettered.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nIt was a quiet neighbourhood, and we received few visitors. I remember one Saturday morning being stirred from the law of tort by the front doorbell. I heard Susan invite someone\u2014two someones, a man and a woman\u2014into the kitchen. About twenty minutes later, I heard her say, as she shut the front door,\n\n\"I'm sure you feel a whole lot better now.\"\n\n\"Who was that?\" I asked as she passed my door. She looked in to see me.\n\n\"Missionaries,\" she replied. \"God damn and blast them, missionaries. I let them get it all off their chests and then sent them on their way. Better to waste their puff on me than someone they might convert.\"\n\n\"Not _actual_ missionaries?\"\n\n\"It's a general term. Actual missionaries are the worst, of course.\"\n\n\"You mean, these were Jehovah's Witnesses, or Plymouth Brethren, or Baptists, or something?\"\n\n\"Or something. They asked me if I was worried about the state of the world. It's an obvious catch question. Then they bored on about the Bible as if I'd never heard of it. I nearly told them I knew all about it and that I was a flaming Jezebel.\"\n\nAnd with that she left me to my studies. But instead I mused on these sudden bursts of fierce opinion, which so endeared her to me. I had been educated by books, she by life, I thought again.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nOne evening, the phone went. I picked it up and gave the number.\n\n\"Who is that?\" said a voice I immediately recognised as Macleod's.\n\n\"Well, who's _that_?\" I replied, with fake casualness.\n\n\"Gor-don Mac-leod,\" he said with extended heaviness. \"And whom might I be having the honour of speaking to?\"\n\n\"Paul Roberts.\"\n\nAs he banged the receiver down, I found myself wishing I'd said Mickey Mouse, or Yuri Gagarin, or the chairman of the BBC.\n\nI didn't tell Susan about this. I didn't see the point.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBut a few weeks later we received a visit from a man called Maurice. Susan had met him before, once or twice. He might have had a connection to Macleod's office. There must have been some arrangement made. It seemed he had picked a time when I would be there too. I'm not sure about it all, at this distance\u2014maybe it was just luck on his part.\n\nI failed to ask any of the obvious questions at the time. And if I had, perhaps Susan would have had the answers, perhaps not.\n\nHe was a man of fiftyish, I suppose. In my memory I have given him\u2014or he has acquired over the years\u2014a trench coat, and perhaps a broad-brimmed hat, underneath which he wore a suit and tie. He was perfectly cordial in behaviour. He shook my hand. He accepted a cup of coffee, he used the lavatory, he asked for an ashtray, and he talked about the bland, general topics adults went in for. Susan was in her hostess mode, which involved tamping down some of the things I most loved her for: her irreverence, her free-spirited laughter at the world.\n\nAll I can remember is that at one point the conversation turned to the closure of R _eynolds News._ This was a paper\u2014R _eynolds News and Sunday Citizen,_ to give its full title\u2014which had fallen on hard times, relaunched itself as a tabloid Sunday, and then finally closed\u2014presumably not long before this conversation.\n\n\"I don't think it matters much,\" I said. I didn't really have any view on the matter. I might have seen a copy or two of R _eynolds News,_ but was mainly just reacting to Maurice's tone of deep concern.\n\n\"You don't?\" he asked civilly.\n\n\"No, not really.\"\n\n\"What about the diversity of the press? Isn't that something to be valued?\"\n\n\"All the papers seem much the same to me, so I don't see that one fewer of them matters much.\"\n\n\"Are you by any chance part of the Revolutionary Left?\"\n\nI laughed at him. Not at his words, but at him. What the fuck did he take me for? Or perhaps, Who the fuck? He might as well have been a member of the tennis club committee, back at the Village.\n\n\"No, I despise politics,\" I said.\n\n\"You despise politics? Do you think that's an entirely healthy attitude? Do you find cynicism a comfortable position? What would you replace them with? You'd close down newspapers, you'd close down our way of doing politics? You'd close down democracy? That sounds like a Revolutionary Left position to me.\"\n\nNow the fellow was really annoying me. I wasn't out of my area of competence so much as my area of interest.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I said. \"It's really not that at all. But you see,\" I added, looking at him with melancholy seriousness, \"it's just that I'm a member of a played-out generation. You may think we're a bit young for it, but even so, we're played out.\"\n\nHe left shortly afterwards.\n\n\"Oh, Casey Paul, you are one wicked person.\"\n\n\"Me?\"\n\n\"You. Didn't you hear him say he'd worked for R _eynolds_ _News_?\"\n\n\"No, I thought he was a spy.\"\n\n\"You mean, a Russki?\"\n\n\"No, I just mean he was sent along to check up on us and report back.\"\n\n\"Probably.\"\n\n\"Do you think we should worry about that?\"\n\n\"Not for a couple of days at least, I'd say.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nYou decide that, since you are a student, and all your fellow students, apart from those who live at home, pay rent, then you should do so too. You ask a couple of friends how much they pay. You take the midpoint: four pounds a week. You can afford this out of your state grant.\n\nOne Monday evening, you hand Susan four pound notes.\n\n\"What's that?\" she asks.\n\n\"I've decided I should pay you rent,\" you reply, perhaps a little stiffly. \"That's about what others pay.\"\n\nShe throws the notes back at you. They don't hit your face, as they might do in a film. They just lie on the floor between you. Awkward silences follow, and you sleep on your sofa bed that night. You feel guilty about not having introduced the subject of rent with more subtlety; it was like when you gave her that parsnip. The four green pound notes lie on the floor all night. The next morning you pick them up and put them back in your wallet. The subject is never mentioned again.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAs a result of Martha's visit, two things happened. The attic rooms were let out to lodgers, and Susan went back to the Village for the first time since we ran away together. She said it would be necessary and practical to return from time to time. Half the house belonged to her, and she could hardly rely on Macleod to pay the bills or remember to get the boiler serviced. (I didn't see why not, but still.) Mrs. Dyer would continue to serve and thieve on a daily basis, and would alert Susan to anything that needed her attention. She promised that she would only go back when Macleod wasn't there. Grudgingly, I agreed.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI said a bit ago that \"This is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can't.\" There's some stuff I left out, stuff I can't put off any longer. Where to start? In the \"book room,\" as they called it, downstairs at the Macleods'. It was late, and I was unwilling to go home. Susan might already have been in bed; I don't remember. Nor do I remember what book I was reading. Something I'd picked off the shelves at random, no doubt. I was still trying to get my head round the Macleod collection. There were leather-bound sets of the classics, old enough to have been handed down through maybe two generations; art monographs, poetry, a lot of history, some biography, novels, thrillers. I came from the sort of household where books, as if to confirm that they should be respected, were put in order: by subject, author, even size. Here, there was a different system\u2014or rather, as far as I could see, no system at all. Herodotus was next to _The Bab Ballads,_ a three-volume history of the Crusades next to Jane Austen, T. E. Lawrence sandwiched between Hemingway and a Charles Atlas manual of bodybuilding. Was it all an elaborate joke? Mere bohemian muddle? Or a way of saying: we control the books, they don't control us.\n\nI was still musing when the door banged back against the bookcase, then rebounded far enough to be kicked again. Macleod stood there in his dressing gown, which\u2014and this I do remember\u2014was plaid, with a maroon cord tied and dangling. Below were his elephant pyjamas and leather slippers.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" he asked, in a tone of voice normally attached to the words \"Fuck off.\"\n\nMy default position of insolence kicked in.\n\n\"Reading,\" I replied, waving the book in his direction.\n\nHe stomped across and ripped it from my hand, briefly inspected it, then threw it like a Frisbee across the room.\n\nI couldn't help grinning. He thought he was chucking my book away, when it was one of his own. Hilarious!\n\nThat was when he hit me. Or rather, aimed a succession of blows\u2014three, I'm pretty sure\u2014one of which landed as a wrist slapping the side of my head. The other two flailed past.\n\nI got up and tried to hit him back. I think I aimed one blow, which skidded off his shoulder. Neither of us was doing any snappy defensive work; we were just equally incompetent attackers. Well, I'd never hit anyone before. He, I assume, had, or had at least tried to.\n\nWhile he was concentrating on what to say, or where to hit, next, I squirmed past him, ran to the back door, and escaped. I was relieved to get back to a house where I hadn't been assaulted since a few doubtless-merited spankings a decade and more previously.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nNo, that wasn't quite true\u2014about never having hit someone. In my first year at school, the gym master had encouraged us all to enter the annual boxing competition, which was organised by weight and age. I had absolutely no desire to inflict or receive pain. But I noticed that, with only a few hours to go, there were no entrants listed under my category. So I gave my name in, expecting to win by walkover.\n\nUnfortunately for me\u2014for both of us\u2014another boy, Bates, had the same idea at almost the same time. So we found ourselves in the ring together, two skinny, scared things in plimsolls, vests and house shorts, with these big bobbly gloves suddenly at the end of our arms. For a couple of minutes we each did a reasonably good job of feinting attacks and then backpedalling at great speed, until the gym master pointed out that neither of us had yet landed a blow.\n\n\"Box!\" he had commanded.\n\nWhereupon I leaped at the unprepared Bates, whose gloves were down near his knees, and punched him on the nose. He squealed, looked at the sudden blood on his clean white vest and burst into tears.\n\nAnd so I became school boxing champion in the under-12, under-6-stone category. Naturally, I never fought again.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe next time I went to the Macleod house, Susan's husband couldn't have been friendlier. Perhaps that was when he showed me how to do the crossword, making it some kind of exclusive male preserve. Or at any rate, a Susan-excluding one. So I put the book-room incident down as an aberration. And anyway, it might have been partly my fault. Perhaps I should have engaged him about which version of the Dewey system his library was organised under. No, I can see that might have been equally provoking.\n\nHow much time then went by? Let's call it six months. Again, it was lateish. At the Macleod house, unlike my own, there was a main staircase near the front door, and a narrower one near the kitchen, presumably for those mob-capped servants now replaced by machines. Often, when I visited Susan during term time, I would sleep in a small attic room which could be reached from either direction. Susan and I had been listening to the gramophone\u2014preparing for a concert\u2014and the music was still in my head when I reached the top of the back stairs. All of a sudden there came a kind of roar, and something which might have been a kick or a trip, accompanied by a thump on the shoulder, and I found myself falling back down the stairs. I managed somehow to grab the banister, wrenching my shoulder but just about keeping my balance.\n\n\"You fucking bastard!\" I said automatically.\n\n\"Whatski?\" came an answering bellow from above. \"Whatski, my fine and feathered friend?\"\n\nI looked up at the squat bully glaring down at me from the semi-darkness. I thought that Macleod must be absolutely, certifiably mad. We stared at one another for a few seconds, then the dressing-gowned figure stomped away, and I heard a distant door close.\n\nIt wasn't Macleod's fists I was afraid of\u2014not principally. It was his anger. We didn't do anger in my family. We did ironic comment, snappy rejoinder, satirical elaboration; we did exact words forbidding a certain action, and more severe ones condemning what had already taken place. But for anything beyond this, we did the thing enjoined upon the English middle classes for generations. We internalised our rage, our anger, our contempt. We spoke words under our breath. We might have written some of those words down in private diaries if we kept them. But we also thought that we were the only ones reacting like this, and it was a little shameful, and so we internalised it all even further.\n\nWhen I got to my room that night, I placed a chair at an angle, wedged under the doorknob, as I'd seen done in films. I lay in bed thinking: Is this what the adult world is really like? Underneath it all? And how close beneath the surface does it\u2014will it\u2014lie?\n\nI had no answers.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI didn't tell Susan about either of these incidents. I internalised my anger and shame\u2014well, I would, wouldn't I?\n\nAnd you'll have to imagine long spells of happiness, of delight, of laughter. I've described them already. That's the thing about memory, it's...well, let me put it like this. Have you ever seen an electric log-splitter in action? They're very impressive. You cue the log to a certain length, lay it on the bed of the machine, press the button with your foot, and the log is pushed onto a blade shaped like an ax-head. Whereupon the log splits pure and straight down the grain. That's the point I'm trying to make. Life is a cross section, memory is a split down the grain, and memory follows it all the way to the end.\n\nSo I can't not continue. Even if this is the hardest part to remember. No, not to remember\u2014to describe. It was the moment when I lost some of my innocence. That may sound like a good thing. Isn't growing up a necessary process of losing one's innocence? Maybe, maybe not. But the trouble with life is, you rarely know when that loss is going to happen, do you? And how it will be, afterwards.\n\nMy parents were away on holiday, and my granny\u2014my mother's mother\u2014had been drafted in to look after me. I was, of course, twenty\u2014 _only_ twenty\u2014so obviously couldn't be left in the house by myself. What might I get up to, whom might I import, what might I organise\u2014a bacchanalia of middle-aged women, perhaps\u2014what might the neighbours think, and who might subsequently refuse to come for sherry? Grandma, widowed some five years, didn't have anything better to do. I had naturally\u2014innocently\u2014loved her as a child. Now I was growing up and she seemed boring. But that was a loss of innocence I could handle.\n\nAt this time, I used to sleep quite late during the holidays. It could have been mere idleness, or a belated reaction to the stress of the university term; or, perhaps, some instinctive unwillingness to reenter this world I still called home. I would sleep on until eleven without compunction. And my parents\u2014to their credit\u2014never came in and sat on my bed and complained that I was treating the place like a hotel; while Grandma was happy to cook me breakfast at lunchtime if that's what I wanted.\n\nSo it was probably closer to eleven than ten when I stumbled downstairs.\n\n\"There's a very rude woman asking for you,\" said Grandma. \"She's rung three times. She told me to wake you up. Actually, the last time to 'B' wake you up. I said I'm not interfering with his beauty sleep.\"\n\n\"Good for you, Grandma. Thanks.\"\n\nA very rude woman. But I didn't know any. Someone from the tennis club, persecuting me further? The bank about my overdraft? Maybe Grandma was beginning to lose her marbles. At which point, the phone went again.\n\n\"Joan,\" said the very rude voice of Joan. \"It's Susan. Get over there. She wants you, not me. _You, now._ \" And she put the phone down.\n\n\"Aren't you having your breakfast?\" asked Grandma as I rushed out.\n\nAt the Macleods', the front door was open, and I walked around until I found her fully dressed, handbag beside her, on the sofa in the sitting room. She didn't look up when I greeted her. I could only see the top of her head, or rather, the curve of her headscarf. I sat down beside her, but she immediately turned her face away.\n\n\"I need you to drive me up to town.\"\n\n\"Of course, darling.\"\n\n\"And I need you not to ask me any questions. And absolutely not to look at me.\"\n\n\"Whatever you say. But you'll need to tell me roughly where we're going.\"\n\n\"Head for Selfridges.\"\n\n\"Are we in a hurry?\" I allowed myself that question.\n\n\"Just drive safely, Paul, just drive safely.\"\n\nWe got to near Selfridges and she directed me down Wigmore Street, then left up one of those streets where private doctors practise.\n\n\"Park here.\"\n\n\"Do you want me to come with you?\"\n\n\"I'd rather not. Get yourself some lunch. This won't be quick. Do you need some money?\"\n\nI had indeed come without my wallet. She gave me a ten-shilling note.\n\nAs I turned back into Wigmore Street, I saw ahead of me John Bell & Croyden, where she had gone for her Dutch cap. A terrible realization came upon me. That the system had failed, that she'd found herself pregnant, and was even now dealing with the consequences. The Abortion Law was still going through Parliament, but everyone knew there were doctors\u2014and not just at the backstreet end\u2014who would perform \"procedures\" more or less on demand. I imagined the conversation: Susan explaining how she had got herself pregnant by her young lover, hadn't had sex with her husband for two decades, and how a child would destroy her marriage and endanger her own mental health. That would be enough for any doctor, who would agree to what went down euphemistically in medical records as a D&C: dilatation and curettage. Just a little scraping away at the lining of the womb\u2014which would also scrape away the embryo attached to its wall.\n\nI was working all this out as I sat in an Italian caf\u00e9 having my lunch. I didn't know what I thought\u2014or rather, I thought several incompatible things. The notion of being a father while still a student struck me as terrifying and crazy. But it also struck me as, well, kind of heroic. Subversive yet honourable, annoying yet life-affirming: noble. I didn't think it would get me into the _Guinness Book of_ R _ecords_ \u2014no doubt there were twelve-year-olds hard at work getting their grannies' best friends pregnant, but it would certainly make me exceptional. And irritate the hell out of the Village.\n\nExcept that now it wasn't going to happen. Because Susan was getting rid of our child at this very moment, just around the corner. I felt sudden rage. A woman's right to choose\u2014yes, I believed in that, theoretically and actually. Though I also believed in a man's right to be consulted.\n\nI went back to the car and waited. After an hour or so she turned the corner and came towards me, head lowered, scarf pulled around her cheeks. She averted her face from me as she got into the car.\n\n\"Right,\" she said. \"That's that for the moment.\" There was something slurry about her articulation. The anaesthetic, presumably\u2014if they used any. \"Home, James, and don't spare the horses.\"\n\nNormally I was charmed by her turns of phrase. Not this time.\n\n\"First tell me where you've been.\"\n\n\"The dentist.\"\n\n\"The dentist?\" So much for my imaginings. Unless this was just another euphemism among women of Susan's class.\n\n\"I'll tell you when I can, Casey Paul. I can't tell you now. Don't ask.\"\n\nOf course not. I drove her home, as carefully as I could.\n\nOver the next days, she told me bit by bit what had happened. She had been sitting up late, listening to the gramophone. Macleod had gone to bed an hour previously. She kept playing over and over again the slow movement of Prokofiev's third piano concerto, which we'd heard a few days before at the Festival Hall. Then she put the record back in its sleeve and went upstairs. She was just reaching for the handle of her bedroom door when her hair was seized from behind, and with the words, \"How's your fucking musical education coming along?,\" her husband smashed her face into the closed door. Then he had gone back to bed.\n\nThe dentist's examination showed that her two front teeth were broken beyond repair. The two teeth on either side of them would probably have to go as well. There was a crack in her upper jaw which would, over time, heal itself. The dentist would make her a plate. He asked if she wanted to talk about how it had happened, but didn't press her when she said she would rather not.\n\nAs the bruising came up in all its furious colours, and she powdered over it as well as she could; as I drove her up to town and back for appointment after appointment; as I wasn't able to get her to look at me for days, or kiss me for weeks; as I realised I would never again be able to tap her \"rabbit teeth,\" long discarded in some Wimpole Street waste bin; as I understood that I now had greater responsibilities than before; as I found myself wondering, and not idly, how I might kill Gordon Macleod; as first my grandma and then my returning parents drove me mad with their careful, safe, banal views of life; as Susan's bravery and lack of self-pity nearly broke my heart; as I absented myself from her house a good hour before Macleod's daily return; as I accepted her word\u2014or was it his word?\u2014that nothing like this would ever happen again; as anger and pity and horror washed through me; as I realised that Susan would have to leave the bastard somehow, with me or without me, but obviously with me; as at the same time a kind of impotence overcame me; as all this was happening, I learned a little more about the Macleod marriage.\n\nOf course, that bruise on her upper arm had not just been the size of a thumbprint, it was the imprint of an actual thumb as he forced her to sit in a chair and listen to his denunciations. There had been grabbings and slappings, and more than a punch or two. He would put a glass of sherry down in front of her and order her to \"join in the fun.\" When she declined, he would grasp her by the hair, pull her head back and hold the glass to her lips. Either she drank, or he poured it down her chin, and throat and dress. It was all verbal and physical, never sexual; though whether there was anything sexual behind it...well, that is beyond my competence, or, indeed, interest. Yes, it was usually connected to his drinking, but not necessarily; yes, she was frightened of him, except that mostly she wasn't. She had learned to manage him over the years. Yes, every time he attacked her, it was of course her fault\u2014according to him; she drove him to it with her airy bloody insolence\u2014that had been one of his phrases. Also, her irresponsibility; also, her stupidity. At some point after he had smashed her face against the door, he had gone downstairs and bent Prokofiev's third piano concerto until the record broke.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nIt was, I suppose, ignorance and snobbery on my part which had hitherto made me assume that domestic violence was confined to the lower classes, where things were done differently, where\u2014as I understood from my reading rather than from a close familiarity with backstreet life\u2014women would rather their husbands hit them than be unfaithful to them. If he beats you, it shows he loves you, and all that crap. The idea of violence being inflicted by husbands with a Cambridge degree seemed to me incomprehensible. Of course, it was not a matter I'd had reason to think about before. But if I had, I would probably have guessed that violence among working-class husbands was connected to inarticulacy: they fell back on their fists whereas middle-class husbands fell back on words. Both these myths took some years to dispel, despite the present evidence.\n\nSusan's dental plate caused her constant trouble; there were many drives up to town for adjustments. The dentist had also made the four new prosthetic teeth better aligned than the original ones, and shortened the central pair by a millimetre or two. A subtle change, but one always manifest to me. Those teeth I used to tap so lovingly were gone forever; and I had no desire to touch their replacements.\n\nOne thing I never swerved from was the certainty that Gordon Macleod's behaviour was a crime of absolute liability. And his responsibility was also absolute. A man hits a woman; a husband hits a wife; a drunkard hits a sober spouse. There was no defence, and no possible mitigation. The fact that it would never come to court, that middle-class England had a thousand ways of avoiding the truth, that respectability was no more shed in public than clothes, the fact that Susan would never accuse him to any authority, not even a dentist\u2014all this had no relevance to me, except sociologically. The man was as guilty as hell, and I would hate him until the end of his days. This much I knew.\n\nIt was about a year after this that I went to see Joan and announced our intention of moving up to London.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nYou are an absolutist for love, and therefore an absolutist against marriage. You have given the matter much thought, and come up with many fanciful comparisons. Marriage is a dog kennel in which complacency lives and is never chained up. Marriage is a jewellery box which, by some mysterious opposite of alchemy, turns gold, silver and diamonds back into base metal, paste and quartz. Marriage is a disused boathouse containing an old, two-person canoe, no longer water-worthy, with holes in the bottom and one missing paddle. Marriage is...oh, you have dozens of such comparisons to hand.\n\nYou remember your parents, and your parents' friends. They were, on the whole, and without giving them too much credit, decent people: honest, hardworking, polite with one another, no more than averagely controlling of their children. Family life meant for them much what it had meant for their parents' generation, though with just enough extra social freedom to let them imagine themselves pioneers. But where was love in all of this, you asked. And you didn't even mean sex\u2014because you preferred not to think about that.\n\nAnd so, when you had come into the Macleod household, and inspected a different way of living, you thought first about how circumscribed your own home seemed to be, how lacking in life and emotion. Then, gradually, you realised that the marriage of Gordon and Susan Macleod was, in fact, in far worse shape than any marriage among your parents' circle, and you became all the more absolutist. That Susan should live with you in a state of love was obvious; that she should leave Macleod was equally obvious; that she should divorce him\u2014especially after what he had done to her\u2014seemed not just an acknowledgement of the truth of things, not just a romantic obligation, but a necessary first step towards her becoming an authentic person once more. No, not \"once more\": really, it would be for the first time. And how exciting must that be for her?\n\nYou persuade her to see a solicitor. No, she doesn't want you to come with her. Part of you\u2014the part that imagines a free, and freestanding, Susan in the near future\u2014approves.\n\n\"How did it go?\"\n\n\"He said that I was in a bit of a muddle.\"\n\n\"He said _that_?\"\n\n\"No. Not exactly. But I explained things to him. Most things. Not you, obviously. And, well, I suppose he thought I'd just bolted. Done a bunk. Maybe he thought it was all to do with the Dreaded.\"\n\n\"But...didn't you explain what had happened...what _he_ did to you?\"\n\n\"I didn't go into detail, no. I kept it general.\"\n\n\"But you can't get a divorce on _general_ grounds. You can only get a divorce on particular grounds.\"\n\n\"Now don't get shirty with me, Paul, I'm doing my best.\"\n\n\"Yes, but...\"\n\n\"He told me that, for a starting point, I should go away and write it all down. Because he could see I found it hard to tell him about it directly.\"\n\n\"That sounds very sensible.\" Suddenly, you approve of this solicitor.\n\n\"So that's what I shall try to do.\"\n\nWhen, a couple of weeks later, you ask how her statement is coming along, she shakes her head without reply.\n\n\"But you've got to do it,\" you say.\n\n\"You don't know how hard it is for me.\"\n\n\"Would you like me to help you?\"\n\n\"No, I have to do this by myself.\"\n\nYou approve. This will be the start, the making, of the new Susan. You try some gentle advice.\n\n\"I think what they need are specifics.\" You know a bit about divorce law by now. \"Exactly what happened, and roughly when.\"\n\nAnother two weeks later, you ask how she's doing.\n\n\"Don't give up on me just yet, Casey Paul\" is her reply. And whenever she says this to you\u2014and you never think it is calculated, because she is not a calculating person\u2014it tears at your heart. Of course you won't give up on her.\n\nAnd then, some weeks later, she gives you a few sheets of paper.\n\n\"Don't read it in front of me.\"\n\nYou take it away, and from the first sentence, your optimism disperses. She has turned her life, and her marriage, into a comic short story, which sounds to you like something by James Thurber. Perhaps it was. It is about a man in a three-piece suit, called Mr. Elephant Pants, who every evening goes to the pub\u2014or the bar at Grand Central Station\u2014and comes home in a state which alarms his wife and children. He knocks over the hatstand, kicks the flowerpots, shouts at the dog, so that there is a spreading of Great Alarm and Despondency, and he rackets away until he falls asleep on the sofa and snores so loudly that tiles fall off the roof.\n\nYou don't know what to say. You say nothing. You pretend you are still considering this document. You know you have to be very gentle and very patient with her. You explain again about them needing to know specifics, the where and the when and, most importantly, the what. She looks at you and nods.\n\nSlowly, over the next weeks and months, you begin to understand that it is not going to happen, not ever. She is strong enough to love you, strong enough to run off with you, but not strong enough to enter a court of law and give evidence against her husband about the decades of sexless tyranny, alcoholism and physical attack. She will not be able\u2014even via her solicitor\u2014to ask the dentist to describe her injuries. She cannot attest in public to what she is able to admit in private.\n\nYou realise that, even if she is the free spirit you imagined her to be, she is also a damaged free spirit. You understand that there is a question of shame at the bottom of it. Personal shame; and social shame. She may not mind being thrown out of the tennis club for being a Scarlet Woman, but she cannot admit to the true nature of her marriage. You remember old cases in which criminals\u2014even murderers\u2014would marry their female accomplices because a wife could not be compelled to give evidence against a husband. But nowadays, far away from the world of criminality, in the respectable Village and many, many similar, silent places across the land, there are wives who have been conditioned, by social and marital convention, not to give evidence against their husbands.\n\nAnd there is another factor, of which, strangely, you have not thought. One calm evening\u2014calm because you have officially given up on the project, and all false hope and annoyance have drained from you\u2014she says to you quietly,\n\n\"And anyway, if I did do it, he'd bring up the matter of you.\"\n\nYou are astounded. You feel you had nothing to do with the breakup of the Macleod marriage; you were just the outsider who pointed out what would have been obvious to anyone. Yes, you fell in love with her; yes, you ran away with her; but that was consequence, not cause.\n\nEven so, perhaps you are lucky that the old law of enticement is no longer on the statute book. You imagine being called as a witness and asked to explain yourself. Part of you thinks this would be wonderful, heroic; you play through the courtroom exchange, in which you are dazzling. Until the final question. Oh, and by the way, young enticer, young seducer, may I ask what you do by way of a job? Of course, you reply, I am studying to be a solicitor. You realise that you might just have to change profession.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nYou know that sometimes, after checking on the house she owns half of, she goes to visit Joan. This is a good idea, even if on her return her hair smells of cigarette smoke. Once, you catch sherry on her breath.\n\n\"Did you have a drink with Joan?\"\n\n\"Did I? Let me think...Quite possibly.\"\n\n\"Well, you shouldn't. Drink and drive. It's crazy.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" she agrees satirically.\n\nAnother time, she has smoke in her hair and Polos on her breath. You think, This is silly.\n\n\"Look, if you're going to have a drink with Joan, don't insult my intelligence by chewing a few Polos afterwards.\"\n\n\"The thing is, Paul, there are parts of the drive I don't like. They give me the jitters. Blind corners. I find that a little nip of sherry with Joan calms my nerves. And the Polos aren't for you, darling, they're in case I get stopped by a policeman.\"\n\n\"I'm sure policemen are just as suspicious of drivers smelling of Polos as when they smell of alcohol.\"\n\n\"Don't _you_ turn into a policeman, Paul. Or a lawyer, even if you are going to be one. I'm doing my best. That's all I can do.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nYou kiss her. You have no more taste for confrontation than she does. Of course you trust her, of course you love her, of course you are far too young to be a policeman or a lawyer.\n\nAnd so you both laugh your way through several uncomplicated months.\n\nBut one February afternoon, she is late back from the Village. You know she doesn't like driving in the dark. You imagine the car off the road, in a ditch, her bloodied head against the dashboard, Polos spilling from her handbag.\n\nYou ring Joan.\n\n\"I'm a bit worried about Susan.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Well, what time did she leave you?\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"Today.\"\n\n\"I haven't seen Susan today.\" Joan's voice is steady. \"I wasn't expecting her either.\"\n\n\"Oh fuck,\" you say.\n\n\"Let me know when she's back safely.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" you say, your mind only half there.\n\n\"And Paul.\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"If she comes back safely, that's the main thing.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nIt is the main thing. And she does come back safely. And her hair is clean, and there is nothing on her breath.\n\n\"Sorry I'm late, darling,\" she says, putting down her handbag.\n\n\"Yes, I was worrying.\"\n\n\"No need to worry.\"\n\n\"Well I do.\"\n\nYou leave it at that. After supper, you pick up the plates, and, making sure your back is to her, ask,\n\n\"How's old Joan?\"\n\n\"Joan? Same as ever. Joan doesn't change. That's what's nice about her.\"\n\nYou rinse off the plates and leave it at that. You are a lover, not a lawyer, you remind yourself. Except that you are going to become a lawyer, because you need to be solid and stable, the better to look after her.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe log of memory splits down the grain. So you can't remember the quiet times, the outings, the jollity, the running jokes, even the legal studies, which fill the gap between that last exchange and the day when, worried by a succession of late returns from the Village, you say to her, quietly and unchallengingly,\n\n\"I know you don't always go and see Joan when you say you do.\"\n\nShe looks away.\n\n\"Have you been checking up on me, Casey Paul? It's a terrible unloving thing to do, check up on people.\"\n\n\"Yes, but I can't stop worrying, and I can't bear to think of you alone in the house with...him.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm quite safe,\" she says. There is a silence for a while. \"Look, Paul, I don't tell you about it because I don't want the two parts of my life overlapping. I want to build a wall around us here.\"\n\n\"But?\"\n\n\"But there are practical matters to discuss with him.\"\n\n\"Like divorce?\"\n\nImmediately, you feel ashamed of your sarcasm.\n\n\"Don't badger me like that, Mr. Badger. I've got to do things in my own time. It's all more complicated than you think.\"\n\n\"OK.\"\n\n\"We\u2014he and I\u2014have two children together, don't forget that.\"\n\n\"I don't.\" Though of course, you do. Often.\n\n\"There's money to discuss. The car. The house. I think the place needs repainting this summer.\"\n\n\"You discuss painting the house?\"\n\n\"That's enough from you, Mr. Badger.\"\n\n\"OK,\" you say. \"But you love me and you don't love him.\"\n\n\"You know that's how it is, Casey Paul. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't.\"\n\n\"And I suppose _he_ would like you to return.\"\n\n\"What I _hate,_ \" she says, \"is when he gets down on his knees.\"\n\n\"He gets down on his knees?\" In his elephant pants, I think.\n\n\"Yes, it's awful, it's embarrassing, it's undignified.\"\n\n\"And, what, begs you to stay with him?\"\n\n\"Yes. You see why I don't tell you about it?\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe Fancy Boys used to turn up at Henry Road and sleep on the floor, dossing like dogs on piles of cushions. The more of them there were, the more busily relaxed Susan became. So this was all good. Sometimes they brought their girlfriends, whose reactions to Henry Road used to intrigue me. I became expert in sensing covert disapproval. I wasn't being defensive or paranoid, merely observant. Also, I was amused by the orthodoxy of their sexual outlook. You might have thought\u2014mightn't you?\u2014that a girl or young woman in her early twenties would be rather encouraged by the notion that something exciting might happen to her nearly three decades on: that her heart and body would still be excitable, and that her future didn't necessarily have to be a matter of rising social acceptance combined with slow emotional diminution. I was surprised that some of them didn't find my relationship with Susan a cause for cheer. Instead, they reacted much as their parents would have done: alarmed, threatened, moralistic. Perhaps they were looking forward to being mothers themselves, and imagining their precious sons being cradle-snatched. Anyone would have thought Susan was a witch who had entranced me, fit only for the ducking stool. Well, she had entranced me. And to feel the disapproval from women of my own age merely increased my pleasure at Susan's and my originality, and my own determination to continue offending the prim and the unimaginative. Well, we all have to have a purpose in life, don't we? Just as a young man needs a reputation.\n\nAround this time, one of the lodgers moved out, and Eric, having broken up with his (moralistic, marriage-demanding) girlfriend, took over the free room on the top floor. This brought a new dynamic to the house, perhaps even a better one. Eric thoroughly approved of our relationship, and would be able to keep an eye on Susan when I couldn't. He was allowed to pay rent, which made it seem the more illogical that Susan wouldn't take any from me. But I knew how she would react if I renewed my offer.\n\nA few months passed. One evening, after Susan had gone to bed, Eric said,\n\n\"Don't like to mention this...\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\nHe looked embarrassed, which was unlike Eric.\n\n\"...but the thing is, Susan's been nicking my whisky.\"\n\n\"Your whisky? She doesn't even drink whisky.\"\n\n\"Well, it's her, or you, or the poltergeist.\"\n\n\"You're sure?\"\n\n\"I put a mark on the bottle.\"\n\n\"How long's this been going on?\"\n\n\"A few weeks. Maybe months?\"\n\n\" _Months?_ Why didn't you tell me?\"\n\n\"Wanted to make sure. And she changed her tactics.\"\n\n\"How do you mean?\"\n\n\"Well, at some point she must have noticed that there was a mark on the bottle. She'd have her nip or glug or however much it was, and then fill the bottle back up to the mark with water.\"\n\n\"That's clever.\"\n\n\"No, it's standard. Banal, even. My dad used to do that when my mum was trying to get him to stop.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" I was disappointed. I wanted Susan always to be as entirely original as she still appeared to me.\n\n\"So I did the logical thing. I stopped drinking from the bottle myself. She'd come up, have a swig, fill up to the pencil mark with water. I let it run and run, until I could see the colour of the whisky fading. Eventually, to confirm it, I had a glass myself. One part whisky to about fifteen of water would be my guess.\"\n\n\"Fuck.\"\n\n\"Yes, fuck.\"\n\n\"I'll have a word with her,\" I promised.\n\nBut I didn't. Was it cowardice, the hope that some alternative explanation might present itself, or a weary refusal to admit my own suspicions?\n\n\"And in the meantime, I'll keep my booze on top of the wardrobe.\"\n\n\"Good plan.\"\n\nIt was a good plan, until the day when Eric said quietly,\n\n\"She's learned to climb up to the top of the wardrobe.\"\n\nHe made it sound like a kind of monkey trick rather than a normal piece of behaviour involving a chair. But that's how it felt to me too.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nYou notice there are times when she seems, not squiffy, but out of focus. Not bleary of face, but bleary of mind. Then, by chance, you notice her swallowing a pill.\n\n\"Headache?\"\n\n\"No,\" she replies. She is in one of those moods\u2014lucid, unselfpitying, yet somehow beaten-down\u2014which bend your heart painfully. She comes and sits on the edge of the bed.\n\n\"I went to the doctor. I explained what had happened. I explained that I'd been feeling depressed. He gave me some cheering-up pills.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry you need them. I must be letting you down.\"\n\n\"It's not you, Paul. And it's not fair on you either. But I think if I can get through the...adjustment, then it'll get better.\"\n\n\"Did you tell him you were drinking a bit too much?\"\n\n\"He didn't ask about that.\"\n\n\"That doesn't mean you shouldn't have told him.\"\n\n\"We're not going to quarrel about this, are we?\"\n\n\"No. We're not going to quarrel. Ever.\"\n\n\"Then it'll all come out right. You'll see.\"\n\nThinking about this conversation later, you begin to understand\u2014for the first time, really\u2014that she has more to lose than you. Much more. You are leaving behind a past, much of which you are happy to let go. You believed, and still believe as deeply, that love is the only thing that counts; that it makes up for everything; that if you and she get it right, everything will fall into place. You realise that what she has left behind\u2014even her relationship with Gordon Macleod\u2014is more complicated than you had assumed. You thought chunks could be cleanly amputated from a life without pain or complication. You realise that, if she had seemed isolated in the Village when you first met her, you have made her more isolated by taking her away.\n\nAll this means that you must redouble your commitment to her. You must get through this tricky patch, and then things will become clearer, better. She believes that, and so you must believe it too.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nYou take the back route as you approach the Village, to avoid passing your parents' house.\n\n\"Where's Susan?\" are Joan's first words as she opens the door.\n\n\"I've come by myself.\"\n\n\"Does she know?\"\n\nYou like the way Joan always gets straight to the point. You quite enjoy having cold water dashed in your face before sitting down with a streaky tumbler full of room-temperature gin.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then it must be serious. I'll shut the little yappers up.\"\n\nYou sink into a dog-scented armchair and a drink is put next to you. As you are gathering your thoughts, Joan gets in first.\n\n\"Point One. I'm not a go-between. Whatever you say stays in this room and it doesn't get leaked back. Point Two. I'm not a shrink, I'm not some kind of advice centre, I don't even much like listening to other people's woes. I tend to think they should get on with it, stop moaning, roll up their sleeves and all of that. Point Three. I'm just an old soak whose life hasn't worked out and who lives alone with her dogs. So I'm not an authority on anything. Not even crosswords, as you once pointed out.\"\n\n\"But you love Susan.\"\n\n\"Course I do. How is the dear girl?\"\n\n\"She's drinking too much.\"\n\n\"How much is 'too much'?\"\n\n\"In her case, anything at all.\"\n\n\"You may be right.\"\n\n\"And she's on antidepressants.\"\n\n\"Well, we've all been _there,_ \" says Joan. \"Doctors hand them out like Smarties. Especially to women of a certain age. Do they do any good?\"\n\n\"I can't tell. They just make her woozy. But a different kind of woozy from what the drink does.\"\n\n\"Yes, I remember that too.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"So what?\"\n\n\"So what should I do?\"\n\n\"Paul, dear, I've just told you I don't give advice. I took my own advice for so many years and look where it got me. So I don't do that anymore.\"\n\nYou nod. You aren't too surprised either.\n\n\"The only advice I'd give you...\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"...is have a swig of what's at your elbow.\"\n\nYou obey.\n\n\"OK,\" you say. \"No advice. But...I don't know, is there something that I ought to know and don't? Something you can tell me about Susan, or about Susan and me, that would help?\"\n\n\"All I can say is that if everything goes belly-up and pear-shaped, you'll probably get over it and she probably won't.\"\n\nYou are shocked.\n\n\"That's not a very kind thing to say.\"\n\n\"I don't do kind, Paul. Truth isn't kind. You'll find that out soon enough as life kicks in.\"\n\n\"It feels as if it's kicked in pretty hard already.\"\n\n\"That may be all to the fucking good.\" Your face must look as if it's just taken a slap. \"Come on, Paul, you didn't come all the way down here so that I'd give you a hug and tell you there are fairies at the bottom of the garden.\"\n\n\"True. Just tell me your thoughts on this. Susan goes back to see Macleod every so often. Probably more than she says.\"\n\n\"Does that trouble you?\"\n\n\"Mainly in the sense that if he ever lays a finger on her again, I'm going to have to kill him.\"\n\nShe laughs. \"Oh, I do so miss the melodrama of being young.\"\n\n\"Don't patronise me, Joan.\"\n\n\"I'm not patronising you, Paul. Of course you'd do no such thing. But I admire you for the thought.\"\n\nYou wonder if she is being satirical. But Joan doesn't do satire.\n\n\"Why don't you think I would?\"\n\n\"Because the last murder in the Village was probably committed by someone wearing woad.\"\n\nYou laugh, and take another sip of gin. \"I'm worried,\" you say. \"I'm worried that I shan't be able to save her.\"\n\nShe doesn't reply, and this annoys you.\n\n\"So what do you think about _that_?\" you demand.\n\n\"I told you I'm not a fucking oracle. You might as well read your horoscope in the _Advertiser &_ _Gazette._ I said when you ran away together, you've got guts, the pair of you. You've got guts, and you've got love. If that isn't good enough for life, then life isn't good enough for you.\"\n\n\"Now you are sounding like an oracle!\"\n\n\"Then I'd better go and wash my mouth out with soap.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nOne day, you return to find her with cuts and bruises to her face, and her arms held defensively against her.\n\n\"I fell over that step in the garden,\" she says, as if it were a known hazard you had previously discussed. \"I'm getting very trippy, I'm afraid.\"\n\nShe is indeed getting \"trippy.\" Nowadays, as a reflex, you take her arm as you walk with her and keep watch for uneven pavements. But she also has a giveaway flush to her face. You call the doctor\u2014not the private one she went to for her cheering-up pills.\n\nDr. Kenny is a fussy, inquisitive middle-aged man, but the right sort of GP\u2014one who believes that house calls provide useful background when it comes to diagnosis. You take him upstairs to Susan's bedroom; her bruises are coming into full colour.\n\nDownstairs again, he asks for a few words.\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"It's rather puzzling,\" he begins. \"It's unusual for a woman of her age to take a fall.\"\n\n\"She's been getting very trippy lately.\"\n\n\"Yes, that's the word she used to me. And, if I may ask, you are...?\"\n\n\"I'm her lodger...no, more than that, kind of godson, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Hmm. And it's just the two of you here?\"\n\n\"There are two more lodgers in the attic rooms.\" You decide not to promote Eric to the status of second godson.\n\n\"Does she have family?\"\n\n\"Yes, but she's kind of...estranged from them at the moment.\"\n\n\"So she has no support? Except for you, that is?\"\n\n\"I suppose not.\"\n\n\"As I say, it's rather puzzling. Do you think there was drink involved?\"\n\n\"Oh no,\" you say swiftly, \"she doesn't drink. She hates the stuff. That's one of the reasons she left her husband. He's a drinker. Flagons and gallons,\" you add, without being able to stop yourself.\n\nYou realise two things. First, that you lie automatically to protect Susan\u2014even if the truth might have helped her more. You also begin to see how your relationship, or rather, your cohabitation, might appear to an outsider.\n\n\"So, if I may ask, what does she do all day?\"\n\n\"She...does some volunteer work for the Samaritans.\" This isn't true either. Susan has mentioned the idea; though you are against it. You think she shouldn't try to start helping others when she is the one needing help.\n\n\"That's not much, is it?\"\n\n\"Well, I suppose she...keeps house.\"\n\nHe looks around. The place is clearly in a mess. You realise that he is finding your answers inadequate. And why shouldn't he?\n\n\"If it happens again, we'll be obliged to investigate,\" he says. Then picks up his bag and leaves.\n\nInvestigate? you think. Investigate? He can tell you've been lying. But investigate what? Perhaps he guesses you are her lover, and suspects you might have been beating her up. Christ to that, you think: in your desire to protect her from being thought a drinker, you seem to be opening yourself up to a charge of assault. Perhaps he was giving you a final warning.\n\nNot that the police would necessarily be interested. You remember an incident from a year or two before. You are in the car with Susan and have scarcely gone a quarter of a mile when you notice a couple rowing on the pavement. As you see the man bearing down on the woman you have flashbacks to the Macleod household. He is not exactly hitting her, but looks about to do so. Maybe they are drunk, you can't tell. You wind down the window and the woman yells, \"Call the police!\" Now he is holding her. \"Call the police!\" You speed home, dial 999, and are picked up by a patrol car which takes you to the scene of the reported possible crime. The couple have moved on, but you soon track them down a couple of streets away. They are ten yards apart, bellowing obscenities at one another.\n\n\"Oh, we know them,\" says the young constable. \"It's just a domestic.\"\n\n\"Aren't you going to arrest him?\"\n\nThe two of you are probably about the same age, but he knows he has seen more of life than you have.\n\n\"Well, sir, it's not our policy to interfere in domestics. I mean, not unless it really kicks off. They're just having a bit of a barney by the looks of it. Friday night, after all.\"\n\nAnd then he drives the two of you home.\n\nYou realise that you want official interference into other people's lives but not into your own. You also realise that your truthfulness has become dangerously flexible. And you wonder if you should have got out of the car and tried to pull the man away from the woman.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nOne of your problems is this: for a long time it remains inconceivable to you that she is a drinker. How could she be, given that her husband is a drinker, and drink disgusts her? She hates even the smell of it, as she hates the bogus emotions it sets off in people. It makes Macleod coarser, angrier, more crudely sentimental; when he grabbed her hair and forced a glass to her lips, she would rather the sherry went down her dress than her throat. Nor has anyone in her life ever offered a credible counterexample: alcohol as glamorous, as usefully disinhibiting, as fun, as something you can control, knowing when to give the stuff its hour and when to refuse it.\n\nYou believe her. You never query her increasing lapses and latenesses. When you come in to find her blank-faced and bleary, you tell yourself that she has mistakenly swallowed an extra cheering-up pill\u2014which is sometimes the case. And because you inevitably believe that one of the reasons she is on antidepressants is because you are failing to make her so happy that she doesn't need them, you feel guilty, and this guilt forbids you from questioning her. So when, out of her bleariness, she looks up, pats the sofa beside her, and asks,\n\n\"Where've you been all my life?\"\n\nyou feel a ripping and a tearing inside you, and there is nothing you want more in the world than to make everything all right for her, and on her own terms, not yours. So you sit down next to her and take her wrists.\n\nJust as you believe your love to be unique, you believe your problems\u2014her problems\u2014to be unique. You are too young to understand that all human behaviour falls into patterns and categories and that her\u2014your\u2014case is far from unique. You want her to be some kind of exception, rather than any kind of rule. If anyone had ventured such a word as codependency to you back then\u2014assuming the term had even been invented\u2014you would have laughed it off as American jargon. However, you might have been more impressed by a statistical linkage of which you were then unaware: that the partners of alcoholics, far from being repulsed by the habit\u2014or rather, despite being repulsed by the habit\u2014frequently succumb to it themselves.\n\nBut the next stage for you is to accept a percentage of the evidence in front of your eyes. You understand that in certain, very limited circumstances, she needs the small lift of a small drink\u2014as she now occasionally admits. Obviously, she has to keep Joan company when she goes to the Village; obviously, she's sometimes frightened by the increasing traffic on the roads, and by that sudden twisty climb over the hills, so a little nip helps her; obviously, she is sometimes very lonely when you're away at college for most of the day. She also has \"my bad time,\" as she calls it\u2014usually between five and six in the evening, though as the days draw in and dusk falls earlier, so her bad time accordingly starts earlier, and obviously, extends just as late as it did before.\n\nYou believe what she says. You believe that the bottle she keeps beneath the sink, behind the bleach and washing-up liquid and silver polish, is the only bottle she drinks from. When she suggests that you put a pencil mark on the bottle so you can both monitor how much she drinks, you are heartened, and think these pencil marks are quite different from the ones on Eric's whisky bottle. Nor do you imagine there are other bottles elsewhere. When friends try to tip you off\u2014\"I'm a bit worried about Susan's drinking,\" says one, and \"Boy, you could smell the booze from the other end of the phone,\" says another\u2014you react in various ways. You protect her by denying it; you admit there are occasional lapses; you say the two of you have talked about it and she has promised \"to see someone.\" You may even say all three things in the course of a single conversation. But you will also be offended by your friends' attempted helpfulness. Because you do not need help: the two of you, since you love one another, will be able to sort the matter out, thank you very much. And this slightly alienates your friends, and also alienates them from her. Increasingly, you find yourself saying, \"She was just having a bad day,\" and you believe it yourself by dint of repetition.\n\nBecause there are still many good hours, and good days, when sobriety and cheerfulness fill the house, and her eyes and smile are just as they were when you first met, and you do something simple like drive for a walk in the woods, or go to the cinema and hold hands, and a sudden rush of feeling tells you it is all very easy and straightforward, and then your love is reaffirmed, yours for her, hers for you. And you wish you could display her to your friends at times like this: look, she is still herself, not just \"underneath,\" but here, now, on the surface too. You never suspect that one reason your friends tend to see her half-cut might be because she has persuaded herself, by some tortuous argument, that she needs a little Dutch courage before facing them.\n\nEach stage rolls seamlessly into the next. And here comes a paradoxical one that you initially struggle with. If you love her, as you unwaveringly do, and if loving her means understanding her, then understanding her must include understanding why she is a drinker. You run through all her prehistory, and recent history, and current situation, and possible future. You understand all this, and before you know where you are, you have passed somehow from total denial of the fact that she drinks to total comprehension of why she might do so.\n\nBut with this comes a brute chronological fact. As far as you know, Susan only drank occasionally in all her years with Macleod. But now that she is living with you, she is\u2014has become, is still becoming\u2014an alcoholic. There is too much in this for you to entirely acknowledge, let alone bear.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nShe is sitting up in her quilted bedjacket, the newspapers around her, at her elbow a mug of coffee long gone cold. She has a frown on her, and her chin is pushed forward, as if she has been ruminating all day. It is now six in the evening, and you are in your last year of law studies. You sit on the side of her bed.\n\n\"Casey Paul,\" she begins, in an affectionate, puzzled tone, \"I've decided that there's something seriously wrong.\"\n\n\"I think you may be right,\" you answer quietly. At last, you think, perhaps this is the moment of breakthrough. That's what's meant to happen, isn't it? Everything comes to a moment of crisis, and then the fever breaks, and all becomes clear and rational and happy again.\n\n\"But I've been searching my wits all day and can't get a handle on it.\"\n\nNow where do you go? Do you start straight in again with the drinking? Suggest seeing the doctor again, a specialist, a psychiatrist? You are twenty-five, and quite untrained for this kind of situation. There are no articles in the newspaper headed, HOW TO COPE WITH YOUR MIDDLE-AGED FEMALE ALCOHOLIC LOVER. You are on your own. You have no theories of life yet, you only know some of its pleasures and pains. You still believe, however, in love, and in what love can do, how it can transform a life, indeed the lives of two people. You believe in its invulnerability, its tenacity, its ability to outrun any opponent. This, in fact, is your only theory of life so far.\n\nSo you do the best you can. You take one of her wrists, and talk about how you met and fell in love, how you were chosen by lot and then threw in your lot together, how you had run away in the finest tradition of lovers, and you continue like this, meaning and believing every word, and then you gently suggest that she's been drinking a little too much lately.\n\n\"Oh, you're always going on about that,\" she replies, as if this were some tedious and pedantic obsession of yours, nothing really to do with her. \"But if you want me to say so, then I will. Maybe I occasionally take a drop or two more than is good for me.\"\n\nYou quell the prompting inner voice which says: No, not a drop or two, a whole bottle or two more than is good for you.\n\nShe goes on, \"I'm talking about something much bigger than _that._ I think there's something seriously wrong.\"\n\n\"You mean, something that causes your drinking? Something I don't know about?\" Your mind heads towards some terrible, defining event in her childhood, much worse than a \"party kiss\" from Uncle Humph.\n\n\"Oh, you really can be a Great Bore at times,\" she says mockingly. \"No, much more important than that. What's behind it all.\"\n\nYou are already losing a little patience. \"And what do you think might be behind it all?\"\n\n\"Maybe it's the Russkis.\"\n\n\"The R _usskis_?\" You\u2014well, yes\u2014you yelp.\n\n\"Oh Paul, do try and keep up. I don't mean the _actual_ Russkis. They're just a figure of speech.\"\n\nLike, say, the Ku Klux Klan or the KGB or the CIA or Che Guevara. You suspect that this one brief chance is slipping away, and you don't know if it is your fault, her fault, or nobody's fault.\n\n\"OK,\" you say. \"The Russians are a figure of speech.\"\n\nBut she takes this only as sly impertinence.\n\n\"It's no good if you can't follow. There's something behind it all, just out of sight. Something which holds it all together. Something that, if we put it back together, would mend it all, would mend us all, don't you see?\"\n\nYou give it your best shot. \"You mean, like Buddhism?\"\n\n\"Oh don't be absurd. You know what I think about religion.\"\n\n\"Well, it was just an idea,\" you say jokingly.\n\n\"And not a very good one.\"\n\nHow quickly it has gone from something tentative and gentle and hopeful to something irascible and mocking. And how far away from what you consider to be the problem, not just behind it all but on the surface and at all points in between: the bottles under the sink, under the bed, behind the bookshelves, in her stomach, in her head, in her heart. It may be true that you don't know the cause, if indeed there is a single, identifiable cause, but it seems to you that you can only work with\u2014against\u2014the manifestations that erupt every day.\n\nYou know what she means about religion, of course. There is her adamantine disapproval of missionaries, whether they seek to convert in distant lands or on suburban doorsteps. And there is also the Malta story, which she has told you more than once. When the girls were small, Gordon Macleod was posted to Malta for a couple of years. She went out and lived there for some of the time. And her abiding memory was of the priest's bicycle. Yes, she would explain, it's terribly Catholic out there. The church is all-powerful, and everyone's very obedient. And the church keeps them down by making the women have as many children as possible: it's absolutely impossible to obtain birth control on the island. They're very backward in that regard\u2014John Bell & Croyden would be run out of town\u2014so you have to take the equipment out with you.\n\nAnyway, she goes on, it sometimes happens that a young bride doesn't get pregnant immediately after marriage, say for a year or two, despite all her prayers. Or maybe there's a woman who has two children and desperately wants a third but it isn't happening. And in such cases, the priest will come round and prop his bicycle outside the front door, so everyone\u2014especially the husband\u2014knows not to interfere until the bicycle has gone. And when, nine months later\u2014though of course it may take several goes\u2014the family is blessed, that blessing is known as \"the priest's child,\" and thought of as a gift from God. And sometimes there is more than one priest's child in the family. Can you imagine that, Paul? Don't you think it's barbaric?\n\nYou do think it's barbaric\u2014you say so every time. And now part of you\u2014the doomful, despairing, sarcastic part of you\u2014wonders whether, if it isn't the Russkis who are behind it all, then it might be the Vatican.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nYou still share a bed, but haven't made love for a long time now. You don't ask yourself how long in calendar terms, because what counts is how it feels in terms of the heart. You discover more about sex than you want to\u2014or more than you should be allowed to discover while still young. Certain discoveries should be kept for later in life, when they might hurt less.\n\nYou know already that there is good sex and bad sex. Naturally, you prefer good sex to bad sex. But also, being young, you think that even so, all things considered, taking the rough with the smooth, bad sex is better than no sex at all. And sometimes better than masturbation; though sometimes not.\n\nBut if you think these are the only categories of sex that exist, you find you are mistaken. Because there is a category which you had not known to exist, something which isn't, as you might have guessed had you heard about it before, merely a subcategory of bad sex; and that is sad sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.\n\nSad sex is when, the toothpaste in her mouth not fully disguising the smell of sweet sherry, she whispers, \"Cheer me up, Casey Paul.\" And you oblige. Though cheering her up also involves cheering yourself down.\n\nSad sex is when she is already doped by a cheering-up pill, but you think that if you fuck her, it might cheer her up a bit more.\n\nSad sex is when you are yourself in such despair, the situation so insoluble, the prehistory so oppressive, the very balance of your soul in doubt from day to day, moment to moment, that you think you may as well forget yourself for a few minutes, for half an hour, in sex. But you don't forget yourself, or your state of soul, not for even a nanosecond.\n\nSad sex is when you feel you are losing all touch with her, and she with you, but this is a way of telling one another that the connection is still there, somehow; that neither of you is giving up on the other, even if part of you fears that you should. Then you discover that insisting on the connection is the same as prolonging the pain.\n\nSad sex is when you are making love to a woman while thinking about how to kill her husband, even if this is something you would never be able to do, because you are not that sort of person. But as your body continues, so does your mind: you find yourself thinking, Yes, if you discovered him in the process of strangling her, you can imagine hitting him on the back of the head with a spade, or maybe stabbing him with a kitchen knife, though you realise that, given your hopelessness at fisticuffs, you might end up with the spade or the knife skidding off him and striking her instead. Then this parallel narrative in your head gets even madder, proposing that if you were to miss him and hit her instead, then it might be that you secretly wanted to harm her, because she\u2014this woman now naked beneath you\u2014has got you into this insoluble morass so early in your life.\n\nSad sex is when she is sober, you both desire one another, you know that you will always love her regardless, just as she will always love you regardless, but you\u2014both of you, perhaps\u2014now realise that loving one another does not necessarily lead to happiness. And so your lovemaking has become less a search for consolation than a hopeless attempt to deny your mutual unhappiness.\n\nGood sex is better than bad sex. Bad sex is better than no sex, except when no sex is better than bad sex. Self-sex is better than no sex, except when no sex is better than self-sex. Sad sex is always far worse than good sex, bad sex, self-sex and no sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAt college you meet Paula\u2014blond, friendly, direct\u2014who has switched to law after a short-service commission in the Army. You like her handwriting when she shows you a case summary from a lecture you missed. You invite her for coffee one morning, then start having sandwich lunches in the nearby public gardens. One evening you take her to the cinema and kiss her good night. You exchange phone numbers.\n\nA few days later, she asks, \"Who's that madwoman who lives in your house?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry?\" Already there is a chill spreading through you.\n\n\"I rang you up last night. A woman answered the phone.\"\n\n\"That would have been my landlady.\"\n\n\"She sounded as mad as a hatter.\"\n\nYou take a breath. \"She's a little eccentric,\" you say. You want this conversation to stop, immediately. You wish it had never started. You wish Paula had never phoned the number you gave her. You very much don't want her to be specific, but you know she is going to be.\n\n\"I asked when you'd be back, and she said, 'Oh, he's very much the dirty stop-out, that young man, you can't rely on him from one moment to the next.' And then she came over all genteel and said something like, 'If you will excuse me while I fetch a pencil, I shall pass on any message you may choose to leave.' Well, I put the phone down before she came back.\"\n\nShe is looking at you expectantly, sure that you will provide her with an explanation that will satisfy her. It doesn't have to be much; a joke might even do it. Various extravagant lies cross your mind until, preferring the quarter-truth to the self-interested obfuscation\u2014and also feeling stubborn and defensive about Susan\u2014you repeat,\n\n\"She's a little eccentric.\"\n\nAnd that, unsurprisingly, is the end of your relationship with Paula. And you realise that such a pattern is likely to repeat itself with other friendly and direct girls whose handwriting you admire.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAround this time, you stop thinking of her family by their nicknames. All that Mr. Elephant Pants and Miss Grumpy stuff was fine and funny at the time, part of the first silliness and proprietoriness of love. But it was also a facetious minimising of their presence in her life. And if you are beginning to think of yourself as grown-up\u2014however forcedly and prematurely\u2014then they should be allowed their own maturity as well.\n\nAnother thing you notice is that you no longer fall easily into the private, teasing love language that used to pass between you. Perhaps the weight of what you have taken on has temporarily crushed out love's decorativeness. Of course, you still love her, and tell her so, but in plainer terms nowadays. Perhaps, when you have solved her, or she has solved herself, there will be room again for such playfulness. You can't be sure.\n\nSusan, however, continues using all the little phrases from her side of the relationship. It is her way of maintaining that nothing has changed, that she is fine, you are fine, all is fine. But she, you and it aren't, and those familiar words sometimes cause a prickle of embarrassment, more often lurching pain. You let yourself into the house, deliberately making enough noise to alert her, and as you come down the short flight of stairs into the kitchen, you find her in a familiar pose: red-faced by the gas fire, wrinkling her brow at a newspaper as if the world really does need to sort itself out. Then she looks up brightly and says, \"Where've you been all my life?\" or \"Here's the dirty stop-out,\" and your cheerfulness\u2014even if briefly assumed\u2014drains like bathwater. You look around and take stock of the situation. You open the store cupboards to see if there is something you can make into something. And she lets you get on with it, while offering occasional remarks designed to convey that she is still well capable of understanding a newspaper.\n\n\"Things seem to be in a frightful mess, don't you agree, Casey Paul?\"\n\nAnd you ask, \"Where exactly are we talking about?\"\n\nAnd she replies, \"Oh, just about everywhere.\"\n\nAt which point you might throw the emptied tin of plum tomatoes into the bin with some force, and she will chide you,\n\n\"Temper, temper, Casey Paul!\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBy months of manoeuvring, you get her first to a GP and then to a consultant psychiatrist at the local hospital. She doesn't want you to come with her, but you insist, knowing what will probably happen otherwise. You turn up at a quarter to three for a three o'clock slot. The waiting area already contains a dozen other patients, and you realise it is the hospital's policy to book everyone in for the same time, which is when the consultant's session begins. You can see their point: mad people\u2014and at your age you use the term pretty broadly\u2014are presumably not among the world's most punctilious timekeepers: so it's best to summon them all _en bloc._\n\nShe makes what might be an attempt to escape, heading off to the ladies. You let her go with a fifty-fifty expectation that she won't return. But she does, and you find yourself reflecting cynically that she probably went to the hospital shop to check if they stocked booze, or maybe asked a few nurses where the bar was, only to receive the annoying news that the hospital doesn't have one.\n\nYou realise how sympathy and antagonism can coexist. You are discovering how many seemingly incompatible emotions can thrive, side by side, in the same human heart. You are angry with the books you have read, none of which have prepared you for this. No doubt you were reading the wrong books. Or reading them in the wrong way.\n\nYou feel, even at this late, desperate stage, that your emotional situation is still more interesting than that of your friends. They (mostly) have girlfriends and (mostly) have peer sex; some have been inspected by their girlfriends' parents, receiving approval, disapproval or judgement suspended. Most have a plan for their future life which includes this girlfriend\u2014or, if not, one very similar. A plan to become furrow-dwellers. But for the moment, they have only the traditional clear-skinned joys, sane dreams and inchoate frustrations of young men in their mid-twenties with girlfriends of the same age. Yet here you are, in a hospital waiting area, surrounded by mad people, in love with a woman who is being characterised as potentially mad.\n\nAnd the strange thing is, part of you feels exhilarated by it. You think: not only do you love Susan more than they love their girlfriends\u2014you must do, otherwise you wouldn't be sitting here among all the nutters\u2014but you are having a more interesting life. They may measure their girlfriends' brains and breasts, and their future parent-in-laws' deposit accounts, and imagine they have won; but you are still ahead of them because your relationship is more fascinating, more complicated and more insoluble. And the proof of this is that you are sitting here on a metal stacking chair, half-reading some discarded magazine, while your beloved dreams of\u2014what? Escape, no doubt: escape from here, escape from you, escape from life? She too is staggering beneath the weight of extreme, unbearable and incompatible emotions. You are both in deep pain. And yet, aware as you are of the stupid, bolloxy world of male competitiveness, you tell yourself that you are still a winner. And when you get to this point in your thoughts, the next logical stage is: you're a nutter as well. You are obviously one stark staring, complete and utter nutter. On the other hand, you are the youngest fucking nutter in the whole waiting area. So you have won again! Former under-12, under-6-stone school boxing champion becomes hospital's under-26 nutter champion!\n\nAt this moment a round, bald, suited man opens the door of the consulting room.\n\n\"Mr. Ellis,\" he calls quietly.\n\nThere is no reply. Familiar with the inattention, selective deafness and other failings of his patients, the consultant raises his voice:\n\n\"Mr. ELLIS!\"\n\nSome old fool wearing three sweaters and an anorak gets to his feet; a towelling headband restrains the ten or so wisps of white hair that sprawl from his crown. He stands looking round for a moment, as if perhaps expecting applause for having recognised his own name, then follows the consultant into his office.\n\nYou are not prepared for what happens next. You hear the psychiatrist's voice, quite clearly, say,\n\n\"And how are we today, Mr. Ellis?\"\n\nYou look at the closed door. You see that there is a three-inch gap between the foot of it and the floor. You guess that the consultant must be facing the door. You do not hear a reply from the deaf old fool, but perhaps there hasn't been one, because next, loud enough to rouse the other nodding nutters, come the words,\n\n\"SO HOW'S THE DEPRESSION, MR. ELLIS?\"\n\nYou are not sure if Susan has been paying attention. For yourself, you think this is unlikely to work.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThere is her shame, which is ever present. And then there is your shame, which sometimes presents itself as pride, sometimes as a kind of noble realism; but also, mostly, as what it is\u2014just shame.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nYou come back one evening to find her pie-eyed in a chair, the water glass by her side still containing a good inch or so of non-water. You decide to behave as if all this is completely normal\u2014indeed, what domestic life is all about. You go into the kitchen and start looking around for something to turn into something. You find some eggs: you ask if she would like an omelette.\n\n\"It's easy for you,\" she answers belligerently.\n\n\"What's easy for me?\"\n\n\"That's a clever lawyer's answer,\" she replies, taking a swig right in front of you, which she rarely does. You are about to go back to cracking eggs, when she adds,\n\n\"Gerald died today.\"\n\n\"Which Gerald?\" You can't immediately think of a Gerald among your mutual friends.\n\n\"Which Gerald indeed? Mr. Clever. _My_ Gerald. My Gerald that I told you about. The one I was engaged to. This was the day he died.\"\n\nYou feel terrible. Not because you have forgotten the date\u2014she has never told you it before\u2014but because, unlike you, she has her dead to remember. Her fianc\u00e9, the brother who disappeared out over the Atlantic, Gordon's father\u2014whose name you no longer remember\u2014who had been soft on her. You have no such figures in your life, no griefs, no holes, no losses. So you don't know what it's like. Everyone should remember their dead, you believe, and everyone else should respect this need and desire. You are in fact rather envious, and wish you had a few dead of your own.\n\nLater, you become more suspicious. She has never mentioned the day of Gerald's death before. And there is no way for you to check. Just as, in happier days, there was no way for you to check when she told you how many times the two of you had made love. Perhaps, when she heard your key turn in the lock, and she was unable to get up and also unwilling to hide the glass at her elbow, she decided\u2014no, this is perhaps too deliberate a verb to describe her mental processes that evening\u2014she \"realised,\" yes, she suddenly realised that it was the day of Gerald's death. Though it could equally have been Alec's, or that of Gordon's father. Who could tell? Who knew? And who, in the end, cared?\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI said I never kept a diary. This isn't strictly true. There was a point, in my isolation and turmoil, when I thought writing things down might help. I used a hardback notebook, black ink, one side of the paper. I tried to be objective. There was no point, I thought, in merely venting my feelings of hurt and betrayal. I remember that the first line I wrote down was:\n\n> _All alcoholics are liars._\n\nThis was, obviously, not based on a huge sample or broad research. But I believed it at the time, and now, decades later, with more field experience, I believe it to be an essential truth about the condition. I went on:\n\n> _All lovers are truth-tellers._\n\nAgain, the sample was small, consisting mainly of myself. It seemed to me evident that love and truth were connected; indeed, as I may have said, that to live in love is to live in truth.\n\nAnd then the conclusion to this quasi-syllogism:\n\n> _Therefore, the alcoholic is the opposite of the lover._\n\nThis seemed not just logical, but also consistent with my observations.\n\nNowadays, a lifetime later, the second of these propositions seems the weakest. I have seen too many examples of lovers who, far from living in truth, dwelt in some fantasy land where self-delusion and self-aggrandizement reigned, with reality nowhere to be found.\n\nYet, even while I was compiling my notebook, searching to be objective, the subjective kept undermining me. For instance, I realised, looking back at our time in the Village, that whereas I thought of myself as both lover and truth-teller, the truths I had told were only to myself and Susan. I told lies to my parents, to Susan's family, to my own close friends; I even dissembled at the tennis club. I protected the zone of truth with a rampart of lies. Just as she was now lying to me all the time about her drinking. As well as lying to herself. And yet she would still affirm that she loved me.\n\nSo I began to suspect that I was wrong in considering alcoholism as the opposite of love. Perhaps they were much closer than I imagined. Alcoholism is certainly just as obsessive\u2014as absolutist\u2014as love; and maybe to the drinker the hit of booze is as powerful as the hit of sex is to the lover. So could the alcoholic be merely a lover who has shifted the object and focus of his or her\u2014no, her\u2014love?\n\nMy observations and reflections had filled a few dozen pages when I came home one evening to find Susan in a state I knew all too well: red-faced, semi-coherent, quick to take offence, yet at the same time genteelly pretending that all was for the best in this best possible of worlds. I went to my room and discovered that my desk had been inexpertly rifled. I had, even then, a habit of orderliness, and knew what lived where. Since the desk contained my Notes on Alcoholism, I assumed, wearily, that she had probably read them. Still, I thought, perhaps in the long run the shock might have a useful effect on her. In the short run, evidently not.\n\nThe next time I went to my notebook to make an addition, I saw that Susan had done more than just read it. She had left an annotation beneath my last entry, using the same black ink from the same pen. In an unsteady hand, she had written:\n\n> _With your inky pen to make you hate me._\n\nI didn't accuse her of rifling my desk, reading my notebook, writing in it. I could imagine her saying, in a tone of polite protest, \"No, I don't think so.\" I was weary of constant confrontation. But then, I was equally weary of a constant pretence that all was well, a constant evasion of the truth. I also realised that it would be impossible for me to write anything down in the future without picturing her at my desk studying my latest denunciations. This would be intolerable for both of us: the annotation of pain on my part, the dim yet irate acknowledgement of pain caused on her part. So I threw away the notebook.\n\nBut that half-formed sentence of hers, written by a wonky hand with an unfamiliar pen, remained with me, and always has. Not least because of its ambiguity. Did she mean, \"You use your inky pen to write down things which will then make you hate me\"? Or did she mean, \"I have left my mark with your inky pen because I want to make you hate me\"? Critical and aggressive, or masochistic and self-pitying? Maybe she knew what she meant when she wrote the words, but there was no subsequent clarity to be found. You may judge the second interpretation oversubtle, and designed to let me off the hook. But\u2014and this formed the basis of another of my long-lost notes\u2014the alcoholic, in my experience, wants to provoke, to push away help, to justify her own isolation. So if she managed to convince herself that I hated her, all the more reason to turn for comfort to the bottle.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nYou are taking her somewhere in the car. There is no need for her to fear the journey, and you will pick her up later and drive her home. But there are the usual delays before you can get her into the car. And as you are about to release the handbrake, she rushes back into the house and returns with a large, bright yellow plastic laundry bag, which she puts between her feet. She does not explain. You do not ask. This is where things have got to.\n\nAnd then you think, Oh Fuckit.\n\n\"What's that for?\" you ask.\n\n\"The thing is,\" she replies, \"I'm not feeling entirely well, and it's just possible I might be sick. What with the car and all that.\"\n\nNo, you think, what with being drunk and all that. A doctor friend has told you that alcoholics sometimes throw up so violently that they can perforate their own oesophagus. As it happens, she doesn't need to vomit, but she might as well have done. Because she has already filled your head with an image of her throwing up into this yellow bag, and you cannot stop seeing it. You might as well have listened to her dry retching and then wet retching, and can hear the vomit trickling into the bright yellow plastic. The smell, too, of course, in your small car. The excuses, the lies. Her lies, your lies.\n\nBecause it is no longer just a question of her lying to you. When she does so, you have two choices: call her out on it, or accept what she says. Usually, out of weariness and a desire for peace\u2014and yes, out of love\u2014you accept what she says. You condone the lie. And so become a liar by proxy. And it is a very short step from accepting her lies to lying yourself\u2014out of weariness, and a desire for peace, and also out of love\u2014yes, that too.\n\nWhat a long way you have come. Years ago, when you started off lying to your parents, you did so with a kind of relish, reckless of consequence; it almost felt character-building. Later, you began to tell lies in all directions: to protect her, and to protect your love. Later still, she starts lying to you, to keep you from knowing her secret; and now she lies with a kind of relish, reckless of consequence. Then, finally, you begin lying to her. Why? Something to do with the need to create some internal space which you could keep intact\u2014and where you could yourself remain intact. And this is how it is for you now. Love and truth\u2014where have they gone?\n\nYou ask yourself: Is staying with her an act of courage on your part, or an act of cowardice? Perhaps both? Or is it just an inevitability?\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nShe has taken to going to the Village by train. You approve: you think this comes from a recognition of her unfitness to drive. You take her to the station, she tells you the time of her return train, though, as often as not, she doesn't turn up until the next one, or the one after. And when she says, \"Don't bother meeting me,\" she is protecting her inner world. And when you reply, \"Fine\u2014sure you'll be all right?\" you are protecting yours.\n\nThe phone goes one evening.\n\n\"Is that Henry?\"\n\n\"No, sorry, wrong number.\"\n\nYou are about to put the phone down when the man reads your number to you.\n\n\"Yes, that's right.\"\n\n\"Well, good evening, sir. This is the transport police at Waterloo Station. We have a lady here in a...slightly distressed condition. We found her asleep in the train and, well, her handbag was open and there was a sum of money in it, so you see...\"\n\n\"Yes I see.\"\n\n\"She showed us this number and asked us to call Henry.\"\n\nIn the background you hear her voice. \"Call Henry, call Henry.\"\n\nAh, her shorthand for Henry Road.\n\nSo you drive to Waterloo, find the office of the railway police and there she is, sitting up, bright-eyed, waiting to be collected, knowing that it would happen. The two policemen are courteous and concerned. They are doubtless used to helping drunk old ladies found snoring in empty carriages. Not that she is old, just that when she is drunk, you think of her, suddenly, as a drunk old lady.\n\n\"Well, thank you very much for looking after her.\"\n\n\"Oh, she was no trouble at all, sir. Quiet as a mouse. Look after yourself, Madam.\"\n\nShe gives a rather stately acknowledging nod. You take the arm of this piece of left luggage, and off you go. Your annoyance and despair, however, are cut by a certain pride in her having been \"no trouble.\" Though what if she had been?\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nEventually, more out of despair than hope, you try tough love, or at least what your understanding of that concept is. You don't let her get away with anything. You call her out on her lies. You pour away whatever bottles you find, some in obvious places, some in such strange locations that she must have hidden them there while drunk, and then forgotten where she had put them. You get her banned from the three local shops which sell alcohol. You give them each a photo to keep behind the till. You do not tell her this; you think the humiliation of being refused service will jolt her. You never find out, and she merely gets round the obstruction by travelling further afield.\n\nYou hear reports. Some people are shy about mentioning things to you, others not. A friend, on a bus a mile or so away from Henry Road, has spotted her down an alleyway next to an off-licence, raising a newly bought bottle to her lips. This image burns deep, and transforms itself from another's account into your own private memory. A neighbour tells you that your auntie was in the Cap and Bells last Saturday night, downing five sherries in succession until they stopped serving her. \"It's not the kind of pub someone like her should be in,\" the neighbour adds concernedly. \"They get all sorts in there.\" You picture the scene, from her ashamed first order at the bar to her unsteady walk home, and this too becomes part of your memory bank.\n\nYou tell her that her behaviour is destroying your love for her. You do not mention hers for you.\n\n\"Then you must leave me,\" she says. She is flushed, dignified and logical.\n\nYou know that you are not going to do this. The question is, whether or not she knows it too.\n\nYou write her a letter. If spoken words of rebuke fly unhindered straight out of her head, perhaps written ones will stick. You tell her that the way she is going on, she will almost certainly die of a wet brain, that there is nothing more you can do for her, except come to her funeral, whenever that might be. You leave the letter on the kitchen table, in an envelope with her name on it. She never mentions receiving it, opening it, reading it. _With your inky pen to make you hate me._\n\nYou realise that tough love is also tough on the lover.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nYou are taking her to Gatwick. Martha has invited her out to Brussels, where she is working as a Eurocrat. To your surprise, Susan agrees. You promise to make it as easy as possible for her. You will drive her to the airport and see her through check-in. She nods, then says straightforwardly,\n\n\"You might have to let me have a drink before getting on the plane. Belgian courage.\"\n\nYou are more than relieved: almost encouraged.\n\nThe night before she is half-packed and half-drunk. You go to bed. She continues packing and drinking. The next morning she comes to you with a cupped hand over her mouth.\n\n\"I'm afraid I don't think I shall be able to go.\"\n\nYou look at her without speaking.\n\n\"I've lost my teeth. I can't find them anywhere. I think I may have thrown them into the garden.\"\n\nYou don't say anything except, \"We have to leave by two.\" You decide to let her go on destroying her life.\n\nBut perhaps your failure to respond\u2014to offer neither help nor rebuke\u2014is, for once, the correct approach. An hour or two later, she is walking around with her teeth in, never alluding to either having lost them, or found them.\n\nAt two o'clock you put her case in the back of the car, double-check her ticket and passport and set off. There have been no last-minute diversions, no scurrying for a bright yellow laundry bag. She sits beside you quiet as a mouse, in the railway policeman's words.\n\nAs you are approaching Redhill, she turns and says in a demurely puzzled way, as if you were more her chauffeur than her lover,\n\n\"Would you mind very much telling me where we are going?\"\n\n\"You're going to Brussels. To visit Martha.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't think so. There must be some mistake.\"\n\n\"That's why you've got your ticket and your passport in your handbag.\" Though they are actually in your pocket, as you don't want them going the way of her teeth.\n\n\"But I don't know where she lives.\"\n\n\"She's meeting you at the airport.\"\n\nThere is a pause.\n\n\"Yes,\" she says, nodding, \"I seem to remember about this now.\"\n\nThere is no further resistance. Part of you thinks she should have a large label round her neck with her name and destination written on it, like a wartime refugee. With perhaps her gas mask in a box as well.\n\nAt the bar you buy her a double schooner of sherry, which she sips with inattentive gentility. You think: it could be worse. This is how you react to situations nowadays. You have the lowest of expectations.\n\nThe trip turns out to be a success. She has been shown the city, and brings you some postcards. Miss Grumpy, she announces, is nowadays Much Less So, perhaps influenced by a charming Belgian boyfriend who was in attendance. Her memories are clearer than usual, a sign that she has been temperate. You feel happy for her, if slightly resentful that she can clean up her act for others more easily than for you. Or so it seems.\n\nBut then, she tells you that on the last morning, the real reason why her daughter invited her out became clear. She, Miss Grumpy, is of the opinion that her mother ought to go back to Mr. Gordon Macleod. Who is now very contrite and promises to be on his best behaviour if she returns. According to Susan, according to her daughter.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nTo save time, and to save emotion, you address her, straightforwardly, as a drinker. No longer, There seems to be a problem, Do you know what it might be, Perhaps I can suggest...none of that. So one day you suggest Alcoholics Anonymous, not knowing if there is a branch near you.\n\n\"Not going to the God-botherers,\" she replies firmly.\n\nGiven her dislike of priests, and extreme disapproval of missionaries, this response is understandable. No doubt she thinks of AA as yet another bunch of American missionaries interfering in other countries' belief systems, bringing the foreign halt and lame into the radiant presence of their God. You do not blame her.\n\nMostly, you can only deal with the day-to-day crises. Occasionally, you look to the future, and find one outcome which has a terrifying logic. It goes like this. She doesn't drink all the time. Not every day. She can go a day or two without the comfort of a bottle. But her memory, as a result of the drink, is getting poorer. So the logic runs: if she carries on destroying her memory at the present rate, maybe she will reach the stage when she has actually forgotten she is an alcoholic! Might that happen? It would be one way to cure her. But you also think: you might as well simply blast her with ECT and be done with it.\n\nHere is one of the problems. You don't, at bottom, think of alcoholism as a physical disease. You might have heard that it is, but you aren't really convinced. You can't help thinking of it as many people\u2014some of whom you might not want to be associated with\u2014have thought about it for centuries: as a moral disease. And one of the reasons you do so is because she does too. When she is at her most lucid, her most rational, her most gentle, and as much tormented by what is happening to her as you are, she tells you\u2014as she always has\u2014that she hates the fact that she is a drinker, and feels deep shame and guilt about it: so you must leave her, because she is \"no good.\" She has a moral disease, which is why hospitals and doctors cannot cure her. They cannot fix a flawed personality from a played-out generation. She urges you again to leave her.\n\nBut you cannot leave Susan. How could you bear to withdraw your love from her? If you didn't love her, who would? And maybe it is worse than this. It is not just that you love her, but that you are addicted to her. How ironic would that be?\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAn image comes into your head one day, an image of your relationship to one another. You are at an upstairs window of the house on Henry Road. She has somehow climbed out, and you are hanging on to her. By the wrists, of course. And her weight makes it impossible for you to pull her back inside. It is all you can do to stop yourself being pulled out with her, by her. At one point she opens her mouth to scream, but no sound emerges. Instead, her dental plate comes loose; you hear it hit the ground with a plasticky clatter. You are stuck there, the two of you, locked together, and will remain so until your strength gives out, and she falls.\n\nIt is only a metaphor\u2014or the worst of dreams; yet there are metaphors which sit more powerfully in the brain than remembered events.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAnother image, based on a remembered event, comes into your mind. You are back at the Village, the two of you, in the flush of love, quietly but entirely intent on one another. She is wearing a print dress and, knowing that you are watching her\u2014because you are always watching her\u2014she goes over to the chintzy sofa, plumps herself down, and says,\n\n\"Look, Casey Paul, I'm disappearing! I'm doing my disappearing act!\"\n\nAnd, for a moment, as you look, you can see only her face and the stockinged part of her legs.\n\nNow she is doing another disappearing act. Her body is still there, but what lies inside\u2014her mind, her memory, her heart\u2014is slipping away. Her memory is obscured by darkness and untruth, and persuades itself towards coherence only by fabulation. Her mind oscillates between stunned inertia and hysterical volatility. But it is the disappearing act which her heart is doing, oh, that is the hardest part to bear. It is as if, in her thrashing about, she has stirred up the mud that lies at the bottom of us all. And what is now coming to the surface is unfocussed anger, and fear, and frustration, and harshness, and selfishness and mistrust. When she tells you solemnly that in her considered opinion your behaviour towards her has been not just beastly but actively criminal, she really thinks it is true. And all the sweetness of her nature, the laughingness and trustingness central to the woman you fell in love with, can no longer be seen.\n\nYou used to say\u2014when putting off friends who wanted to visit\u2014\"Oh, she's having a bad day. She's not herself.\" And when they saw her drunk, you'd say, \"But she's still the same underneath. She's still the same underneath.\" How many times did you tell this to others, when the person you were actually addressing was yourself?\n\nAnd then comes the day when you no longer believe such words. You no longer believe that she is still the same underneath. You believe that being \"not herself\" is her new self. You fear that she is, finally and utterly, doing her disappearing act.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBut you make one final effort, and she does too. You get her admitted to hospital. Not the National Temperance, as you had hoped, but a general, all-female ward. You sit her down on a bench while they are admitting her, and explain gently, once more, how it has come to this, and what they will do for her, and how it will help.\n\n\"I'll give it my very best shot, Casey Paul,\" she says sweetly. You kiss her on the temple, and promise to visit her every day. Which you do.\n\nAt first they put her to sleep for three days, hoping to peaceably flush the alcohol out of her system, while also calming her disturbed brain. You sit by her lightly sleeping form and think that this time, surely, it will work. This time, she is under proper medical supervision, the problem has been stated clearly\u2014even she isn't ducking it\u2014and at last Something Will Be Done. You look at her calm face and think of the best years of your time together, and imagine that everything you had back then will now return.\n\nOn the fourth day she is still asleep when you go in. You ask to see a doctor and some twenty-year-old houseman with a clipboard presents himself. You ask why she is still sedated.\n\n\"We woke her up this morning, but she immediately became disruptive.\"\n\n\"Disruptive?\"\n\n\"Yes, she attacked the nurses.\"\n\nYou don't believe this. You ask him to repeat it. He does.\n\n\"So we put her under again. Don't worry, it's a very light sedative. I'll show you.\"\n\nHe adjusts the drip slightly. Almost instantly, she begins to stir. \"You see?\" Then he adjusts the drip again and sends her back to sleep. You find this deeply sinister. You have yielded her care to the authority of some youthful technocrat who has never met her.\n\n\"You're her...?\"\n\n\"Godson,\" you reply automatically. Or maybe you say \"Nephew,\" or possibly \"Lodger,\" which at least contains four correct letters in it.\n\n\"Well, if we wake her up and she's that disruptive again, we'll have to section her.\"\n\n\" _Section_ her?\" You are horrified. \"But she's not mad. She's an alcoholic, she needs treatment.\"\n\n\"So do all the other patients. And they need the nurses' attention. We can't have nurses being attacked.\" You still don't believe his initial allegation.\n\n\"But...you can't just section her by yourself.\"\n\n\"You're right, there have to be two signatures. But it's just a formality in cases like this.\"\n\nYou realise you have not brought her to a place of safety after all. You have delivered her over to the kind of zealot who in the old days would have prescribed a straitjacket plus a course of electroconvulsive therapy. Susan would have called him a \"little Hitler.\" Who knows, perhaps she did. You partly hope so.\n\nYou say, \"I would like to be there when you next wake her up. I think it would help.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" says the curt young man whom you have already come to hate deeply.\n\nBut\u2014such is the way of hospitals\u2014this arrogant little shit isn't there when you next come, and you never see him again. Instead, a female doctor operates the drip. Slowly, Susan wakes. She looks up, sees you and smiles.\n\n\"Where've you been all my life?\" she asks. \"You dirty stop-out.\"\n\nThe doctor reacts with slight surprise, but you kiss Susan on the forehead, and the two of you are left alone together.\n\n\"So you've come to take me home?\"\n\n\"Not just yet, darling,\" you say. \"You've got to stay here for a while. Until you're cured.\"\n\n\"But there's nothing wrong with me. I'm perfectly well and insist on being taken home at once. Take me to Henry.\"\n\nYou grasp both her wrists. You squeeze very hard. You explain that the doctors won't release her until she is cured. You remind her of the promise she made when you brought her here. You say that the last time they brought her round, she attacked the nurses.\n\n\"No, I don't think so,\" she says, in her most distant, genteel manner, as if you are some ill-informed peasant.\n\nYou talk at length to her, asking for her promise to behave until you come back tomorrow. At least until then. She doesn't respond. You press her. Then she promises, but with a stubbornness of tone you are all too familiar with.\n\nThe next day, you approach the ward expecting the worst: that she's been sedated again, or even sectioned. But she is looking alert, and her colour is good. She greets you rather as if you were her guest. A nurse walks by.\n\n\"The maids here are frightfully good,\" she says, giving a wave to the passing figure.\n\nYou think: What's the right tactic? Go along with it? Challenge it? You decide that you mustn't indulge her dream world.\n\n\"They're not maids, Susan, they're nurses.\" You think she might have confused \"hospital\" with \"hotel,\" which after all would not be much of a verbal slippage.\n\n\"Some of them are,\" she agrees. Then, disappointed with your lack of perspicacity, adds, \"But most of them are maids.\"\n\nYou let it go.\n\n\"I've told them all about you,\" she says.\n\nYour heart sinks, but you let that go as well.\n\nThe next day, you find her agitated again. She is out of bed, sitting up in a chair. On the tray in front of her are five pairs of spectacles and a copy of a P. G. Wodehouse novel she has mysteriously acquired.\n\n\"Where did you get all those glasses?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she replies casually, \"I don't know where they come from. I expect people have been giving them to me.\"\n\nShe puts on a pair which are evidently not hers and opens the book at random. \"He's frightfully funny, isn't he?\"\n\nYou agree. She has always enjoyed Wodehouse, and you take this as a good, if slightly confused, sign. You tell her what's in the newspapers. You mention a postcard you've had from Eric. You say that all is well at Henry Road. She listens idly then seizes a different pair of glasses\u2014though still not her own\u2014opens the book at random again and, probably seeing it no more in focus than the previous time, announces,\n\n\"It's frightful rubbish, this, isn't it?\"\n\nYou think your heart will break, now, here, immediately.\n\nThe following day she is again under sedation. The woman in the next bed chats to you and asks what's wrong with Your Nan. You are so weary of it all that you answer,\n\n\"She's an alcoholic.\"\n\nThe woman turns away in distaste. You know exactly what she is thinking. Why give a good hospital bed to a drinker? Furthermore, a female drinker? One thing you have discovered is that male alcoholics are allowed to be amusing, even poignant. Young drinkers of either sex, when out of control, are indulged. But female alcoholics, old enough to know better, old enough to be mothers, even grandmothers\u2014these are the lowest of the low.\n\nThe next day she is awake again and refusing to look at you. So you just sit there for a while. You glance at the tray in front of her. This time, her nocturnal ward-rambling has netted only two pairs of other patients' glasses, plus a tabloid newspaper she would never have in the house.\n\n\"I do think,\" she announces finally, \"that you will be remembered as one of the greatest criminals in the history of the world.\"\n\nYou are tempted to agree. Why not?\n\nThey do not threaten to section her\u2014that little Hitler is off practising his black arts on other, less disruptive patients. But they tell you that they cannot treat her further, that the rest may have done her some good, that this is not the appropriate place for her and they need to free up the bed. You see their point of view entirely, but ask yourself: Then what is the appropriate place for her? Which stands in for a wider question: What is her place in the world?\n\nAs the two of you leave, the woman in the next bed pointedly ignores you both.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nIt has taken some years for you to realise how much, beneath her laughing irreverence, there lies panic and pandemonium. Which is why she needs you there, fixed and steadfast. You have assumed this role willingly, lovingly. It makes you feel grown-up to be a guarantor. It has meant, of course, that for most of your twenties you were obliged to forgo what others of your generation routinely enjoyed: the mad fucking around, the hippie travelling, the drugs, the going off the rails, even the stonking idleness. You were also obliged to forgo the drinking; but then, you were hardly living with a good advertisement for the stuff. You didn't hold any of this against her (except perhaps the lack of drinking); nor did you treat it as some unfair burden you were assuming. It was just the given of your relationship. And it has made you age, or mature, if not by the route normally taken.\n\nBut as things begin to fray between you, and all your attempts to rescue her fail, you acknowledge something you haven't exactly been hiding from, just didn't have time to notice: that the particular dynamic of your relationship is triggering your own version of panic and pandemonium. While you probably strike your friends at law college as affable and sane, if a little withheld, what roils beneath your own surface is a mixture of groundless optimism and searing anxiety. Your inner moods ebb and flow in response to hers: except that her cheerfulness, even when misplaced, strikes you as authentic, your own as conditional. How long will this present little stretch of happiness last, you are continually asking yourself. A month, a week, another twenty minutes? You can't, of course, tell, because it doesn't depend on you. And however calming your presence is on her, the trick doesn't work the other way round.\n\nYou never think of her as a child, not even in her most selfish delinquencies. But when you watch an anxious parent tracking its offspring\u2014the alarm at each bandy-legged footstep, the fear of each \"trippy\" moment, the wider fear of the child simply wandering off and getting lost\u2014you know that you have been there yourself. Not to mention the child's sudden switches of mood, from blissful exaltation and absolute trust to rage and tears and a sense of abandonment. This too is familiar. Except that this wild, shifting weather of the soul is now passing through the brain and body of a mature woman.\n\nIt is this, finally, which breaks you, and tells you to move out. Not far, just a dozen streets, into a cheap one-room flat. She urges you to go, for reasons good and bad: because she senses that she must let you go a little if she is to keep you and because she wants you out of the house so that she can drink whenever the mood takes her. But in fact, little changes: you are still living just as closely. She doesn't want you to remove a single book from your study, or any knick-knack you have bought together, or any clothes from your wardrobe: such actions will throw her into a fit of grieving. Sometimes you sneak back into the house to remove a book, shuffling others along the shelf to cover the theft; occasionally, you stuff in a couple of cheap paperbacks from Oxfam to disguise the betrayal.\n\nAnd so you live an oscillating life. You continue to have breakfast with her, and also supper\u2014which you mostly cook; you go on expeditions together; and you get reports from Eric on her drinking. Eric, being merely fond and concerned, rather than in love with her, is a more reliable witness than you ever were yourself. Susan continues to do your laundry, and some of your best shirts come back lovingly scorched. Drunken ironing: that is one of the lesser, but still painful, things life has surprised you with.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThen, almost without your noticing it, what is close to the final stage kicks in. You may still desperately want to save her, but at some level of instinct or pride or self-protection, her devotion to drink now strikes you more sharply, and more personally: as a rejection of you, of your help, of your love. And since few can bear to have their love rejected, resentment builds, then curdles into aggression, and you find yourself saying\u2014not aloud, of course, because you find it hard to be overtly cruel, especially to her\u2014\"Go on, then, destroy yourself, if that's what you want.\" And you are shocked to discover yourself thinking this.\n\nBut what you don't realise\u2014not now, in the heat and dark of it all, only much later\u2014is that, even without hearing you, she will agree. Because what she is leaving unspoken is this reply: \"Yes, that's exactly what I want. And I _am_ going to destroy myself, because I am a worthless person. So stop bothering me with your well-intentioned meddling. Just let me get on with the job.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nYou are working for a South London practice which specialises in legal aid. You enjoy the range of cases you handle; you enjoy the fact that in the majority of them you can solve things. You can get people the justice they deserve, and thereby make them happy. You are aware of the paradox of this. Also, of another, longer-term paradox: that in order to support Susan, you need to work, and the more you work, the more you are away from her, and the less able to support her.\n\nYou have also, as Susan predicted, found yourself a girlfriend. And not one who will run off at the first phone call. Anna is, perhaps inevitably, also a lawyer. You have told her some of Susan's history. You have not tried to get away with merely saying she is \"eccentric.\" You introduce the two of them, and they seem to get on. Susan says nothing to embarrass you, Anna is brightly practical. She doesn't think Susan looks after her diet well enough, so once a week takes round a loaf of proper bread, a bag of tomatoes, a pound of French butter. Sometimes the door remains unanswered, so she leaves her offering on the step.\n\nYou are home one evening when the phone goes. It is one of the lodgers.\n\n\"I think you'd better come round. We've had the police. With guns.\"\n\nYou repeat the words to Anna, then run for your car. In Henry Road there is an ambulance outside the house, its blue light revolving, its doors open. You park, walk across, and there she is, in a wheelchair facing out towards the street, with a broad bandage around her forehead which has pushed her hair up into a _Struwwelpeter_ shock. Her expression, as often when a sudden crisis has worked itself out, is one of slightly amused calm. She surveys the street, the ambulance men fixing the wheelchair in place, and your own arrival, as if from a throne. The blue light revolves against the steadier sodium orange. It is real and unreal at the same time; filmic, phantasmagoric.\n\nThen the chair slowly rises on its hoist, and as the ambulance doors are about to be closed, she lifts her hand in a pontifical blessing. You ask the ambulance men where they are taking her and follow in your car. When you get to the A&E department, they are already taking preliminary details.\n\n\"I'm her next of kin,\" you say.\n\n\"Son?\" they ask. You nearly agree, for speed, but they might query the difference of surname. So, once again, you are her nephew.\n\n\"He's not really my nephew,\" she says. \"I could tell you a thing or two about this young man.\"\n\nYou look at the doctor, lying to him with a slight frown and a tiny movement of the head. You collude in the notion that Susan is temporarily off among the nutters.\n\n\"Ask him about the tennis club,\" she says.\n\n\"We'll come to that, Mrs. Macleod. But first...\"\n\nAnd so the process continues. They will keep her in overnight, perhaps run a test or two. It may just be shock. They will call you when they are ready to release her. The ambulance men have said it was just a cut, but as it was on the forehead there was a lot of blood. It may need a stitch or two, maybe not.\n\nThe next day, they release her, still in full dispossession of her faculties.\n\n\"About time too,\" she says, as you walk her to the car park. \"It really has all been frightfully interesting.\"\n\nYou know this mood only too well. Something has been observed, or experienced, or discovered, which has little to do with anything, yet is of extreme, overwhelming interest, and must be reported.\n\n\"Let's wait until we get you home first.\" You have slipped into the language of the hospital, where everything is done or asked for in the name of \"us.\"\n\n\"All right, Mr. Spoilsport.\"\n\nAt Henry Road, you take her to the kitchen, sit her down, make her a cup of tea with extra sugar and give her a biscuit. She ignores them.\n\n\"Well,\" she begins, \"it was all so fascinating. Such fun. You see, these two men with guns got into the house last night.\"\n\n\"With _guns_?\"\n\n\"That's what I said. With guns. Do stop interrupting before I've barely even started. So yes, two men with guns. And they were going round looking for something. I don't know what.\"\n\n\"Were they robbers?\" You feel you are allowed to ask questions which don't challenge the essential veracity of her fantasy.\n\n\"Well, that's what I thought might be the case. So I said to them, 'The gold bullion is under the bed.' \"\n\n\"Wasn't that a bit rash?\"\n\n\"No, I thought it would put them off the scent. Not that I knew what the scent was, of course. They were both quite polite and well mannered. For gunmen, that is. They didn't want to bother me, they would just go about their business if I didn't mind.\"\n\n\"But didn't they shoot at you?\" You indicate her forehead, now decorated with a large gauze patch.\n\n\"Lord, no, they were much too polite for that. But it was rather an interruption to the evening, so I felt obliged to call the police.\"\n\n\"Didn't they try and stop you?\"\n\n\"Oh no, they were all in favour. They agreed with me that the police might help them find what they were looking for.\"\n\n\"But they didn't tell you what that was?\"\n\nShe ignores you and continues.\n\n\"But the thing I really wanted to tell you was that they had these feathers everywhere.\"\n\n\"Gosh.\"\n\n\"Feathers sticking out of their bottoms. Feathers in their hair. Feathers everywhere.\"\n\n\"What sort of guns did they have?\"\n\n\"Oh, who knows about guns?\" she says dismissively. \"But then the police came, and I answered the door to them, and they sorted everything out.\"\n\n\"Was there a gunfight?\"\n\n\"A gunfight? Don't be ridiculous. The British police are far too professional for that.\"\n\n\"But they arrested them?\"\n\n\"Naturally. Why else do you think I called them?\"\n\n\"So how did you cut your head?\"\n\n\"Well, of course I can't remember that. It's the least interesting part of the story in my view.\"\n\n\"I'm glad it all worked out in the end.\"\n\n\"You know, Paul,\" she says, \"sometimes I'm really disappointed in you. It was so enjoyable and so fascinating, but you keep coming up with these banal comments and banal questions. Of course it all worked out in the end. Everything always does, doesn't it?\"\n\nYou don't answer. After all, you have your pride. And in your opinion, the notion that everything works out in the end, and the counternotion that nothing ever does, are both equally banal.\n\n\"Now don't sulk. It's been one of the most interesting twenty-four hours of my life. And everyone\u2014 _everyone_ \u2014was very nice to me indeed.\"\n\nThe gunmen. The police. The ambulance men. The hospital. The Russkis. The Vatican. And all's right with the world, then.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThat evening, over takeaway pizzas, I recounted the whole lurid episode to Anna. I told it fondly, concernedly, almost amusedly, if not quite. The fantasy gunmen, the real policemen, the gold bullion, the feathers, the ambulance men, the hospital. I omitted some of Susan's strictures on my character. I was also aware, however, that Anna was not reacting as I had expected.\n\nEventually, she said, \"That all sounds a great waste of public money.\"\n\n\"That's an odd way to look at it.\"\n\n\"Is it? Police, firearms squad\u2014Special Branch\u2014ambulance, hospital. All of them dashing around making a fuss of her, just because she's gone on a bender. And that includes you too.\"\n\n\"Me? What do you expect me to do when the lodger calls and says there are armed police in the house?\"\n\n\"I didn't _expect_ you to do anything different.\"\n\n\"Well then\u2014\"\n\n\"Just as I wouldn't _expect_ you to do anything different if we were going out for a meal, or a film, or leaving for a holiday and already running late for our flight.\"\n\nI thought about this. \"No, I don't expect I would. Behave differently.\"\n\nWe were reaching a stand-off, I realised. One of the reasons I'd gone for Anna in the first place was that she always spoke her mind. This had a downside to it as well as an upside. I suppose all character traits do.\n\n\"Look,\" I said. \"We talked about...all this when we first got together.\" Somehow, I couldn't say Susan's name at that moment.\n\n\"You talked. I listened. I didn't necessarily agree.\"\n\n\"Then you misled me.\"\n\n\"No, Paul, you didn't explain the full extent of it to me. Maybe in future when I get out my diary to write in a dinner date or a play or a weekend away, I should always add a note saying: subject to the extent of Susan Macleod's alcoholic intake.\"\n\n\"That's very unfair.\"\n\n\"It may be unfair but it also happens to be true.\"\n\nWe paused. It was a question of whether either of us wanted to take it further. Anna did.\n\n\"And while we're about it, Paul, I may as well say that Susan Macleod...is not really my kind of woman.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\n\"I mean, I shall always try to be kind to her for your sake.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, that's very generous of you. And while we're about it, I may as well say that I once promised her there would always be room in my life for her, even if it was just an attic.\"\n\n\"Paul, I don't want an attic in _my_ life.\" And then she said it. \"Especially not with a madwoman in it.\"\n\nI let that last remark fill the silence that was growing between us. Eventually, no doubt sounding prim, I said, \"I'm sorry you think she's mad.\"\n\nShe didn't withdraw her assertion. I realised that I was the only person in the world who understood Susan. And even if I'd moved out, how could I abandon her?\n\nAnna and I continued for a few more weeks, each of us half-concealing our thoughts from the other. But I wasn't surprised when she bailed on the relationship. Nor, by then, did I blame her.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAnd so, by the end, you have tried soft love and tough love, feelings and reason, truth and lies, promises and threats, hope and stoicism. But you are not a machine, switching easily from one approach to another. Each strategy involves as much emotional strain on you as on her; perhaps more. Sometimes, when, lightly drunk, she is in one of her airy, exasperating moods, denying both reality and your concern for her, you find yourself thinking: she may be destroying herself in the long term, but in the short term, she's doing more damage to you. Helpless, frustrated anger overwhelms you; and, worst of all, righteous anger. You hate your own righteousness.\n\nYou remember the running-away fund she gave you when you were at university. You have never thought to make use of it before. Now, you take it all out, in cash. You go to a small, anonymous hotel towards the bottom of the Edgware Road, just up from Marble Arch. This is not a fashionable or expensive part of town. Next door is a small Lebanese restaurant. In the five days you are there, you do not drink. You want your mind to be lucid; you do not want either your anger or your self-pity to be exaggerated or distorted. You want your emotions to be whatever they are.\n\nYou remove a bunch of prostitutes' business cards from a nearby telephone box. They have been attached with Blu-Tack, and before laying them out on the small desk in your hotel room, you roll off the sticky little balls of adhesive and drop them in the wastepaper basket. You do this in a deliberate way. Then you lay the cards out like a game of patience and decide which of these glamorous women who do \"hotel calls\" you wish to fuck. You make your first phone call. The woman, naturally, looks nothing like the photo on the card. You note this, without caring, let alone protesting: on the scale of disappointment, this is nothing. The location and the transaction are the exact opposite of all you have previously imagined love and sex to be. Still, it is fine for what it is. Efficient, pleasurable, emotion-free; fine.\n\nOn the wall is a cheap print of a Van Gogh cornfield with crows. You enjoy looking at it: again, an efficient, second-rate, counterfeit pleasure. You think there is something to be said for the second-rate. Perhaps it is more reliable than the first-rate. For instance, if you were in front of the real Van Gogh, you might get nervous, be full of jacked-up expectations about whether or not you were reacting properly. Whereas no one\u2014you, least of all\u2014cares how you respond to a cheap print on a hotel wall. Perhaps that is how you should live your life. You remember, when you were a student, someone maintaining that if you lowered your expectations in life, then you would never be disappointed. You wonder if there is any truth in this.\n\nWhen desire returns, you order up another prostitute. Later, you have a Lebanese dinner. You watch television. You lie on your bed, deliberately not thinking about Susan or anything to do with her. You do not care how anyone might judge you if they could see where you are and what you are doing. Doggedly, and almost without actual pleasure, you continue to spend your running-away fund until all that remains is enough for your bus fare back to SE15. You do not reproach yourself; nor do you experience guilt, now or later. You never tell anyone about this episode. But you begin to wonder\u2014not for the first time in your life\u2014if there is something to be said for feeling less.\n\n# THREE\nHe sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHe had kept a little notebook for decades now. In it he wrote down what people said about love. Great novelists, television sages, self-help gurus, people he met in his years of travelling. He assembled the evidence. And then, every couple of years or so, he went through and crossed out all the quotations he no longer believed to be true. Usually, this left him with only two or three temporary truths. Temporary, because the next time round, he would probably cross those out as well, leaving a different two or three now standing.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHe had found himself on a train to Bristol the other day. Across the aisle was a woman with the _Daily Mail_ spread out in front of her. He saw the bright headline, accompanied by a large photo. HEADMISTRESS, 49, SANK 8 GLASSES OF WINE, DROPPED CRISPS DOWN HER TOP, AND SAID TO PUPIL, \"COME AND GET 'EM.\" After such a headline, what need to read the story? And what chance of the reader finding a different moral to the one so fiercely implied? Any more than would have been the case, half a century previously, had the newspaper's hot moralism been applied to a story which, at the time, hadn't even made the local _Advertiser &_ _Gazette._ For the next ten minutes and more he worked on the headline his own case might have elicited. He finally came up with: NEW BALLS, ANYONE? TENNIS CLUB SCANDAL AS HOUSEWIFE, 48, AND LONG-HAIRED STUDENT, 19, EXPELLED OVER RUMPY-PUMPY. As for the text below, it would write itself: \"There were shock waves behind the lace curtains and laurel hedges of leafy Surrey last week as steamy allegations emerged of...\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nSome people, when they grow old, decide to live by the sea. They watch the tides approach and recede, foam bubbling on the beach, further out the breakers, and perhaps, beyond all this, they hear the oceanic waves of time, and in such hinted outer vastness find some consolation for their own minor lives and impending mortality. He preferred a different liquid, with its own movements and its own destination. But he saw nothing eternal in it: just milk turning into cheese. He was suspicious of the grander view of things, and wary of indefinable yearnings. He preferred the daily dealings of reality. And he also admitted that his world, and his life, had slowly shrunk. But he was content with this.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nFor instance, he thought he probably wouldn't have sex again before he died. Probably. Possibly. Unless. But on balance, he thought not. Sex involved two people. Two persons, first person and second person: you and I, you and me. But nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nSo, that familiar question of memory. He recognised that memory was unreliable and biased, but in which direction? Towards optimism? That made initial sense. You remembered your past in cheerful terms because this validated your existence. You didn't have to see your life as any kind of triumph\u2014his own had hardly been that\u2014but you did need to tell yourself that it had been interesting, enjoyable, purposeful. Purposeful? That would be pitching it a bit high. Still, an optimistic memory might make it easier to part from life, might soften the pain of extinction.\n\nBut you could equally argue the opposite. If memory is biased towards pessimism, if, retrospectively, all appears blacker and bleaker than it actually was, then this might make life easier to leave behind. If, like dear old Joan, dead now these thirty years and more, you had already been to hell and back in your lifetime, then what fear of actual hell, or, more probably, eternal nonexistence? There drifted into his mind words caught on the headcam of a British soldier in Afghanistan\u2014words spoken by another soldier as he executed a wounded prisoner. \"There you are. Shuffle off this mortal coil, you cunt,\" the man had said before pulling the trigger. Impressive to have Shakespeare half-quoted on the modern battlefield, he had thought at the time. Why had that come into his head? Perhaps Joan's swearing had been the connection. So he considered the upside to feeling that life was just a fucking coil to be shuffled off. And men were just cunts; not women, men. There might also be an evolutionary advantage to a pessimistic memory. You wouldn't mind making room for others in the food queue; you could see it as a social duty to wander off into the wilderness, or allow yourself to be staked out on some hillside for the greater good.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBut that was theory; and here was practicality. As he saw it, one of the last tasks of his life was to remember her correctly. By which he didn't mean: accurately, day by day, year by year, from beginning to middle to end. The end had been terrible, and far too much middle had overhung the beginning. No, what he meant was this: it was his final duty, to both of them, to remember and hold her as she had been when they were first together. To remember her back to what he still thought of as her innocence: an innocence of soul. Before such innocence became defaced. Yes, that was the word for it: a scribbling-over with the wild graffiti of booze. Also, a losing of the face, and his subsequent inability to see her. To see, to recall what she had been like before he lost her, lost sight of her, before she disappeared into that chintz sofa\u2014\"Look, Casey Paul, I'm doing my disappearing act!\" Lost sight of the first person\u2014the only person\u2014he had loved.\n\nHe had photographs, of course, and they helped. Smiling at him while leaning back against the trunk of a tree in some long-forgotten wood. Windswept on a broad empty beach with a row of shuttered huts in the distance behind her. There was even a picture of her in that tennis dress with the green trim. Photographs were useful, but somehow always confirmed the memory rather than liberating it.\n\nHe tried to get his mind to catch her on the wing. To remember her gaiety, her laughter, her subversiveness and her love for him, before everything became occluded. Her dashingness, and her gallant attempt to make happiness when the odds were always against her, always against them. Yes, this was what he was after: Susan happy, Susan optimistic, despite not having much of a clue what the future held. That was a talent, a lucky slice of her character. He himself tended to look at the future and decide from an assessment of probabilities whether optimism or pessimism was the appropriate outlook. He brought life to his temperament; she brought her temperament to life. It was more risky, of course; it brought more joy, but it left you no safety net. Still, he thought, at least they hadn't been defeated by practicality.\n\nThere was all this; and there was also the way she accepted him simply as he was. No, better: she enjoyed him as he was. And she had confidence in him: she looked at him and didn't doubt him; she thought he would make something of himself, and something of his life. Which in a sense he had done, though not as either of them would have foreseen.\n\nShe would say, \"Let's pile all the Fancy Boys into the Austin and drive to the sea.\" Or to Chichester Cathedral, or Stonehenge, or a secondhand bookshop, or a wood with a thousand-year-old tree at the centre of it. Or to a horror flick, however much they scared the daylights out of her. Or to a funfair, where they would hurtle round the dodgems, stuff themselves with candyfloss, fail to dislodge coconuts from their holders and be whirled into the air by various devices until all the puff had gone out of them. He didn't know if he'd done all these things back then, with her; some perhaps later, some even with other people. But it was the kind of remembering he needed, and which brought her back even if she hadn't actually been there.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nNo safety net. One image would always recur, whenever he thought of her. He was holding her out of the window by her wrists, unable to pull her in or let her drop, both their lives in agonising stasis until something happened. And what _had_ happened? Well, he had tried to organise people to pile mattresses high enough to break her fall; or, he had got the fire brigade to hold a jumping sheet; or...But they were locked together at the wrist like trapeze artists: he wasn't just holding her, she was holding him. And in the end his strength gave way, and he let her go. And though her fall was cushioned, it was still very grievous because, as she had once told him, she had heavy bones.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nOne entry in his notebook was, of course: \"It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.\" That was there for a few years; then he crossed it out. Then he wrote it in again; then he crossed it out again. Now he had both entries side by side, one clear and true, the other crossed out and false.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWhen he thought back to life in the Village, he remembered it as being based on a simple system. For each ailment, there was a single remedy. TCP for a sore throat; Dettol for a cut; Disprin for a headache; Vicks for chestiness. And beyond that lay greater matters but still with unitary solutions. The cure for sex is marriage; the cure for love is marriage; the cure for infidelity is divorce; the cure for unhappiness is work; the cure for extreme unhappiness is drink; the cure for death is a frail belief in the afterlife.\n\nAs an adolescent, he had longed for more complication. And life had let him discover it. At times, he felt he had had enough of life's complications.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nA few weeks after his row with Anna he gave up his rented room and moved back to Henry Road. Somewhere, in some novel he subsequently read, he had come across the sentence: \"He fell in love like a man committing suicide.\" It wasn't quite like that, but there was a sense in which he had no choice. He couldn't live with Susan; he couldn't establish a separate life away from her; therefore he went back to live with her. Courage or cowardice? Or mere inevitability?\n\nAt least by now he was familar with the patterned patternlessness of the life he was submitting to again. His reappearance was greeted not with happiness or relief, but with a blithe lack of surprise. Because such a return was always going to happen. Because young men must be allowed their delinquencies, but shouldn't be congratulated when they returned to a place they should never have left. He noted this discrepant reaction but didn't resent it; on the scale of things to be resented, it didn't really signify.\n\nAnd so\u2014for how long? another four, five years?\u2014they continued under the same roof, with good days and bad weeks, swallowed rage, occasional outbursts and increasing social isolation. All this no longer made him feel interesting; instead, he felt a failure and an outcast. He never got close to another woman in this time. After a year or two, Eric could no longer stand the atmosphere, and moved out. The top two rooms were rented to nurses. Well, he couldn't get policemen.\n\nBut there was one discovery made during these years which surprised him, and which made his future life, when it came, easier. The office manager announced herself pregnant; they advertised for a stand-in, but could find no one suitable; he suggested himself for the job. It scarcely occupied the whole day, and he continued handling some legal aid cases. But he found the routine of admin, diary-keeping, mail, billings\u2014even the banalities of maintaining the coffee machine and water cooler\u2014gave him quiet satisfaction. In part, no doubt, because he often arrived from Henry Road in a state unfit for much more than low-level administration. But he also took unanticipated pleasure in running things. And his colleagues were straightforwardly grateful to him for making their lives easier. The contrast with Henry Road was blatant. When had Susan last thanked him for making her life less arduous than it would have been?\n\nThe office manager, with many explanations about the thrilling surprise of maternal love, announced that she wouldn't be returning. He took the job full-time; and, years later, this practical ability proved his means of escape. He managed offices for law firms, for charities, for NGOs, and so was able to travel, and move on when he needed to. He worked in Africa, and in North and South America. The routine satisfied a part of him he didn't know existed. He remembered how, back at the Village tennis club, he'd been shocked at the way some of the older members played. They were certainly competent, but inexpressive and uninventive, as if merely following the instructions of some long-dead coach. Well, that had been them, then. Now he could run an office\u2014wherever, whenever\u2014like any grooved old hacker. He kept his satisfactions to himself. And over the years he had also learned to see the point of money: what it could\u2014and couldn't\u2014do.\n\nThere was another thing. It was a job below his qualifications. Not that he didn't take it seriously; he did. But since, professionally, he had now lowered his expectations, he found that he was rarely disappointed.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHe had a duty to see back to how she had been, and to rescue her. But this wasn't just about her. He had a duty to himself. To see back and...rescue himself? From what? From \"the subsequent wreckage of his life\"? No, that was stupidly melodramatic. His life had not been wrecked. His heart, yes, his heart had been cauterised. But he had found a way to live, and continued with that life, which had brought him to here. And from here, he had a duty to see himself as he had once been. Strange how, when you are young, you owe no duty to the future; but when you are old, you owe a duty to the past. To the one thing you can't change.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHe remembered, at school, being guided by masters through books and plays in which there was often a Conflict between Love and Duty. In those old stories, innocent but passionate love would run up against the duty owed to family, church, king, state. Some protagonists won, some lost, some did both at the same time; usually, tragedy ensued. No doubt in religious, patriarchal, hierarchical societies, such conflicts continued and still gave themes to writers. But in the Village? No church-going for his family. Not much of a hierarchical social structure, unless you counted the tennis and golf club committees, with their power to expel. Not much patriarchy, either\u2014not with his mother around. As for family duty: he had felt no obligation to placate his parents. Indeed, nowadays the onus had shifted, and it was the parents' job to accept whatever \"life choices\" their child might make. Like running off to a Greek island with Pedro the hairdresser, or bringing home that gymslip-mother-to-be.\n\nYet this liberation from the old dogmas brought its own complexities. The sense of obligation became internalised. Love was a Duty in and of itself. You had a Duty to Love, the more so now that it was your central belief system. And Love brought many Duties with it. So, even when apparently weightless, Love could weigh heavily, and bind heavily, and its Duties could cause disasters as great as in the old days.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAnother thing he had come to understand. He had imagined that, in the modern world, time and place were no longer relevant to stories of love. Looking back, he saw that they had played a greater part in his story than he ever realised. He had given in to the old, continuing, ineradicable delusion: that lovers somehow stand outside of time.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nNow he was getting off the point. Susan and himself, all those years ago. There was her shame to deal with. But there was also, he knew, his shame.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAn entry from his notebook which had survived several inspections: \"In love, everything is both true and false; it's the one subject on which it's impossible to say anything absurd.\" He had liked this remark since first discovering it. Because for him it opened out into a wider thought: that love itself is never absurd, and neither are any of its participants. Despite all the stern orthodoxies of feeling and behaviour that a society may seek to impose, love slips past them. You sometimes saw, in the farmyard, improbable forms of attachment\u2014the goose in love with the donkey, the kitten playing safely between the paws of the chained-up mastiff. And in the human farmyard, there existed forms of attachment which were just as unlikely; and yet never, to their participants, absurd.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nOne permanent effect of his exposure to the Macleod household had been a distaste for angry men. No, not distaste, disgust. Anger as an expression of authority, an expression of masculinity, anger as a prelude to physical violence: he hated it all. There was a hideous false virtue to anger: look at me, angry, look how I boil over because I am so filled with emotion, look how I am really alive (unlike all those cold fish over there), look how I am going to prove it by grabbing your hair and smashing your face into a door. And now look what you made me do! I'm angry about that too!\n\nIt seemed to him that anger was never just anger. Love was, usually, in itself, just love, even if it impelled some to behave in ways which made you suspect there was no love present anymore, and perhaps never had been. But anger, especially the sort which coated itself in self-righteousness (and perhaps all anger did) was so often an expression of something else: boredom, contempt, superiority, failure, hatred. Or even something apparently trivial, like a chafing dependence on female practicality.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nEven so, and to his considerable surprise, he had finally stopped hating Macleod. True, the man was long dead\u2014though it was perfectly possible, indeed reasonable, to hate the dead; and at one stage he imagined he would live with his hatred until the day he himself died. But it hadn't worked out that way.\n\nHe wasn't sure about the chronology of it all. At some point, Macleod had retired, but continued to live on in that large house, attended by a cook-housekeeper to whom he behaved with elaborate, antiquated politeness. Once a week he would go to the golf club and hit a stationary ball as if it were a personal enemy. He would garden furiously, smoke furiously, turn on the goggle-box and drink along to it until he could still just get himself to bed. Often the thieving Mrs. Dyer would find the blank-screened set still buzzing when she arrived.\n\nThen, one winter morning, while he was planting out cabbages, Macleod had fallen to the hard ground and wasn't discovered for hours; the stroke had done its worst. Half-paralysed, but fully silenced, he now depended on regular visits from a nurse, monthly ones from his daughters, more erratic ones from Susan. Maurice, his old pal from R _eynolds News,_ would drop by from time to time, and, in knowing contravention of medical advice, would pull out a half-bottle of whisky and pour some of it down Macleod's throat while the familiar eyes blinked back at him. By the time the housekeeper found him dead on the floor with the bedsheets wrapped round him, Susan had long since handed power of attorney to Martha and Clara. The house, with many unwanted contents, was sold to a dubious local who might have been fronting for a property developer.\n\nSomewhere in this sequence, he had stopped hating Macleod. He didn't forgive him\u2014he didn't consider forgiveness the opposite of hatred\u2014but he acknowledged that his seething antipathy and nighttime rages had become somehow irrelevant. On the other hand, he didn't feel pity for Macleod, despite all the humiliations and infirmities visited upon him. These he regarded as inevitabilities; indeed, he nowadays regarded most things that happened as inevitabilities.\n\nThe question of responsibility? That seemed a matter for outsiders: only those with a sufficient lack of evidence and knowledge could confidently apportion blame. He was, even at this distance, still far too involved to do so himself. And he had also reached a stage in life where he had started pursuing counterfactuals. What if this had happened rather than that? It was idle but involving (and perhaps held the question of responsibility at bay). For instance, what if he hadn't been nineteen, with time on his hands and\u2014while hardly aware of it\u2014desperate for love when he had arrived at the tennis club? What if Susan, from religious or moral scruple, had discouraged his interest, and taught him nothing more than tactical astuteness when playing mixed doubles? What if Macleod had continued to hold a sexual interest in his wife? None of this might have happened. But given that it had, then if you wanted to attribute fault, you were straight away into prehistory, which now, in two of their three cases, had become inaccessible.\n\nThose charged first few months had reordered his present and determined his future, even up to now. But what if, for instance, he and Susan hadn't been attracted to one another? What if one of their many cover stories had been true? He was a young man who drove her because she needed new glasses. He was a friend of one or both of the daughters. He was a kind of prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Gordon's. Now, in his state of slowly acquired calmness, he found he could easily imagine things other than they had been; the facts and feelings quite different.\n\nCurious, he pursued this untaken path. For instance, he started helping Old Man Macleod with the gardening. As well as playing tennis with Susan, he took up golf, had lessons at the club and would often partner Gordon\u2014as he'd been asked to call him\u2014round the local eighteen holes when the dew still sparkled on the fairways. There was something about his presence which relaxed Old Man Macleod: that gruffness was only a mask, and Paul was able to help him relax a bit more on the tee; he even taught him (after flipping through an American golf manual) how to love that little dimpled ball rather than hate it. He\u2014Casey Paul, as more than Susan now called him\u2014discovered that he rather liked a drink: gin with Joan, beer with Gordon, an occasional glass of sherry with Susan; though all agreed that at a certain point enough was enough and one more was too many. And then\u2014why not pursue this alternative life to, if not a logical, at least a conventional conclusion\u2014what if he and one of the Macleod daughters became (as their parents would have put it) \"sweet on one another\"? Martha or Clara? Obviously Clara, who took more character traits from Susan. But this was counterfactual, and so he chose Martha.\n\nThe immediate consequence was that the Macleods did indeed come round to have sherry with his parents\u2014an occasion he and Martha had been dreading, but which actually passed off quite well. The two couples were never going to make a harmonious bridge four, but there was nothing like fixing a date with the vicar of St. Michael's for everyone to overlook incompatibilities. And\u2014since this counterfactual had now got way out of hand\u2014he decided to decorate the wedding day with the most extravagantly beautiful weather, even unto a double rainbow. Then, on a whim, he chose to award himself the sister he never had. To stir things up a bit for his parents, he made her a lesbian. Oh, and she brought her baby along to the ceremony. The only baby in the Western world who didn't cry at an inappropriate moment during a wedding. Why not?\n\nHe shook his head to clear this strange vision that had come upon him. There were two ways of looking at life; or two extremes of viewpoint, anyway, with a continuum between them. One proposed that every human action necessarily carried with it the obliteration of every other action which might have been performed instead; life therefore consisted of a succession of small and large choices, expressions of free will, so that the individual was like the captain of some paddle steamer chugging down the mighty Mississippi of life. The other proposed that it was all inevitability, that prehistory ruled, that a human life was no more than a bump on a log which was itself being propelled down the mighty Mississippi, tugged and bullied, smacked and wheedled, by currents and eddies and hazards over which no control was possible. Paul thought it did not have to be one or the other. He thought a life\u2014his own, of course\u2014could be lived first under the dispensation of inevitability, and later under the dispensation of free will. But he also realised that retrospective reorderings of life are always likely to be self-serving.\n\nOn further thought, he decided that the unlikeliest part of his counterfactual was that Martha would ever have considered him a potential husband.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nDid he feel regret at what he always thought of as his \"handing back\" of Susan? No: the proper word for that might be guilt; or its sharper colleague, remorse. But there was also an inevitability to it, which lent the action a different moral colouring. He found that he simply couldn't go on. He couldn't save her, and so he had to save himself. It was as simple as that.\n\nNo, of course it wasn't; it was much more complicated. He could have gone on, both fooling and torturing himself. He could have gone on, calming her down and reassuring her even when her mind and memory ran in three-minute loops, from fresh surprise at his presence, even though he'd been sitting in the same chair for two hours, via rebuke for his nonexistent absence, through to alarm and panic, which he would quieten with soft talk and gentle memories that she would pretend to agree with even though she'd long ago drunk those memories clean out of her head. No, he could have gone on, acting as an emotional home help, watching over her progressive disintegration. But he would have had to be a masochist. And by that time he had made the most terrifying discovery of his life, one which probably cast a shadow over all his subsequent relationships: the realization that love, even the most ardent and the most sincere, can, given the correct assault, curdle into a mixture of pity and anger. His love had gone, had been driven out, month by month, year by year. But what shocked him was that the emotions which replaced it were just as violent as the love which had previously stood in his heart. And so his life and his heart were just as agitated as before, except that she was no longer able to assuage his heart. And that, finally, was when he had to hand her back.\n\nHe wrote a joint letter to Martha and Clara. He didn't go into emotional detail. He merely explained that he was obliged to travel on business for an extended period\u2014perhaps several years\u2014and would obviously not be able to take Susan with him. He would be leaving in three months, which he hoped would be enough time for them to make the appropriate arrangements. If, at some future point, it became necessary to put her into some kind of residential care, he would do what he could to help; though at present he was not in a position to contribute.\n\nAnd most of this was true.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThere was one visit he was obliged to make before going abroad. Was he dreading it or looking forward to it? Both, probably. It was five o'clock by the time he rang the bell, answered this time not by a counterpoint of yapping but by a single, distant bark. When Joan opened the door, there was a placid, elderly golden retriever beside her. She looked so foggy-eyed that it might as well have been a guide dog, he thought.\n\nIt was winter; Joan wore a tracksuit with a few cigarette burns on the bosom, and a pair of Russian house socks in which she padded along as softly as her dog. The sitting room mixed woodsmoke with cigarette smoke. The chairs were the same, but older; their occupants were the same, but older. The retriever, which answered to the name of Sibyl, panted from the journey to the front door and back.\n\n\"The yappers all died on me,\" Joan said. \"Don't ever have dogs, Paul. They die on you, and then there comes a point when you don't know whether to get one last one or not. One for the road. So here we are, Sibyl and me. Either I'll die and break her heart or she'll die and break mine. Not much of a choice, is it? The gin's over there. Help yourself.\"\n\nHe did so, choosing the least filthy of the tumblers.\n\n\"So how are you keeping, Joan?\"\n\n\"As you can see. Pretty much the same, except older, drunker, lonelier. How about you?\"\n\n\"I'm thirty. I'm going abroad for a few years. Work. I've handed Susan back.\"\n\n\"Like a parcel? It's a bit fucking late, isn't it? Taking her back to the shop and asking for a refund?\"\n\n\"It's not like that.\" He realised he might have some difficulty explaining to one drunk woman why he was leaving another.\n\n\"So how exactly is it?\"\n\n\"It's like this. I tried to save her, I failed. I tried to stop her drinking, I failed. I don't blame her, it's way beyond that. And I remember what you told me back then\u2014that she was more likely to get hurt than me. But I can't take it anymore. I can't face another ten days of it, let alone another ten years. So Martha's going to look after her. Clara refused, which surprised me. I said that...if they needed to put her into a home at some point, I might be able to help. In the future. If I do well and make some money.\"\n\n\"You've certainly got it all worked out.\"\n\n\"It's self-protection, Joan. I couldn't take anymore.\"\n\n\"Girlfriend?\" she asked, lighting another cigarette.\n\n\"I'm not that heartless.\"\n\n\"Well, finding another woman can bring an exceptional clarity of mind to a man all of a sudden. Remembering my own distant experiences of cock and cunt.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry it didn't work out for you, Joan.\"\n\n\"Your sympathy is about half a century too late, young man.\"\n\n\"I mean it,\" he said.\n\n\"And how do you think Martha will cope? Better than you? Worse? About the same?\"\n\n\"I've no idea. And in a way I don't care. I don't care, otherwise I'll be dragged back into it all.\"\n\n\"It's not a question of getting dragged back. You're still in it.\"\n\n\"How do you mean?\"\n\n\"You're still in it. You'll always be in it. No, not literally. But in your heart. Nothing ever ends, not if it's gone that deep. You'll always be walking wounded. That's the only choice, after a while. Walking wounded, or dead. Don't you agree?\"\n\nHe looked across, but she wasn't addressing him. She was addressing Sibyl, and patting her soft head. He didn't know what to say, because he didn't know if he believed her or not.\n\n\"Do you still cheat at the crossword?\"\n\n\"You cheeky little bugger. But that's nothing new, is it?\" He smiled at her.\n\nHe'd always liked Joan.\n\n\"And shut the door on your way out. I don't like to get up too many times in the course of a day.\"\n\nHe knew not to do anything like embrace her, so merely nodded, smiled and started to leave.\n\n\"Send a wreath when the time comes,\" she called after him.\n\nHe didn't know if she meant for her, or for Susan. Maybe even for Sibyl. Did dogs get wreaths? Another thing he didn't know.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWhat he didn't\u2014or couldn't\u2014tell Joan was his terrifying discovery that love, by some ruthless, almost chemical process, could resolve itself into pity and anger. The anger wasn't at Susan, but at whatever it was that had obliterated her. But even so, anger. And anger in a man caused him disgust. So now, along with pity and anger, he had self-disgust to deal with as well. And this was part of his shame.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHe worked in a number of countries. He was in his thirties, then forties, perfectly presentable (as his mother would have put it), as well as solvent and not obviously mad. This was enough for him to find the sexual companionship, the social life, the daily warmth he needed\u2014until he moved on to the next job, the next country, the next social circle, the next few years of being agreeable to and with new people, some of whom he might see in later years, some not. It was what he wanted; more to the point, it was all he felt able to sustain.\n\nTo some, his way of life might have sounded selfish, even parasitical. But he also took thought for others. He tried not to mislead, to exaggerate what was emotionally available. He didn't linger by jewellers' windows or go simperingly silent at photos of babies; nor did he claim he was looking to settle down, either with this person or indeed in this country. And\u2014though it was a trait he didn't immediately identify\u2014he was generally attracted to women who were...how to put it? Sturdy, independent and not obviously fucked-up. Women who had their own lives, who might enjoy his solid but passing presence as much as he did theirs. Women who wouldn't get too hurt when he moved on, and who wouldn't inflict too much pain if they were the first to jump.\n\nHe thought of this psychological pattern, this emotional strategy, as being honest and considerate, as well as necessary. He neither pretended nor offered more than he could deliver. Though of course, when he laid it all out like this, he saw that some might regard it as pure egotism. He also couldn't decide if his policy of moving on\u2014from place to place, woman to woman\u2014was courageous in admitting his own limitations, or cowardly in accepting them.\n\nNor did his new theory of living always work. Some women gave him thoughtful presents\u2014and that scared him. Others, over the years, had called him a typical Englishman, a tightass, a cold fish; also, heartless and manipulative\u2014though he believed his was the least manipulative approach to relationships that he knew. Still, it made some women cross with him. And on the rare occasions when he had tried to explain his life, his prehistory and the long-term state of his heart, the accusations sometimes became more pointed, and he was treated as if he had some infectious disease to which he should have admitted between the first and second dates.\n\nBut that was the nature of relationships: there always seemed to be an imbalance of one sort or another. And it was fine to plan an emotional strategy, but another thing when the ground opened up in front of you, and your defending troops toppled into a ravine which hadn't been marked on the map until a few seconds previously. And so there had been Maria, that gentle, calm Spanish woman who suddenly began making suicide threats, who wanted this, who wanted that. But he hadn't offered to be the father of her children\u2014or anybody else's; nor did he intend to convert to Catholicism, even if that would have pleased her supposedly dying mother.\n\nAnd then\u2014since misunderstanding is democratically distributed\u2014there had been Kimberly, from Nashville, who had so instantly fulfilled all his unwritten requirements\u2014from laughing him into bed on the second date to embodying the very spirit of freehearted independence\u2014that instead of quietly congratulating himself on his luck he had as near as dammit fallen smack into love with her. And at first she had rebuffed him with references to personal space and to \"keeping things light.\" Yet this only made him the more desperate for her to move into his house that very afternoon, and he'd done stuff with flowers way beyond what he normally did, and found himself gazing at racks of diamond rings, and even dreaming of that perfect hideaway\u2014perhaps an old trapper's shack (with full modern comforts, of course) up some tree-shadowed lane. He had offered marriage, and she had replied, \"Paul, it doesn't work like that.\" When, in his delirium, she had patted his arm and said the kind of stuff he'd said to Maria, he heard himself accusing her of being selfish and manipulative and a cold fish and a typical American woman\u2014whatever he meant by that, as she was the first American woman he'd dated. So she ditched him by fax, and he got punitively drunk to the point of sudden rationality, when he fell into silly laughter, and a sense of the absurdity of all human dealings, and felt a sudden call for the monastic life, while also entertaining fantasies of Kimberly dressed as a nun and them having joyfully blasphemous sex, whereupon he booked two tickets for an early-morning flight to Mexico, but naturally overslept and the message on his answering machine when he woke was not from Kimberly but from the airline company telling him of his missed flight. Somehow he had got into work that day and gave a comic account of his misfortunes, which made his colleagues laugh, and made himself laugh, so that this lighter, distorted fiction swiftly took over from what had actually happened. And in later years he had silently thanked Kimberly for being smarter than he was\u2014emotionally smarter. He had imagined that he'd learned a lot of emotional lessons from being with Susan. But maybe they were only emotional lessons about being with her.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHe kept up with his men-friends when home on leave, or between jobs, over drinks or dinners which felt like sudden jerks of fast-forwarding. Some of them had turned into unremitting furrow-dwellers, and these were the ones who reminisced most sentimentally about the old days. Some were now on to second wives and stepchildren. One had turned gay, after all these years, having suddenly started noticing the napes of young men's necks. For a few, time brought no alteration. Bernard, red-faced and white-bearded, would give him a nudge, a head-toss and an overloud \"Look at the arse on _that,_ \" as a woman walked past their restaurant table. Bernard had been saying the same at twenty-five, though back then with an inaccurate American accent. Perhaps it was useful still to be reminded that some men mistook boorishness for honesty. Just as others mistook primness for virtue.\n\nThese intermittent friends were of different vintages: of the Fancy Boys, only Eric remained in his life. They were companionable for the necessary hours, and alcohol dissolved any distance between them. But in the way of things\u2014or rather, in his way of things\u2014he tended to remember mainly the phrases that either presumed or grated.\n\n\"Still in the game, eh, Paul?\"\n\n\"Footloose and fancy-free?\"\n\n\"Not found Miss Right yet? Or should I say Se\u00f1orita Rita?\"\n\n\"Do you think you'll ever settle down?\"\n\n\"A pity you haven't had kids. You'd have made a good father.\"\n\n\"Never too late. Never say die, old chum.\"\n\n\"Yes, but don't forget: sperm degrades as we knock on.\"\n\n\"Don't you long for that little cottage with a blazing log fire and grandchildren on the knee?\"\n\n\"He can't have grandchildren without having children first.\"\n\n\"You'd be amazed what medical science can do nowadays.\"\n\nHis occasional reappearances made some pleased with how their lives had turned out, and others, if not envious, a little restless. Then, in his fifties, he came home, moved to Somerset, and invested some of his savings.\n\n\"What gave you the idea of cheese?\"\n\n\"Bad dreams for the rest of your life, old chum.\"\n\n\"Maybe there's a little dairymaid involved?\"\n\n\"And look at the arse on _that._ \"\n\n\"Well, at least we'll be seeing more of you now.\"\n\nBut there was no dairymaid involved; and strangely, he didn't end up seeing more of his intermittent friends. Somerset could turn out to be as distant as Valparaiso or Tennessee, if you wanted things that way. And perhaps he chose to remember their heavy joshing because it helped keep them at bay just as he had kept his women friends at bay. Though now some were keeping themselves at bay, having reached the age when illness arrives. There were emails about prostate cancer, and back operations, and that little bit of heart trouble which maybe wasn't such good news. Vitamin pills and statins were consumed, while the World Service kept them company in their sleeplessness. And soon, no doubt, the funeral years would begin.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHe remembered a friend he'd had, a lifetime back, at law college. Alan something. They hadn't kept up, for one reason or another. Alan had spent seven years training to be a vet, but on qualifying had immediately switched to the law.\n\nOne day, he'd asked his friend why he'd thrown up his first career so abruptly. Had he suddenly decided he didn't like animals? Was it the prospective hours? No, said Alan, none of that. He'd always thought it would be a good, purposeful job, helping to cure sick farmstock, bringing them either to safe birth or pain-free death, working outdoors, meeting all sorts of people. And it would have been all that, he knew. But what had finally put him off was a kind of squeamishness. He explained that if you spent several hours of the day with your arm up the backside of a cow, you couldn't help breathing in the animal's noxious exhalations. And that once they were inside you, they would inevitably seek to come back out again.\n\nThat was as far as Alan had gone. But he had naturally imagined Alan in bed with a girlfriend, and all going well between them, until some catastrophic buildup of cow gas hurtles from him, and the girl jumps from the bed, rushes for her clothes and is never seen again. Or perhaps this hadn't happened, but Alan couldn't bear to think of how it might be, if he was with someone he loved.\n\nWhat had become of Alan? He had no idea. But Alan's story had stayed with him ever since. Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared. The cow gas would out, in one direction or another. Then you just had to live with the consequences until it dispersed. And yes, it had caused more than one girlfriend to run for her clothes, not just Anna. And no, at those times, he had not been much of a stoic.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nIn his youth, hot with pride at his love for Susan, he had been competitive, as all young men are. My cock is bigger than yours; my heart is bigger than yours. Young bucks boasting of their girlfriends' attributes. Whereas his boast had been: look how much more transgressive my relationship is than yours. And then, as well: look at the strength of my feelings for her, and hers for me. Which was what counted, obviously, because the strength of feeling governed the degree of happiness, didn't it? That had seemed blindingly logical to him at the time.\n\nIt used to be said that the Bhutanese were the happiest people on earth. In Bhutan there was little materialism, but a strong sense of kinship, society and religion. Whereas he lived in the materialistic West, where there was little religion and a weaker sense of both society and family. Did this give him an advantage, or a disadvantage?\n\nMore recently, the happiest people on earth were said to be the Danes. Not because of their supposed hedonism, but because of the modesty of their expressed hopes. Instead of aiming for the stars and the moon, their ambition was only to reach the next streetlamp and, being pleased when they did so, were the happier for it. He remembered again that woman, somebody's girlfriend, who said that she had lowered her expectations because this made you less likely to be disappointed. And therefore more happy? Was this what it was like to be Danish?\n\nAs for whether strength of feeling correlated to degree of happiness, his own experience now led him to doubt it. You might as well say, the more you ate, the better your digestion; or, the faster you drove, the quicker you got there. Not if you drove into a brick wall. He remembered that time, out in his Morris Minor with Susan, when the accelerator cable had broken, or jammed, or whatever. They were certainly roaring away up that hill, until he had the wit to disengage the clutch. He'd been doing two things at the same time: panicking and thinking clearly. That's how his life had been, back then. Nowadays, he always thought clearly; but occasionally, he found he missed the panic.\n\nAnd here was another factor, whether you were Bhutanese, Danish or British. If the statistics of happiness depend on personal reporting, how can we be sure that anyone is as happy as they claim to be? What if they aren't telling the truth? No, we have to assume that they are, or at least that the testing system allows for lying. So the real question lay beneath: assuming that those canvassed by anthropologists and sociologists are reliable witnesses, then surely \"being happy\" is the same as \"reporting yourself happy\"? Whereupon any subsequent objective analysis\u2014of brain activity, for instance\u2014becomes irrelevant. To say sincerely that you are happy is to be happy. At which point, the question disappears.\n\nAnd if that was so, then perhaps the argument could be extended. For example, to say that you had once been happy, and to believe what you were saying, was the same as actually to have been happy. Could that be true? No, that was surely specious. On the other hand, the emotional record was not like a history book; its truths were constantly changing, and true even when incompatible.\n\nFor instance, he had noticed during his life one difference between the sexes in the reporting of relationships. When a couple broke up, the woman was more likely to say, \"It was all fine until _x_ happened.\" The _x_ being a change of circumstances or location, the arrival of an extra child, or, all too often, some routine\u2014or not so routine\u2014infidelity. Whereas the man was more likely to say, \"I'm afraid it was all wrong from the start.\" And he would be referring to a mutual incompatibility, or a marriage made under duress, or an unrevealed secret on one or both sides, which had later emerged. So she was saying, \"We were happy until,\" while he was saying, \"We were never really happy.\" And when he had first noticed this discrepancy, he had tried to work out which of them was more likely to be telling the truth; but now, at the other end of his life, he accepted that both were doing so. \"In love, everything is both true and false; it's the one subject on which it's impossible to say anything absurd.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWhen he bought a half-share in the Frogworth Valley Artisanal Cheese Company, he had imagined himself as a kind of owner-manager. Co-owner\u2013co-manager. He had a desk and a chair and a rather decrepit computer terminal; he also had his own white coat, though was rarely required to put it on. Hillary ran the office. He had imagined himself running Hillary; but she didn't need running. He offered to help out and muck in; though mainly he watched things happen around him, and smiled. When Hillary went on holiday, he was allowed to take over her desk.\n\nWhere he proved most useful to the company (which only consisted of five people) was stall-holding at farmers' markets. It wasn't easy to find someone regular, and Barry, who'd done it for years, was growing unreliable. He was happy to stand in when required. Driving to one of the nearby towns, setting up the stall, laying out the cheeses, their captions, the tasting plates, the plastic cup of toothpicks. He wore a tweed cap and a leather apron, but knew he hardly passed for Somerset born-and-bred. Behind him was a plastic backdrop bearing a colour photograph of happy goats. The other stall-holders were friendly; he would swap two fivers for a tenner, two tenners for a twenty. He explained to customers the age of the cheeses and their characteristics: this one rolled in ash, this in chives, this in crushed chillis. He enjoyed doing all this. It gave him the level of social interaction he required nowadays: cheerful, mutually sustaining, with no question of intimacy\u2014even if he did sometimes flirt lightly with Betty of Betty's Best Home-Made Pies. It passed the time. Ah, that phrase. A sudden memory of Susan talking about Joan. \"We're all just looking for a place of safety. And if you don't find one, then you have to learn how to pass the time.\" Back then, it had sounded like a counsel of despair; now, it struck him as normal, and emotionally practical.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nDespite having no expectation of, nor desire for, some final relationship\u2014or perhaps because of this\u2014he often found himself drawn to all those public displays of wantingness. The personal ads, the \"soulmates\" columns, the TV dating shows, and those newspaper features where couples go for a meal, mark one another out of ten, report on or confess to inept chopstick behaviour, and then answer (or not) the question of whether they had kissed. \"A quick hug\" or \"Only on the cheek\" were frequent responses. Some blokes would answer smugly, \"A gentleman never tells.\" It was meant to sound sophisticated, but showed far too much class deference: \"gentlemen,\" in his experience, were as boastful as any other males. Still, he followed all these brave, tentative forays of the heart with a mixture of tenderness and scepticism. He hoped it might work out for them, even as he doubted that it would.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\n\"A gentleman never tells.\" Well, it might occasionally be true. For instance, Uncle Humphrey, stinking of booze and cigars, coming into Susan's bedroom to demonstrate \"a party kiss,\" and then demanding one (or more) on an annual basis. He doubted Uncle Humph had \"told.\" But this hardly made him a \"gentleman\"\u2014quite the opposite. Uncle Humph, whose lechery had resulted in Susan not believing in the afterlife. Had his behaviour affected her in other ways? Impossible to tell, at this distance. And so he dismissed that long-dead uncle from his mind.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHe preferred to remember Joan. He wished he'd known her as a bounding tennis champion, then as a girl who went off the rails, then as a kept woman. Was the man who kept her, and then dismissed her, a \"gentleman\"? Susan had withheld his name, and there was no finding it now.\n\nHe smiled at the thought of Joan. He remembered the yappers, and Sibyl, the elderly golden retriever. Which of them had died first, Joan or Sibyl? She'd asked him to send flowers. Though for whom was never made clear. Whenever he'd been tempted to get a dog, he heard Joan's warning voice about them dying on you. So he never got a dog. Nor was he ever tempted to do crosswords or drink gin.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\n\"Little man, you've had a busy day.\"\n\nThis is the greeting she often sings at you, when you visit her on home leaves.\n\nExcept when it is:\n\n> \"Clap hands, here comes Charlie,\n> \n> Clap hands, good time Charlie,\n> \n> Clap hands, here comes Charlie now.\"\n\nMartha, to your continuing surprise, never objects to your visits, and never asks you for money. She looks after her mother herself, with an occasional nurse in attendance. You get the impression that Martha's husband is doing well in...whatever he does. She told you once, which means you can no longer ask.\n\nSusan's mind has slipped a little more each time you see her. Short-term memory disappeared a while ago, and long-term memory is a shifting, blurry palimpsest from which clear but unconnected phrases will occasionally be picked out by her fading brain. What often rises to the surface are songs and catchphrases from decades previously.\n\n> \"High o'er the fence leaps Sunny Jim,\n> \n> Force is the food that raises him.\"\n\nSome advertising jingle for a breakfast cereal\u2014from her own childhood? from that of her children? In your house, you had Weetabix.\n\nShe has long ago ceased to drink; indeed, she has forgotten that she was ever a drinker. She seems to know that you are, or were, something in her life, but not that she once loved you, and you loved her in return. Her brain is ragged, but her mood is strangely stable. The panic and pandemonium have drained out of her. She is alarmed by neither your arrival nor your departure. Her manner is satirical at times, disapproving at others, but always a little superior, as if you aren't a person of much consequence. You find all this agonising, and try to resist the temptation to believe that you deserve what you are getting.\n\n\"He's a dirty stop-out, that one,\" she will confide to the nurse in a stage whisper. \"I could tell you things about him that would make your hair stand on end.\"\n\nThe nurse looks at you, so you shrug and smile, as if to say, \"What can you do, it's so sad, isn't it?\" while realizing that even now you are betraying her, even in this new and last extremity of hers. Because she could, of course, tell the nurse a thing or two about you, and the nurse's hair might well stand on end.\n\nYou remember her saying that she wasn't afraid of death, and that her only regret would be over not knowing what happened afterwards. But now she has very little past and\u2014literally\u2014no thought for the future. She has only a ghostplay on some frayed screen of memory, which she takes to be the present.\n\n\" _You're_ a played-out generation.\"\n\n\"Got to eat a peck of dirt before you die.\"\n\n\"Clap hands, here comes...Sunny Jim.\"\n\n\"One of the worst criminals in the world.\"\n\n\"Where've you been all my life?\"\n\nAt least, you think, there is something of her still left among these shreds and patches.\n\n> \"Oh dear, what can the matter be?\n> \n> Three old ladies got locked in the la-va-tree,\n> \n> They were there from Monday to Saturday,\n> \n> Reading the R _adio Times._ \"\n\nYes, you remember teaching her that one. So at least she hasn't turned into an entirely different person. You've heard about that happening: pillars of the church screaming obscenities, sweet old ladies turning into Nazis, and so on. But this is faint comfort. Perhaps, if she became unrecognizable and slipped completely out of character, it would all be less painful to deal with.\n\nOnce\u2014and naturally in front of the nurse\u2014she dredges up a football song which can only have come from you:\n\n> \"If I had the wings of a sparrow,\n> \n> If I had the arse of a crow,\n> \n> I'd fly over Tottenham tomorrow,\n> \n> And shit on the bastards below.\"\n\nBut the nurse has, of course, heard far worse in her years of caring for the elderly and demented, so she merely cocks an eyebrow at you and asks,\n\n\"Chelsea supporter?\"\n\nWhat makes it unbearable, what makes you so exhausted and depressed after twenty minutes in her presence that you want to run outside and howl, is this: though she can't name you, never asks you any questions or answers any of yours, she still, at one level, registers your presence and responds to it. She doesn't know who the fuck you are, or what you do, or even your fucking name, but at the same time, she recognises you, and judges you morally and finds you wanting. It is this which urges you to run out of the house and howl; and this which makes you realise that, perhaps at some similar unconscious level, in some remote part of your brain, you still love her. And because this awareness is unwelcome, it makes you want to howl the more.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAnd while he was tormenting himself, here was a question he would often arrive at when his mind followed a particular trail of memory. Handing back Susan had been an act of self-protection on his part. There was no doubt about that; and no doubt in his mind that he had to do it. But beyond this, was it an act of courage, or of cowardice?\n\nAnd if he couldn't decide, perhaps the answer was: both.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBut she had marked his life in so many ways, some for the better, some the worse. She had made him more generous and open to others though also more suspicious and enclosed. She had taught him the virtue of impulsiveness; but also its dangers. So he had ended up with a cautious generosity and a careful impulsiveness. His pattern of life for twenty years and more had been a demonstration of how to be impulsive and careful at the same time. And his generosity to others also came, like a pack of bacon, with a \"use by\" date on it.\n\nHe always remembered what she had said to him after they left Joan's house that day. Like most young men, especially those first in love, he had viewed life\u2014and love\u2014in terms of winners and losers. He, obviously, was a winner; Joan, he assumed, had been a loser, or, more likely, not even a competitor. Susan had put him right. Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn't make it any the less real. And it was the only story.\n\nAt the time, he had been sobered by her words, and Joan's story had made him think of her quite differently. Then, over the years, as his life developed, as caution and carefulness began to predominate, he realised that he, no less than Joan, had had his love story, and perhaps there wasn't another one to come. So now he better understood how couples clung to their own story\u2014each, often, to a separate part of it\u2014long after it had gone cold on them, even to the point where they were not sure they could bear one another. Bad love still contained the remnant, the memory, of good love\u2014somewhere, deep down, where neither of them any longer wanted to dig.\n\nHe found himself often wondering about other people's love stories; and sometimes, because he was a calm and unintimidating presence, they would confide in him. Mostly, it was women who did so, but that was unsurprising; men\u2014himself a prime example\u2014were both more covert and less eloquent. And even when he guessed that the love stories of the misled and the forsaken had become a little less authentic with each retelling\u2014that such tales were the equivalent of Winston Churchill in an Aylesbury backstreet, all rouged and made up for the Path\u00e9 News camera\u2014even if this was the case, he was still moved. Indeed, he was more moved by the lives of the bereft and the unchosen than he was by stories of success in love.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nOn the one hand, there were the furrow-dwellers, tunnelling deeper into the earth, and who, understandably, were not communicative about their inner selves. And at the other extreme were those who would tell you their entire lives, their only story, either in a series of outpourings, or in a single episode. Where had he been that time? He could see the beachfront bar with its silly cocktails, feel the warm night breeze, hear the thudding backbeat from tinny loudspeakers. He was at ease with the world, watching other people's lives develop. No, that was too grand a way of putting it: he was observing the young get cheerfully drunk and turn their minds to sex, romance and something more. But though he was indulgent\u2014even sentimental\u2014about the young, and protective of their hopes, there was one scene he was superstitious about, and preferred not to witness: the moment when they flung away their lives because it just felt so right\u2014when, for instance, a smiling waiter delivered a mound of mango sorbet with an engagement ring glittering in its domed apex, and a bright-eyed proposer fell to bended knee in the sand...The fear of such a scene would often lead him to an early night.\n\nSo he was sitting at the bar, halfway through his third and theoretically final cigarette of the evening, when a man in beach shorts and flip-flops climbed onto the stool beside him.\n\n\"Mind if I bum one?\"\n\n\"Be my guest.\" He passed across the pack, then some hotel book-matches with a palm tree on the cover.\n\n\"Smokers, we're a dying breed, right?\"\n\nThe fellow was probably in his forties, as lightly drunk as he was, English, genial, unpushy. None of that fake bonhomie you sometimes encountered, the assumption that you must have more in common than you did. And so they sat there quietly, smoking away, and maybe the lack of false small talk encouraged the man to turn and announce in a level, meditative tone,\n\n\"She said she wanted to rest on my shoulder as lightly as a bird. I thought that sounded poetic. Also, bloody brilliant, just what a fellow needs. Never went for clingy.\"\n\nThe man paused. Paul was always happy to supply a prompt.\n\n\"But it didn't work out?\"\n\n\"Two problems.\" The fellow inhaled, then blew the smoke into the scented air. \"Number one, birds fly away, don't they? That's in their nature, as a bird, isn't it? And number two, before they do, they always shit on your shoulder.\"\n\nAnd with that he stubbed out his cigarette, nodded and walked off down the beach towards the gentle tide.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nIt came into his head, in one of those whimsical, sentimental moods he always sought to guard against, to try and make one of Susan's famous upside-down cakes. Over the years, he had become a competent baker, and so imagined that he could work out what had gone wrong. Too much fruit, too little baking powder, too much flour\u2014that was his best guess.\n\nThe mixture certainly looked surly and unpromising in the tin. But when he opened the oven door, it had surprisingly risen to its correct height, the fruit looked evenly distributed, and it smelt like...cake. He let it cool, then cut himself a small slice. It tasted fine. Eating it failed to set off any specific memories, for which he was grateful. He was also grateful that he wasn't able to repeat someone else's mistakes, only his own.\n\nHe cut himself another slice and then, suddenly suspicious of his own motives, threw the rest in the bin. He turned on Wimbledon and watched as two tall, baseball-capped men hit aces past one another for game after game. He chewed his cake and wondered idly what might happen if he went back to the Village and presented himself at the tennis club. Applied for membership. Asked to play in, even at his advanced age. The bad boy returned: the Village's own John McEnroe. No, that was another sentimentality. Doubtless there would be no one left who remembered him. Or, more likely, all he would find would be a neat little housing estate. No, he would never go back. He was deeply incurious about whether his parents' house, or the Macleods', or Joan's, were still standing. Those places would hold no emotions for him at this distance. That's what he told himself, anyway.\n\nTowards the end of Wimbledon fortnight, the broadcasters showed more doubles matches: men's, women's, mixed. Naturally, he was most interested in the mixed. \"The most vulnerable spot is always down the middle, Casey Paul.\" Not anymore: the players were so fit, so quick and solid on the volley, and their rackets had sweet spots the size of their heads. Another change was the lack of chivalry, certainly at this level. As he remembered it, back in the day, male players would hit as hard as possible against the opposing man, but when rallying with a woman would hold back on the power, and rely more on a change of angle or depth; maybe throw in a slice or a drop shot. It was a bit more than chivalry, in fact: it was simply boring to watch a man outhitting and overpowering a woman.\n\nHe hadn't played tennis for years; decades indeed. When he lived in the States, a temporary friend had introduced him to golf. At first this felt an ironic surprise; but it was absurd to hold a prejudice against a game just because Gordon Macleod had once played it. He came to know the joy of a perfect contact between club and ball, the shame of a shank; and to appreciate the strategic intricacies of tee to green. Nevertheless, as he took aim down a fairway, his head properly filled with the coach's advice about taking the club back, use of the hips and legs, and the importance of the follow-through, he did occasionally hear, as if in a whisper, the sweet, laughing opinion of Susan Macleod that it was plain unsporting to hit a stationary ball.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nGordon Macleod: whom he had once wanted to kill, even if Joan had told him there hadn't been a local murder since the Villagers wore woad. An exemplar of the kind of Englishman he most loathed. Patronising, patriarchal, manneredly precise. Not to mention violent and controlling. He remembered how it had seemed to him that Macleod was somehow preventing him from growing up: not by doing anything, simply by existing. \"And how many Fancy Boys are you providing yourself with this weekend?\" Bravely, Susan had responded, \"I think it's just Ian and Eric this weekend. Unless the others turn up as well.\" Gordon Macleod's words had been like fire; he'd laughed at them, as Susan had done, but they had scorched his skin.\n\nAnd then there was that other occasion when words were spoken which had echoed down his life. That furious, squat man in his dressing gown, his eyes invisible in the gloom, bullying down on him as he gripped the banister in panic.\n\n\"Whatski? Whatski, my fine and feathered friend?\"\n\nAt the time, he had blushed, feeling his skin burn. But beyond this, he thought the fellow must simply be mad. That's to say, mad enough to have somehow listened in to his and Susan's private conversations. Unless he'd hidden a tape recorder beneath his wife's bed. And the thought of that had made him blush all over again.\n\nIt had taken him years to realise that this had not been crazy malevolence, but something quite unintended, which nevertheless held a powerful and destructive resonance. Gordon Macleod, roused from his bed by the sound of his wife's lover, had merely, in that moment, and probably with no ulterior motive, fallen back on the private language he had shared with Susan. Shared? More than that\u2014created. And which Susan had then brought into her relationship with him. Unthinkingly. You say \"darling,\" you say \"my love,\" you say \"kiss me hardly,\" you say \"whatski?,\" you say \"my fine and feathered friend,\" because those are the words which come to you at that moment. With no ulterior motive on her part either. And now he wondered if any of her turns of phrase, which had so beguiled him, had been her own. Perhaps only \"We're a played-out generation,\" because it seemed unlikely that Gordon Macleod, in all his self-importance, believed that he and men of his age were played out.\n\nHe remembered a public service advertisement from the time when the government, grudgingly, had acknowledged the existence of AIDS. There were two versions of the ad, he seemed to remember: a photo of a woman in bed with about half a dozen men, and one of a man in bed with about half a dozen women, all side by side like sardines. The text pointed out that every time you went to bed with someone new, you also went to bed with everyone he or she had previously gone to bed with. The government had been talking about sexually transmitted disease. But it was the same with words: they too could be sexually transmitted.\n\nAnd actions as well, for that matter. Except that\u2014strangely, fortunately\u2014actions had never caused a problem. He had never found himself thinking, Oh, when you did that with your hand or arm or leg or tongue, you must also have done it with _x_ and _y_ and _z._ Such thoughts and images had never bothered him, and he was grateful, because he could easily imagine how ghostly antecedents in your head could drive you mad. But ever since Gordon Macleod's sneer had first made sense to him, he had become conscious\u2014at times, absurdly so\u2014of what must have been going on, verbally, since the day Adam or Eve or whoever it might have been first took another lover.\n\nOnce, he had mentioned this discovery to a girlfriend: lightly, almost frivolously, as if it were natural and inevitable and therefore _interesting._ A day or two later, in bed, she had teasingly called him \"my fine and feathered friend.\"\n\n\"No!\" he had shouted, instantly retreating to his side of the mattress, \"You're not allowed to call me that!\"\n\nShe had been shocked by his vehemence. And he had shocked himself. But he was protecting a phrase which had always been uniquely between Susan and himself. Except that, earlier, it had been a phrase uniquely between the newly married Mr. Gordon Macleod and his hopeful, puzzled wife.\n\nSo, for a while\u2014say, twenty years or more\u2014he had found himself morbidly sensitive to lovers' language. This was ridiculous, of course. He saw rationally that there was only a limited vocabulary available, and it shouldn't matter when the same words were recycled, when nightly, across the globe, billions asserted the uniqueness of their love with secondhand phrases. Except that sometimes it did. Which meant that here, as elsewhere, prehistory ruled.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHe imagined the Village tennis courts replaced by a spread of the finest modern boxes, or perhaps a more lucrative clump of low-rise flats. He wondered if anyone, anywhere, had ever looked at a housing development and thought: Why don't we knock them all down and build a nice tennis club, one with the latest all-weather courts? Or maybe\u2014yes, why don't we go further and lay some proper old-fashioned grass courts, for tennis as it once used to be? But no one would ever do, or even think, that, would they? Things, once gone, can't be put back; he knew that now. A punch, once delivered, can't be withdrawn. Words, once spoken, can't be unsaid. We may go on as if nothing has been lost, nothing done, nothing said; we may claim to forget it all; but our innermost core doesn't forget, because we have been changed forever.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHere was a paradox. When he had been with Susan, they had scarcely discussed their love, analysed it, sought to understand its shape, its colour, its weight and its boundaries. It was simply there, an inevitable fact, an unshakeable given. But it was also the case that neither of them had the words, the experience, the mental equipment to discuss it. Later, in his thirties and forties, he had gradually acquired emotional lucidity. But in these later relationships of his, he had felt less deeply, and there was less to discuss, so his potential articulacy was rarely required.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHe had read, some years before, that a common psychological trope in men's attitude to women was the \"rescue fantasy.\" Perhaps it stirred in them memories of fairy tales in which valiant knights came across pretty maidens locked in towers by wicked guardians. Or those classical myths in which other maidens\u2014usually naked\u2014were chained to rocks for the sole purpose of being rescued by dauntless warriors. Who usually discovered a convenient sea serpent or dragon which had to be eliminated first. In modern, less mythical times, it appeared that the woman about whom men most had rescue fantasies was Marilyn Monroe. He had viewed this sociological datum with a degree of scepticism. Odd how rescuing her seemed inevitably to involve sleeping with her. Some rescue that would prove. Whereas in fact, as it seemed to him, the most effective way to rescue Marilyn Monroe would have been _not_ to sleep with her.\n\nHe didn't think that, as a nineteen-year-old, he had been suffering from a rescue fantasy with Susan. On the contrary, he suffered from a rescue reality. And unlike maidens in towers or chained to rocks, who attracted a whole swirl of knights looking for chivalric action, and unlike Marilyn Monroe, whom every Western man dreamed of liberating (if only to lock her up in a tower of his own making), in the case of Susan Macleod, there was not a great queue of knights, cinemagoers and Fancy Boys squabbling for the right to rescue her from her husband. He had believed he could save her; further, that _only_ he could save her. That was no fantasy; it was practicality and brute necessity.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAt this distance, he realised, he no longer had a memory of Susan's body. Of course, he remembered her face, and her eyes and her mouth and her elegant ears, and what she looked like in her tennis dress; there were photographs to confirm all this. But a sexual memory of her body: that had gone. He couldn't remember her breasts, their shape, their fall, their firmness or otherwise. He couldn't remember her legs, what form they took, and how she parted them and what she did with them when they made love. He couldn't remember her undressing. It was as if she'd undressed as women did on the beach, with lots of prim ingenuity beneath a capacious towel, but emerging in a nightdress rather than a swimming costume. Had they always made love with the lights out? He couldn't remember. Perhaps he'd closed his eyes a lot.\n\nShe had a corset, that he remembered; well, doubtless several. Which had\u2014whatever they were called\u2014straps for holding up her stockings. Suspenders, that was it. How many per leg? Two, three? But he knew she only ever attached the front one. This private eccentricity came back to him now. As for what her bras had been like...At nineteen, he didn't have the slightest underwear fetishism, any more than she took an erotic interest in his vests and pants. He couldn't even remember what his pants had looked like at that age. He'd had a period of wearing string vests, which for some reason he had imagined to be cool.\n\nShe had no coquetry about her, that was certain. No flirty bits of flesh showing. How did they kiss? He couldn't even remember that: Whereas, with later, lesser attachments, there were astonishing moments of sexual freeze-frame still in his head. Maybe, as you got better at sex, the sex became more memorable. Or maybe, the deeper your feelings, the less the particulars of sex mattered. No, neither of these were true. He was just trying to find a theory to explain an oddity.\n\nHe remembered when she had told him, just like that, how many times they had made love. A hundred and fifty-three, or some such number. Back then, it had thrown him into all sorts of pondering. Should he have been counting too? Was it a lapse in love that he wasn't, or hadn't? And so on. Now, he thought: a hundred and fifty-three, the number of times he had come up to that point. But what about her? How many orgasms had she had? Indeed, did she ever have one? There was pleasure and intimacy, surely; but orgasm? At the time he couldn't tell, nor did he ask; nor know how to ask. To put it more truthfully, he had never thought of asking. And now it was too late.\n\nHe tried to imagine why she might have decided to count. To begin with, as a matter of pride and attentiveness, in bed with only the second lover of her life, and that after a long drought. But then he remembered the anguished whisper of her question, \"Don't give up on me just yet, Casey Paul?\" So maybe counting had turned from a matter of acclaim to one of anxiety and dismay: the fear that he might leave her, the fear that she might never have another lover. Was that it? He gave up. He stopped examining the past, chasing down what Joan had memorably called \"my own distant experiences of cock and cunt.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nOne evening, glass in hand, he was idly following the televised highlights of the Brazilian Grand Prix. He wasn't much interested in the bland plutocracy of Formula One; but he did like to watch young men taking risks. In that respect, the race was gratifying. Heavy rain had made the track dangerous; pools of standing water sent even former world champions aquaplaning smack into the barriers; the race was stopped twice, and frequently brought under the control of the safety car. Everyone drove cautiously, except for nineteen-year-old Max Verstappen of the Red Bull team. He overtook his way from almost last place to third, making moves his elders and supposed betters declined to dare. The commentators, astonished by this display of skill and guts, sought explanation. And one of them provided it: \"They say your risk profile doesn't stabilise until you're about twenty-five.\"\n\nThis statement made him attend even more closely. Yes, he thought: a treacherous circuit, visibility reduced by spray to almost zero, others trepidatious while you felt invulnerable, going flat out thanks to a risk profile as yet unstabilised. Yes, he remembered that all too well. It was called being nineteen. And some would crash and some wouldn't. Verstappen hadn't. So far, anyway: though he had another six years to go before neurophysiology rendered him entirely sensible.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBut if Verstappen was showing youthful fearlessness rather than true courage, did the same age disclaimer apply in reverse: to cowardice? He'd certainly been under twenty-five when he committed an act of cowardice which had haunted him all his life. He and Eric were staying at the Macleods', and had gone off to a funfair in a hilly park. They were walking down from the top, side by side, chatting, and failed to notice a group of youths coming up towards them. As they drew level, one leaned into Eric with his shoulder, spinning him round; another tripped him, and a third went in with his boot. He took all this in with a kind of heightened peripheral vision\u2014how long before Eric was on the ground? a second? two?\u2014and had instantly, instinctively run away. He kept saying to himself, \"Find a policeman, find a policeman,\" but even as he did so, he knew that wasn't the reason he was running. He was afraid of getting beaten up himself. The rational part of him knew that policemen were a rare sight at funfairs. So he ran to the bottom of the hill on this futile, pretend quest, without actually asking anyone where he might find help. Then he walked back up, nauseous at what he might find. Eric was on his feet, blood on his face, feeling his ribs. He could no longer remember what had been said\u2014whether he offered his fake excuse\u2014and they drove back to the Macleod house. Susan bandaged Eric, with liberal use of Dettol, and insisted he stay until the bruising had gone down and the cuts mended. Which Eric had done. Neither then nor later had Eric rebuked him for cowardice, or asked why he'd disappeared.\n\nYou could get through a life, if you were careful, and lucky, without having your courage much tested\u2014or rather, your cowardice revealed. That time Macleod had attacked him in the book room he'd certainly run for it, after throwing one ineffective punch in reply to Macleod's three. And when he'd scuttled out of the back door, he hadn't been trying to find a policeman, either. He had made the probably correct calculation that Macleod was drunk enough and angry enough to go on attempting to hit him until he succeeded. Despite being younger, and reasonably fit, he hadn't fancied his chances at close quarters. It wasn't like facing an under-12, under-6-stone schoolboy of equal timorousness.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAnd then again, more recently. \"Recently\" in the sense of \"fifteen or twenty years ago.\" That was how the mind, and time, worked nowadays. He'd been back in England for only a few years. He'd visited Susan a couple of times, bringing no visible pleasure or benefit to either of them. One evening, the phone rang. It was Martha Macleod, now\u2014for a long time\u2014Mrs. Something-or-Other.\n\n\"My mother has been temporarily sectioned\" was her opening line.\n\n\"I'm very sorry to hear that.\"\n\n\"She's in...\" and cited the mental health department of a local hospital. He knew its reputation. A doctor friend, with professional dryness, had once told him, \"You have to be _really_ mad to get in there.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"It's a terrible place. It's like Bedlam. Lots of people screaming. Either that or they're zombified with tranquillizers.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" He didn't ask which category Susan was in.\n\n\"Would you go and see her? And see the place?\"\n\nHe thought: this is the first time in a quarter of a century that Martha has asked anything of me. Disapproval at first; quiet superiority thereafter; though she had always been polite to him. She must be at the end of her tether, he thought. Well, he had been there in his time too; and knew how elastic the end of a tether could be. So he considered her request.\n\n\"Maybe.\" He was going up to town in a couple of days, as it happened. But he wasn't going to tell her that.\n\n\"I think it would do her good to see you. In the place she's in.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nHe'd left it like that. After he put the phone down, he thought: I looked after her for years. I tried my best. I failed. I handed her over to you. So it's your turn now.\n\nBut he didn't believe his own bitter logic. It was like saying, \"Find a policeman, find a policeman.\" The truth was, he couldn't face it: he couldn't face seeing her, the remnant of her, whether screaming or zombified, among the screaming and zombified. He tried to think of his decision as an act of necessary self-protection; also, protection of the picture he had of her in his head. But he knew the truth. He was scared of going there.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAs he grew older, his life turned into an agreeable routine, with enough human contact to sustain and divert, but not disturb, him. He knew the contentment of feeling less. His emotional life was recast as a social life. He was on nodding and smiling terms with many, as he stood in his leather apron and tweed cap in front of a colour photograph of happy goats. He prized stoicism and calm, which he had achieved less through some exercise of philosophy, more from a slow growth within him; a growth like coral, which in most weathers was strong enough to keep out the ocean breakers. Except when it wasn't.\n\nSo his life consisted mainly of observation and memory. It was not a bad mix. He viewed with distaste those men in their sixties and seventies who carried on behaving as if they were in their thirties: a whirl of younger women, exotic travel and dangerous sports. Fat tycoons on yachts with hairy arms round thin models. Not to mention respectable husbands who, in a turmoil of existential anguish and Viagra, left their wives of several decades. There was a German expression for this fear, one of those concertina words the language specialised in, which translated as \"the panic at the shutting of the doors.\" He himself felt untroubled by that shutting; though he saw no reason to hurry it up.\n\nHe knew what they said of him locally: Oh, he likes to keep himself to himself. The phrase was descriptive, not judgemental. It was a principle of life the English still respected. And it wasn't just about privacy, about an Englishman's home\u2014even a pebbledash semi\u2014being his castle. It was about something more: about the self, and where you kept it, and who, if anyone, was allowed to fully see it.\n\nHe knew that no one can truly hold their life in balance, not even when in calm contemplation of it. He knew there was always a pull, sometimes amounting to an oscillation, between complacency on one side and regret on the other. He tried to favour regret, as being the less damaging.\n\nBut he certainly never regretted his love for Susan. What he did regret was that he had been too young, too ignorant, too absolutist, too confident of what he imagined love's nature and workings to be. Would it have been better\u2014in the sense of less catastrophic\u2014for him, for her, for them both, if they had indeed had some \"French\" relationship? The older woman teaching the younger man the arts of love, and then, concealing an elegant tear, passing him out into the world\u2014the world of younger, more marriageable women? Perhaps. But neither he nor Susan had been sophisticated enough for that. He had never known sophistication of the emotional life: anyway, to him it sounded like a contradiction in terms. So he didn't regret that either.\n\nHe remembered his own early attempts to define love, back in the Village, alone in his bed. Love, he had ventured, was like the vast and sudden uncreasing of a lifelong frown. Hmm: love as the end of a migraine. No, worse: love as Botox. His other comparison: love feeling as if the lungs of the soul had suddenly been inflated with pure oxygen. Love as barely legal drug use? Did he have any idea what he'd been talking about? Some years later, as it happened, he'd been with a group of friends when an excited junior doctor joined them, having just \"liberated\" a cylinder of nitrous oxide from the hospital where he worked. They were each given a balloon, which they inflated from the cylinder then held tightly by the neck. Emptying their lungs as much as they could, they put the balloon to their lips, and released into themselves the roar and lift of a sudden, rushing, eye-blinking high. But no, it hadn't reminded him at all of love.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nStill, were the professionals any better? He took his little notebook from the desk drawer. He hadn't written anything new in it for a long time. At one point, frustrated by how few good definitions of love he could find, he started copying down at the back all the bad definitions. Love is this, love is that, love means this, love means that. Even quite well-known formulations said little more than, in effect: it's a soft toy, it's a puppy dog, it's a whoopee cushion. Love means never having to say you're sorry (on the contrary, it frequently means doing just precisely that). Then there were all those love lines from all those love songs, with the swooning delusions of lyricist, singer, band. Even the bittersweet ones and the cynical ones\u2014always true to you, darling, in my fashion\u2014struck him as the mere counterfactuals of sentimentality. Yes, it was this bad for us, buddy, but it needn't be this bad for you: such was the song's implicit promise. So you can listen with sympathetic complacency.\n\nHere was an entry\u2014a serious one\u2014which he hadn't crossed out in years. He couldn't remember where it came from. He never recorded the writer or the source: he didn't want to be bullied by reputation; truth should stand by itself, clear and unsupported. This one went: \"In my opinion, every love, happy or unhappy, is a real disaster once you give yourself over to it entirely.\" Yes, that deserved to stay. He liked the proper inclusivity of \"happy or unhappy.\" But the key was: \"Once you give yourself over to it entirely.\" Despite appearances, this wasn't pessimistic, nor was it bittersweet. This was a truth about love spoken by someone in the full vortex of it, and which seemed to enclose all of life's sadness. He remembered again the friend who, long ago, had told him that the secret of marriage was \"to dip in and out of it.\" Yes, he could see that this might keep you safe. But safety had nothing to do with love.\n\nThe sadness of life. That was another conundrum he would occasionally ponder. Which was the correct\u2014or the more correct\u2014formulation: \"Life is beautiful but sad\" or \"Life is sad but beautiful\"? One or the other was obviously true; but he could never decide which.\n\nYes, love had been a complete disaster for him. And for Susan. And for Joan. And\u2014back before his time\u2014it might well have been so for Macleod as well.\n\nHe skimmed through a few crossed-out entries, then slid the notebook back in the drawer. Perhaps he had always been wasting his time. Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThen there was the case of Eric. Of all his friends, Eric had truly been a man of good intentions, and therefore had always ascribed good intentions to others. Hence the lack of rebuke after he'd received a kicking at the fair. In his early thirties, working in a local planning department, and with a decent little house in Perivale, Eric had become involved with a younger American woman. Ashley said she loved him; a love which expressed itself as wanting to be with him all the time and never wanting to meet his friends. And Ashley wouldn't sleep with him, no, not now anyway, but certainly later. Ashley had her faith, you see, and Eric, having been religious himself in his youth, could understand and appreciate that. Ashley wasn't a member of an established church, because look at all the harm established churches had caused; Eric could see that too. Ashley said that if he loved her, and agreed with her contempt for worldly possessions, then he would surely join her in such beliefs. And so Eric, temporarily cut off from his friends, put his little house up for sale, planning to give the proceeds to some cockamamie sect in Baltimore, after which the couple would move there and be married by some cockamamie religious theorist, or shaman, or sham, whereupon Eric, in exchange for his Perivale house, would be granted squatter's rights in perpetuity in his new wife's body. Fortunately, almost at the last minute, some survival instinct asserted itself, and he had cancelled his instructions to the estate agent, whereupon Ashley vanished from his life forever.\n\nIt had been a real disaster for Eric. He had lost his belief in the good intentions of others, and with it the ability fully to give himself over to love. If only he'd been inoculated with Susan's suspicion of missionaries. But that hadn't been part of Eric's prehistory.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nIt was odd how the long-dead Gordon Macleod still nagged at him. More than Susan did, in truth. She was now resolved in his mind, and would remain so, even if she would also continue to cause him pain. Whereas Macleod was unresolved. So he would find himself imagining what it was like in Macleod's head during those last, mute years, goggling at the wife who had left him, at the housekeeper and nurse whose presence irritated him, at his old pal Maurice, who said, \"Down the hatch, chum,\" then poured whisky straight from the bottle until it soaked his pyjamas.\n\nSo, there was Macleod lying on his back, day after day, knowing that this was not going to end well. Macleod was thinking back over his life. Macleod was remembering when he had first set eyes on Susan, at some dance or tea party, peopled with girls who on the whole wanted to have fun, and men who on the whole were not in respectably reserved occupations. And she was dancing with these spivs and black-marketeers\u2014that's what his envy turned them all into. Even the honest ones were just fancy boys and fancy men. But she went for none of them. Instead she chose that twerp with the goofy grin who could really dance\u2014about the only thing he could do\u2014yet whose flat feet or heart flutter had kept him out of uniform. What was his bloody name? Gerald. Gerald. And then the two of them had danced while he, Gordon, looked on. Then the twerp had died of leukaemia\u2014they'd have done better to send him up in a bomber and let him do a hand's turn before he pegged it, in Gordon's view.\n\nSusan was of course upset\u2014inconsolable, they said\u2014but he, Gordon, had stepped in and declared that he was the sort of chap she could rely on, both during the war and after. She had struck him as not exactly flighty, but a bit\u2014what? irresponsible? No, that wasn't quite right. She eluded him, and she laughed at some of the things he said\u2014and not just the jokes, either\u2014and such improbable, indeed impertinent reactions had made him fall smack in love with her. He told her that it didn't matter how she felt now, because he was confident that she would come to love him in time, and she had replied, \"I'll do my very best.\" Then they'd just thrown themselves into it, as many did during the war. At the altar, he had turned to her and asked, \"Where've you been all my life?\" But it hadn't worked. The being together hadn't worked, the sex hadn't worked, except for successful impregnation; but otherwise, it led to no intimacy. So, their love was a disaster. But that of course was no reason not to stay married, back in those days. Because one could still be fond, couldn't one? And there were the girls. He had long craved a son, but Susan hadn't wanted any more after Martha and Clara. So that was the end of that part of their life. Separate beds to begin with; then, as she complained about his snoring, separate rooms. But one continued to be fond; if increasingly exasperated.\n\nSo he ventriloquised Gordon Macleod, in a way he could never have done while he still hated him. Was he getting anywhere nearer the truth?\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHe remembered another angry man: the furious driver with red, hairy ears, hooting and shouting at him on the Village's zebra crossing. And in reply he had sneered, \"You'll be dead before I will.\" At the time he believed that the function of the old was to envy the young. So, now that his turn had come, did he envy the young? He didn't think so. Did he disapprove of them, was he shocked by them? Sometimes, but that was only fair: what they deserved, what he deserved. He had shocked his mother with the cover of _Private Eye._ Now he was himself shocked when some YouTube thread took him to a woman singing of love gone wrong: her title, and refrain, was \"Bloody Mother-Fucking Asshole.\" He had shocked his parents with his sexual behaviour. Now he was shocked when sex was so often portrayed as mindless, heartless, thoughtless shagging. But why the surprise? Each generation assumes that it has got sex just about right; each patronises the previous generation but feels queasy about the succeeding one. This was normal.\n\nAs for the wider question of age, and mortality: no, he didn't think he felt a panic at the shutting of the doors. But maybe he hadn't yet heard their hinges creak loudly enough.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nOccasionally, people would ask him, either slyly or sympathetically, why he had never married; others assumed or implied that he must have been, back there, back then. He would deploy an English reticence and an array of demurrals, so the enquiries rarely came to anything. Susan had predicted that one day he would have an act of his own, and she had been proved right. His act, which had developed without his really noticing, was that of someone who had never\u2014not really, not truly\u2014ever been in love.\n\nThere was nothing between a very long answer and a very short one: this was the problem. The long answer\u2014in an abbreviated form\u2014would involve, of course, his own prehistory. His parents, their characters and interaction; his view of other marriages; the damage he'd seen families do; his escape from his own into the Macleod household, and the brief illusion that he'd fallen into some magical world; then a second disillusionment. Once bitten, twice shy; twice bitten, forever shy. So he had come to believe that such a way of life was not for him; and had never subsequently found anyone to change his mind. Although it was true that he had proposed to Susan in the cafeteria of the Royal Festival Hall, and later to Kimberly in Nashville. This would require a parenthesis or two of explication.\n\nThe long answer was too time-consuming to give. The short answer was too painful. It went like this. It was a question of what heartbreak is, and how exactly the heart breaks, and what is left of it afterwards.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWhen he remembered his parents, he often visualised them in some old television play from the black-and-white days. Sitting in high-backed armchairs on either side of an open fire. His father with a pipe in one hand, flattening a newspaper with the other; his mother with a dangerous inch of ash at the end of her cigarette, but always finding the ashtray a few seconds before it would drop onto her knitting. Then his memory would cut to her in that pink dressing gown, picking him up late at night, and flicking her lit cigarette disdainfully out onto the Macleods' driveway. And then the suppressed resentment on both sides, as they made their silent way home.\n\nHe imagined his parents discussing their only child. Did they wonder \"where they had gone wrong\"? Or merely \"where he had gone wrong\"? Or how \"he'd been led astray\"? He imagined his mother saying, \"I could throttle that woman.\" He imagined his father being more philosophical and forgiving. \"There was nothing wrong with The Lad, or how we brought him up. It's just that his risk profile hadn't stabilised yet. That's what David Coulthard would say.\" Of course, his parents had died long before Max Verstappen's exploits at the Brazilian Grand Prix; and his father took no interest in motor sport. But perhaps he might have found some parallel form of exoneration.\n\nAnd he, in turn, now felt retrospective gratitude for the very safety and dullness he had been railing against when he first met Susan. His experience of life had left him with the belief that getting through the first sixteen years or so was fundamentally a question of damage limitation. And they had helped him do that. So there was a kind of posthumous reconciliation, even if one based on a certain rewriting of his parents; more understanding, and with it, belated grief.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nDamage limitation. He found himself wondering if he had always misconstrued that indelible image which had pursued him down his life: of being at an upstairs window, holding on to Susan by the wrists. Perhaps what had happened was not that he had lost strength and let her fall. Perhaps the truth was that _she_ had pulled _him_ out with her weight. And he had fallen too. And been grievously damaged in the process.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nI went to see her before she died. This was not long ago\u2014at least, as time goes in a life. She didn't know that anyone was there, let alone that it might be me. I sat in the chair provided. Playing through the scene beforehand, I had hoped that in some way she might recognise me, and that she would look peaceful. These hopes were as much for me as for her; I realised that.\n\nFaces don't change much, not even in extremity. But she didn't look peaceful, even though she was asleep, or unconscious, whichever. Her forehead was pulled into a frown, and her bottom jaw pushed out a little. I knew these ways her face worked; I'd seen them many times, when she was in obstinate denial of something, denying it to herself even more than to me. She was breathing through her nose, occasionally giving a small snore. Her mouth was clamped tight. I found myself wondering if she still had the same dental plate all these decades on.\n\nA nurse had brushed her hair, which fell straight down on both sides of her face. Almost instinctively, I reached out a hand, planning to uncover for the last time one of her elegant ears. But my hand stopped, seemingly of its own volition. I withdrew it, not knowing if my motive was concern for her privacy, or fastidiousness; fear of sentimentality, or fear of sudden pain. Probably the last.\n\n\"Susan,\" I said quietly.\n\nShe didn't react, except to continue with her frown, and the obstinate jut of her jaw. Well, that was fair enough. I hadn't come with, or for, any message, let alone for any forgiveness. From love's absolutism to love's absolution? No: I don't believe in the cosy narratives of life some find necessary, just as I choke on comforting words like redemption and closure. Death is the only closure I believe in; and the wound will stay open until that final shutting of the doors. As for redemption, it's far too neat, a moviemaker's bromide; and beyond that, it feels like something grand, which human beings are too imperfect to deserve, much less bestow upon themselves.\n\nI wondered if I should kiss her goodbye. Another moviemaker's bromide. And, no doubt, in that film, she would stir slightly in response, her frown lines uncrease, and her jaw relax. And then I would indeed lift back her hair, and whisper into her delicately helixed ear a final \"Goodbye, Susan.\" At which she would stir slightly, and offer the trace of a smile. Then, with the tears unwiped from my cheeks, I would rise slowly and leave her.\n\nNone of this happened. I looked at her profile, and thought back to some moments from my own private cinema. Susan in her green-piped tennis dress, feeding her racket into its press; Susan smiling on an empty beach; Susan crashing the gears of the Austin and laughing. But after a few minutes of this, my mind began to wander. I couldn't keep it on love and loss, on fun and grief. I found myself wondering how much petrol was left in the car, and how soon I would have to find a garage; then about how sales of cheese rolled in ash were suffering a dip; and then about what was on television that evening. I didn't feel guilty about any of this; indeed, I think I am now probably done with guilt. But the rest of my life, such as it was, and subsequently would be, was calling me back. So I stood up and looked at Susan one last time; no tear came to my eye. On my way out I stopped at reception and asked where the nearest petrol station might be. The man was very helpful.\n\n# A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nJulian Barnes is the author of twenty-two previous books, most recently _The Noise of Time._ He received the Man Booker Prize for _The Sense of an Ending,_ and has also received the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the David Cohen Prize for Literature, and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the French Prix Medicis and Prix Femina; and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. In 2017 he was awarded the L\u00e9gion d'Honneur by the French government. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in London.\n\n# An A. A. Knopf Reading Group Guide\n\n# The Only Story by Julian Barnes\n\nThe questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group's discussion of _The Only Story_ , the newest novel by Julian Barnes.\n\n# QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION\n\n1. The opening line reads, \"Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less?\" Which would you pick? Do you agree with Paul that this isn't a fair questions because \"we don't have the choice\"?\n\n2. Susan and Paul have a quarter-century age difference, yet he repeatedly insists throughout the novel that neither one of them was taking advantage of the other. Do you agree, or do you think there is an inherent power imbalance between them due to that gap?\n\n3. Games and sports feature prominently throughout the story, whether tennis, golf, or crossword puzzles. How do each of these activities, and the attitudes the characters have toward them, illuminate and illustrate the nature of love as they interpret it?\n\n4. Discuss the character of Joan and her role as Paul's only true confidant when it comes to his relationship with Susan.\n\n5. Point of view consistently changes throughout the novel, with part one being in first person, part two in second person, and part three in third, second, and first. Why do you think Barnes chose to do this? How did the different perspectives impact the reading experience and influence how you understand Paul?\n\n6. On this page, Paul presents his theory that memory is like a \"log-splitter.\" How is the nature of memory demonstrated throughout the novel, and do you agree with Paul when he says, \"Life is a cross section, memory is a split down the grain, and memory follows it all the way to the end\"?\n\n7. As Susan's alcoholism progresses, she tells Paul she has \"a moral disease\" caused by her being from \"a played-out generation\" (this page). What do you think is the impetus for her drinking, and how do you interpret her repeated insistence that her generation is \"played out\"?\n\n8. A subsequent girlfriend of Paul's calls Susan a \"madwoman\" in an attic (this page), a reference to not only Charlotte Bronte's _Jane Eyre_ but also the groundbreaking 1979 work of feminist literary criticism of that title by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. How does Susan fit into the broader tradition of literary housewives? Is she a transgressive feminist, a beleaguered relic of pre\u2013sexual revolution England, or something else entirely?\n\n9. Do you think Paul was right to \"hand back\" Susan to her daughters, or do you think he abandoned her? How did his decision color your opinion of him?\n\n10. As we see throughout the novel, and as is explicitly discussed in part three, Paul is obsessed with defining love. Discuss what it means when, on this page, he posits, \"Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.\"\n\n11. How is marriage represented in the novel, and how important is it that Paul himself never marries?\n\n12. Gordon Macleod is an extremely complex man\u2014something Paul comes to realize only later in life. Discuss the evolution of their relationship, and Gordon's significance as a man who subscribes to traditional British masculinity.\n\n13. Paul and Susan's final encounter is, on the surface, anticlimactic, but at its core imbued with deep significance. How did you interpret it?\n\n14. After their first match, when Paul apologizes for causing them to lose, Susan says, \"The most vulnerable spot in doubles is always down the middle\" (this page). How does this idea reemerge throughout the novel\u2014that our weakest spot is the space between us and someone else?\n\n15. What is your only story?\n\n# SUGGESTED READING\n\n_The Sense of an Ending_ by Julian Barnes\n\n_The Remains of the Day_ by Kazuo Ishiguro\n\n_The Sparsholt Affair_ by Alan Hollinghurst\n\n_Nutshell_ by Ian McEwan\n\n_Mothering Sunday_ by Graham Swift\n\n# _What's next on  \nyour reading list?_\n\n[Discover your next  \ngreat read!](http:\/\/links.penguinrandomhouse.com\/type\/prhebooklanding\/isbn\/9780525521297\/display\/1)\n\n* * *\n\nGet personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.\n\nSign up now.\n  1. Cover\n  2. Other Titles\n  3. Title Page\n  4. Copyright\n  5. Contents\n  6. Dedication\n  7. Epigraph\n  8. One\n  9. Two\n  10. Three\n  11. A Note About the Author\n  12. Reading Group Guide\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Cover\n  3. Title Page\n  4. Contents\n  5. Start\n\n  1. b\n  2. iii\n  3. iv\n  4. v\n  5. vii\n  6. \n  7. \n  8. \n  9. \n  10. \n  11. \n  12. \n  13. \n  14. \n  15. \n  16. \n  17. \n  18. \n  19. \n  20. \n  21. \n  22. \n  23. \n  24. \n  25. \n  26. \n  27. \n  28. \n  29. \n  30. \n  31. \n  32. \n  33. \n  34. \n  35. \n  36. \n  37. \n  38. \n  39. \n  40. \n  41. \n  42. \n  43. \n  44. \n  45. \n  46. \n  47. \n  48. \n  49. \n  50. \n  51. \n  52. \n  53. \n  54. \n  55. \n  56. \n  57. \n  58. \n  59. \n  60. \n  61. \n  62. \n  63. \n  64. \n  65. \n  66. \n  67. \n  68. \n  69. \n  70. \n  71. \n  72. \n  73. \n  74. \n  75. \n  76. \n  77. \n  78. \n  79. \n  80. \n  81. \n  82. \n  83. \n  84. \n  85. \n  86. \n  87. \n  88. \n  89. \n  90. \n  91. \n  92. \n  93. \n  94. \n  95. \n  96. \n  97. \n  98. \n  99. \n  100. \n  101. \n  102. \n  103. \n  104. \n  105. \n  106. \n  107. \n  108. \n  109. \n  110. \n  111. \n  112. \n  113. \n  114. \n  115. \n  116. \n  117. \n  118. \n  119. \n  120. \n  121. \n  122. \n  123. \n  124. \n  125. \n  126. \n  127. \n  128. \n  129. \n  130. \n  131. \n  132. \n  133. \n  134. \n  135. \n  136. \n  137. \n  138. \n  139. \n  140. \n  141. \n  142. \n  143. \n  144. \n  145. \n  146. \n  147. \n  148. \n  149. \n  150. \n  151. \n  152. \n  153. \n  154. \n  155. \n  156. \n  157. \n  158. \n  159. \n  160. \n  161. \n  162. \n  163. \n  164. \n  165. \n  166. \n  167. \n  168. \n  169. \n  170. \n  171. \n  172. \n  173. \n  174. \n  175. \n  176. \n  177. \n  178. \n  179. \n  180. \n  181. \n  182. \n  183. \n  184. \n  185. \n  186. \n  187. \n  188. \n  189. \n  190. \n  191. \n  192. \n  193. \n  194. \n  195. \n  196. \n  197. \n  198. \n  199. \n  200. \n  201. \n  202. \n  203. \n  204. \n  205. \n  206. \n  207. \n  208. \n  209. \n  210. \n  211. \n  212. \n  213. \n  214. \n  215. \n  216. \n  217. \n  218. \n  219. \n  220. \n  221. \n  222. \n  223. \n  224. \n  225. \n  226. \n  227. \n  228. \n  229. \n  230. \n  231. \n  232. \n  233. \n  234. \n  235. \n  236. \n  237. \n  238. \n  239. \n  240. \n  241. \n  242. \n  243. \n  244. \n  245. \n  246. \n  247. \n  248. \n  249. \n  250. \n  251. \n  252. \n  253. \n  254. \n  255. \n  256. \n  257.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n## Gunship: Omnibus Edition\n\nJohn M. Davis\n\nSmashwords Edition\n\nCopyright 2014 Serenity Valley Publishing\n\nSmashwords Edition, License Notes\n\nThis ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.\n\n### Table of Contents\n\nBook 1: The Flight\n\nBook 2: Glimmeria\n\nBook 3: Reflections\n\nBook 4: Gears And Spears\n\nBook 5: Legendary\n\nAbout the Author\n\nBook 1\n\nThe Flight\n\nAnd so begins the greatest story ever told.\n\nStrangest weather. Adam thought as the high winds continued to push across the barren, almost lifeless ground outside. The border planets always seemed to have the toughest climate, no matter the season.\n\nWhen you were on the fringe of charted space, you could be sure of a few things. Rough weather, rougher living and the roughest damn drinking establishments known to mankind. Those were the facts.\n\n\"Another hand, or should we just count you out Michaels?\" the dealer asked, a thick beard of black covering most of his experienced face as he continued shuffling the deck of cards, only slightly moving his thumbs as the cards crisply fell into place.\n\n\"Let's get something straight right here and now. You don't ever count Captain Adam Michaels out.\" he said as he raised his glass for a long drink of the roughest ale he'd ever fallen victim to.\n\n\"The pay in for this round is seventy credits.\" The dealer said as he surveyed the table, giving his best effort in an attempt to block out the dozens of scoundrels in the background drinking ale and most likely telling lies.\n\n\"I'm out.\" Captain Michaels said quietly as he stood up and walked away from the table, doing his best to ignore the taunts and insults directed his way as if to keep some of his dignity.\n\n\"Watching the news huh?\" he said as he sat down on a raggedy wooden stool beside Dalton at the bar.\n\nWearing a long, brown duster and a stubbly dirt colored beard hiding the scars of his past scuffles, Dalton had been a part of Adam's crew for nearly five years. Old military friends, fighting in the Glimmerian War had brought them close together, each earning the trust and respect of the other.\n\n\"Hell no,\" Dalton replied with a slyly grinned face.\n\nAdam laughed as he motioned the bartender over to them, ordering a tall glass of water as covertly as possible in order to maintain a decent reputation among this night's patrons.\n\n\"All I'm hearing is some pencil necked jackass talking about impending civil war between the colonies. You think I give a damn about politics?\" Dalton asked.\n\nObviously having already consumed his weight in alcohol, or even more if it was a good night, he continued puffing on a withered cigar that sat limply in the corner of his mouth.\n\n\"Tastes like watered down piss if you ask me, or even weaker than that,\" Dalton said loudly, with his full intention of the words hitting the bartender's ears. \"Not that I would know what watered down piss tastes like, or any piss for that matter,\" he quickly added as he turned to convince Michaels of the fact. \"Of course, if I have, I wouldn't know about it.\" Dalton added, drawing a strange look from the Captain.\n\nAdam had drifted away from the conversation a bit, the loud events of the bar in full swing becoming nothing more than white noise as he noticed a man enter the front door of Paulie's Bar. Not the run of the mill scum that usually frequented the place, this man carried himself with a certain swagger, there was a military feel about him.\n\nHe looked the part well enough too, with the dark green cargo pants, solid black t-shirt and shaved head which had a look of shimmering marble to it.\n\nMichaels had needed another crew member for some time now, a hired gun if nothing else. He and Dalton could both handle themselves well in a firefight, but an extra set of arms slinging shells would always come in handy in his line of work. He was a cargo transporter. Not the kind you contact through a government office, more like the type that considered a checklist of felonies to be an honest day's work. The black market kind. Transporting things that needed to be moved, all while skirting the law and dealing with only the worst of the worst. That was his job, and he did it well.\n\n\"Be back in a couple of minutes.\" he said to Dalton as he stood up from the sad excuse for a bar, which was nothing more than aged wooden boards poorly assembled by hand.\n\nAdam made his way toward the stranger sitting at one of the corner tables as the smell of must, smoke and public perspiration hit him in the face like the heel of the heaviest of boots.\n\n\"Mind if I sit?\" Michaels asked as the stranger glanced up at him for a moment, quickly going back to eating his plate of bread without so much as a word. \"Every single time I come here, the bread seems to get worse,\" Adam said as the man continued to eat without missing a beat. \"Got work here or just passing through?\" Adam added, hoping for some kind of response.\n\n\"You Legion?\" the stranger said, looking up from his plate with stern intentions.\n\n\"Legion? No. Hell no,\" Michaels quickly replied. \"Far from it friend. Legion patrols and my ship might be on a first name basis, but it's for all the wrong reasons.\" he added.\n\n\"In that case, no I don't have work yet. Not sure about the just passing through part, I'll get back to you on that one.\" the stranger replied.\n\n\"I see. I'm former military myself, if you don't mind me asking, where did you serve your time?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"Gali Special Forces.\" the stranger replied.\n\n\"Fresh out I take it?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"It's complicated.\" the stranger replied.\n\n\"It usually is. Interested in a job?\" Michaels quickly asked, almost expecting the answer to be an even quicker no.\n\n\"Who's asking?\" the stranger calmly answered.\n\n\"Captain Adam Michaels. Rather not get into the details of the type of work we do, at least not until we make it official. For now, I guess you could consider the type of work we do to be, well, off the grid.\" Michaels replied.\n\n\"Off the grid is where I live.\" the stranger said, as he continued to eat without pause.\n\n\"I see..and you would be?\" the Captain asked.\n\n\"Roman Raines,\" the stranger responded without hesitation.\n\nFinishing his meal, Roman pushed the empty plate to the side, its thick green glass dragging across the table's coarse wooden surface as he looked at the Captain. \"What kind of job?\" he asked.\n\n\"Well, we do pretty much anything that needs to be done. From medical supplies to weapons, we transport anything that pays well enough, under the radar of course.\" Michaels replied cautiously.\n\nRoman gave no reply, just an ice cold stare as a welcome for Adam to continue laying out the details.\n\n\"Truth is, sometimes what we take people aren't willing to let go of. Other times, when we deliver the goods, people start second guessing the whole payment process and, well, gunfights tend to ensue. Would be your job to help protect me, my crew and our ship. In return, you get ten percent of the take and free room and board. I decide to let you go, you go. You decide to leave, you are free to do so.\" Michaels explained in a stern tone of his own.\"Sounds fair enough. I'll think it over.\" Roman replied in a humble tone, his desolate blue eyes focused on the Captain.\n\n\"Well enough then, I'll look forward to it. You can find me at the bar next to the drunk in the brown coat, the one yelling about the alcohol.\" Michaels said as he stared in the direction of the bar, watching Dalton bitch the bartender out over the house brew as only a drunkard could do.\n\nSlowly standing to his feet, Adam took a deep breath as he began heading back toward the bar, his thick leather boots striking hard against the creaking wooden floorboards as he switched himself into babysitting mode.\n\n\"What'd he say?\" Dalton asked, wiping a bit of ale from his lips with the sleeve of his duster.\n\n\"He's thinking it over.\" Michaels replied as he sat back down and motioned for a glass of whatever it was they were passing off as the house special here at Paulie's.\n\n\"Well, that's damn thoughtful of him,\" Dalton said with a sarcastic look on his face as he yelled to the bartender. \"Hey! Do you have anything stronger than this shit?\" he yelled, the chubby man decked out in what looked to be borderline rags for clothes quickly nodded yes and motioned that he would be over in a few moments.\n\n\"Well, let's hope he decides soon, otherwise this trip has been a disaster. Jones fucking us on a deal we came through with, it's been raining since we landed, and who only knows what this shit is that I'm drinking.\" Dalton said under his breath as he turned the glass up, never flinching as every drop of it punished his throat on the way down.\n\nThe night continued on its normal course of action in an establishment such as Paulie's. Stories being conjured and told by those who consumed the most drink. Poker games filled with lies, heavy smoke and even heavier drinking. Pickup line after pickup line used on one of the very few women brave enough to set foot inside the run down dwelling. Not even several hours of drinking what could have doubled as Gunship fuel had Dalton the least bit sideways, although Captain Michaels kept telling himself when it came time to stand up and walk away, he would be hard pressed to.\n\nYep, everything seemed normal on this rainy night, that is until Michaels caught glimpse of a group of Legion guards passing a nearby window; moments from entering the bar.\n\n\"Ah shit.\" Michaels said in a low and discouraged voice.\n\n\"What is it?\" Dalton said, turning to the door as it flew open.\n\nThe Legion soldiers were unmistakable, wearing the dense red outfits that were finely stitched and trimmed in black leather. Solid black riot style helmets with the standard tinted face shields.\n\n\"Ah shit.\" Dalton said moments later, agreeing with the Captain's previous assessment.\n\nHe slowly began to reach for his short barrel shotgun, which looked antique. But the gun, which was covered in a dingy haze, had gotten him out of more than one close encounter.\n\nMichaels quickly grabbed his arm and gave a slight nod. \"Not yet, too many of them. Chances are they aren't even here for us.\" he said as the four guardsmen quickly approached them with battle rifles aimed and ready.\n\n\"Captain Adam Michaels!\" one of them shouted in a loud and administrative voice.\n\n\"Really? Is it too much to ask for one lucky break now and then? Just ONE?\" Michaels said under his breath, almost as if he were talking to some higher power.\n\nAnyone who had known Adam long enough; knew all too well the fact that he had the worst luck of anyone in the Skyla System, or possibly even all of charted space. Women, authorities, games of chance, it didn't matter. He was the unluckiest man alive, and he felt abandoned, if not shunned by the Gods because of it.\n\n\"You are under arrest and subject to prosecution for possession of illegal materials per item seventy-one of the Legion Articles.\" one of the officers pronounced aloud as two more of them disarmed both Michaels and Dalton.\n\nThe fourth guard yelled \"Back, otherwise you will be getting the same!\" as Roman approached the conflict.\n\n\"That's kind of the idea,\" he replied as he looked into the direction of Captain Michaels. \"Twenty percent sounds about right, don't you think?\" Roman asked Michaels as the men remained under gunpoint.\n\n\"What do I think? I think they should be arresting you for attempted robbery. Hell, I would rather rot in a Legion prison cell for the next decade of my life. Twenty percent?\" Michaels asked in disbelief.\n\n\"Have it your way friend.\" Roman said as he turned to start walking out of the bar.\n\n\"On the other hand, fifteen percent sounds about right.\" Michaels replied.\n\nRoman turned back to face them for a moment, his blank stare was an obvious sign of mental calculations at work, not to mention the thought of Adam negotiating a deal while being arrested.\n\n\"I can do fifteen.\" he said as he walked toward the Legion guards and their drunken prisoners.\n\n\"STAND DOWN!\" one of the soldiers yelled as a last warning; not even remotely phasing Roman.\n\nIn what seemed like the most basic of motions, Roman thrust his arm under one of the Legion guards rifle hand, sending a shot bursting into the air. In that same moment, he buried a hard fist into the ribcage of the defenseless man of the law, immediately grabbing the vacated rifle from the air and aiming down the iron sights with precision. Surprised, the remaining three Legion troops fumbled with their rifles for a moment before laying them on the ground and reaching skyward.\n\n\"Well, you can damn sure pick 'em, I'll give you that much.\" Dalton said to Adam as he collected their weapons from one of the hostage soldiers. \"Yea, I would have to agree,\" Michaels said, looking at Roman with amazement.\n\n\"Best be getting out of here, but before we do.\" Michaels said calmly as he returned to the card table, pulling an empty cloth sack from one of the large pockets of his faded brown coat; quickly filling it as he raked the card games winnings of every man into it.\n\n\"Like I said folks, don't ever count Captain Adam Michaels out.\" he said as he grinned widely, obviously proud of robbing the men at gunpoint.\n\nAs Dalton grabbed an almost full bottle of whiskey and raced toward the door, keeping his piece pointed in the direction of the Legion soldiers, Adam glanced back at Roman for a moment.\n\n\"You got the job.\" he said as he dashed out of the door.\n\nIt wasn't the first time Roman had disarmed four men at once, although to his knowledge, it was the first time he had done so and then followed it up with chasing two heavily intoxicated fugitives down one of the busiest streets on the small mining planet of Antillia.\n\nHe began to wonder if he had made the right choice, trying his best to figure out what fifteen percent actually meant in terms of money. At this point, it didn't matter. He couldn't stay here, he was wanted by the Gali government for unspeakable crimes; as well as the Legion because of the incident only moments ago. So at least for the moment he was part of the Gunship crew.\n\n\"Kelly, get ready to get us the hell out of here!\" Dalton yelled into a com unit as he sprinted down the filthy streets of the impoverished town, both Adam and Roman right behind as the rain poured down; a staggering stench of cheap whiskey all over Dalton like a thrift store blanket.\n\n\"Copy that. Anything I should know about?\" a female voice responded.\n\n\"The Usual. Just have us ready to lift when we get there, gonna have a whole lot of the wrong kind of company on our asses.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Not again.\" Kelly responded in a puzzled voice.\n\nWithin minutes, they could see the ship. It was easy to spot to the naked eye, strikingly antique; with the only difference being antique gave the impression of value. The Gunship that Adam had poured so much of his heart and soul into, had more of a junkyard feel to it. Different shades of gray on its exterior gave away the fact that it had been pieced together from other ships.\n\n\"I may just hang out here and take my chances.\" Roman said jokingly, earning an immediate response from the Captain.\n\n\"It doesn't look like much, but it's pulled me through a hell of a lot of scrapes.\"\n\nAs they approached the faded blue metal grating of the ship's ramp, a thin Asian man with long brown hair and a white tank top that was littered with grease stains slowly walked down, holding Roman at the end of a single barrel shotgun.\n\n\"Who's the trailer?\" he asked.\n\n\"Relax Kato, he's with us.\" Adam said as he waved everyone inside.\n\n\"May want to put the toy away tan man, before someone gets hurt.\" Roman replied with heavy sarcasm as he walked right by Kato unwaveringly.\n\n\"Don't judge a book by its cover I guess,\" Roman said as he looked around once aboard. \"I'm impressed.\" he added, his eyes skimming the cargo area of the ship.\n\nSeveral wooden crates were stacked nearby, as well as a couple of very large bins made of reinforced sheet metal. The outside of the ship may have looked like a train wreck on its best day, but Roman immediately recognized the interior to be that of a Gunship.\n\nOnce a very popular model, the Glimmerian forces leaned on them heavily during their loss to the Legion in the first Glimmerian War. Once the war had come to an end, they were considered obsolete and quickly phased out in favor of more high tech vessels. The more advanced things became on a ship, the more likely they were to fall apart when you needed them the most, which is why Adam preferred the older model ship. It was solid, built to take a pounding and so basic that it reminded the Captain of himself; his core values simple, yet unwavering.\n\nKato followed the men inside aggressively hitting a red button by the door, followed by a hard turn of a switch to seal it airtight before they took off for orbit.\n\n\"Punch it Kelly, I'm on my way up,\" Michaels said as he pulled the com unit from his pocket and headed up a narrow steel ladder that would eventually lead him to the bridge of the ship. \"Dalton, put Roman in a room and give him the grand tour. I'll catch up with everyone shortly.\" the Captain added as he disappeared up the ladder.\n\n\"You're gonna love the armory.\" Dalton said proudly as he motioned Roman to walk with him.\n\nKato stayed in the cargo bay, shotgun over his shoulder as he held onto a stainless steel handle bolted to the wall until they broke orbit from this sad excuse of a planet, the vibrations of liftoff jolting throughout the ship.\n\nShortly after the Gunship had fully entered the system, Michaels met with Roman on the observation deck of the ship. It was nothing more than a small balcony with two large windows made from hardened glass looking out across the stars, but it was considered to be the perfect place to talk business amongst the crew.\n\nFor the next hour or so, the Captain heard all about Roman's past; or so he thought.\n\nEverything from his many years of service with the Gali special forces, to the recent events during the past couple of years that had him moving planet to planet, doing his best to elude the Legion while making a living for himself.\n\n\"Sounds like it'd make a good book.\" Adam said jokingly, trying to make the newest member of his crew feel a little more comfortable.\n\n\"I suppose it would.\" Roman replied with a slight grin.\n\nAdam went on to do his best in explaining each member of his crew's story to the newly acquired gun. How he had fought alongside Dalton during the Glimmerian war less than a decade ago, and how he was still the weapon obsessed alcoholic which he had become famous for then.\n\nHe explained how Kelly came to them fresh out of flight school, having graduated in the top of her class, she had decided that she would rather work for herself. It presented her a much better chance to see the star system, even the planets on the fringe of uncharted space. It was that, or start making a living taking orders from some suit and tie who would have been signing her paychecks if she would have accepted a job flying a standard commercial transport ship, and that just wouldn't be her style.\n\nKato had been introduced to Michaels during a two week stint in the prison system of Anon. They had formed a bond that only terrible food and forced manual labor can provide, which led to Michaels helping Kato escape a short time after the Captain himself had been released. Since then, Kato had served as the ship's mechanic as well as an extra gun when needed.\n\nAt last, there was Luck. The rest of the crew referred to him as Adam's pet, but the Captain saw him as much more than that. Sure, he was a reminder of the best hand of poker that Michaels had ever played, winning the android in a high stakes game back on Montague.\n\nStill, Adam had grown fond of of him and thought of Luck as being as much a part of this crew as anyone else. Luck had his purpose on the ship, he was a decent mechanic and also knew enough about flying to get the ship to its destination under emergency circumstances.\n\nStill, everyone knew that he was more of a trophy than anything else, giving Adam the opportunity to bring up his rendition of that game whenever he saw fit. Which, painfully for the crew; was quite often.\n\nLong after the conversation was over and Roman had made his way to the crew quarters for the night, the Captain remained sitting in the same chair made of solid stainless steel, finding himself drifting off a bit, thinking of everything important in the here and now.\n\nThe ship's maintenance, his crew's safety and value to the overall scheme of things. He even wondered, as he had done from time to time, what kind of life he would be living if he were settled down on a decent planet somewhere; living a normal life.\n\nAt times, he found himself missing the feeling of settling down with a wife and children, even though it wasn't a feeling that he had been fortunate enough to experience. The thoughts that raced through his head all too often seemed to end up with the same conclusion time and time again. He loved what he was doing, from the near fatal gunfights to the deep space travel. Especially the deep space travel.\n\nIt's hard to explain what space travel is like until you've actually been there. The near frigid temperatures of the ship's interior that you are forced into getting used to. The constant silence of a vast nothingness as you learn to block out the sound of the ship's engines, all while surviving on freeze dried rations and what few supplies you were able to load before leaving the last settled world.\n\nIt sounded horrible, that is until you learned to appreciate the beauty of the stars slowly passing you by; almost as if memories were being revived in slow motion.\n\nMost people will say it all looks the same, but the moment you begin to appreciate the simple things, suddenly you realize how beautifully different every trip becomes. As Adam sat on the observation deck, he had almost as many thoughts racing through his head as stars spread out in front of him.\n\nIt didn't matter though, all of the problems within the system, the challenges his crew faced every single day and the friends he had lost during the Glimmerian war; all of that was simply put on hold every time his ship became interlocked with the stars. It was the one place that nothing else mattered.\n\n\"Into the steel I see.\" Roman said as Dalton continued meticulously cleaning nearly a dozen weapons.\n\nEverything from the basic combat pistol to the punishing double barrel shotgun, it was all right here, laid out on a coarse brown blanket in front of them.\n\n\"Into the steel, hard liquor and the steel that produces the hard liquor,\" Dalton said jokingly. \"I'm also infamous with the ladies, you might have heard?\" he added.\n\n\"Nope.\" Roman replied with a sarcastically fluctuation of his eyes.\n\n\"What about you? I'm sure you've had your hands on plenty of steel yourself in Gali?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"As well as liquor and women,\" Roman replied as both men laughed quietly. \"Yea, I've been trained with quite a bit of everything, still prefer the tactical blade,\" Roman said, pulling a combat knife from a black leather band that wrapped around his leg. \"Never jams up on you and it's just as accurate.\" he added, throwing the blade end over end throughout the room with blazing speed, hitting the wooden post of Dalton's makeshift gun rack, the bulk of the blade burying deep within its unfortunate wooden fibers.\n\n\"Nice throw, but too much damn unnecessary work for me.\" Dalton replied, quickly shouldering a short barrel shotgun and cutting two shots loose, hitting both over and under the blade; chopping the piece of post down to the thick steel floor.\n\n\"Nice accuracy.\" Roman said.\n\n\"You should see me when I'm sober.\" Dalton replied.\n\nA few moments after he had laid the shotgun back in line with the other weaponry, Kato burst into the room, a semi-automatic rifle in his arms and at the ready, responding to the gunfire.\n\n\"You know, I normally consider it a rule to kill anyone who draws down on me twice.\" Roman said calmly as he looked into the barrel of Kato's rifle.\n\n\"Is that a fact?\" Kato asked, tightening his grip on the weapon as he continued a deadlocking stare with Roman.\n\n\"Calm down jackass, I fired the shots; not him.\" Dalton said, making his way to Kato.\n\n\"I don't care who fired the shots, I'm thinking more about him just threatening to kill me.\" Kato replied.\n\n\"Think you're fast enough, then I'm game.\" Roman said, bringing a tense urgency to the room.\n\n\"RELAX! Nobody's killing anyone,\" Adam said as he entered the room. \"Put the piece away Kato,\" Michaels added. \"NOW!\" he yelled, finally convincing Kato to slowly lower his weapon.\n\n\"You muthafu... \" Roman began to yell, charging into the direction of Kato as the Captain drew his revolver with blistering speed, holding Roman at gunpoint.\n\n\"This ends right now. You both understand?\" he asked with neither man responding.\n\n\"It either ends or I'll personally airlock the both of you and hire two more guns when we land on Tameca,\" Adam added. Seconds after Kato had walked away, Roman held his hands up and backed off slowly. \"Good, after seeing what you did to those damn Legion soldiers, I'd have to hire two men to replace you. And I don't want to spend that kind of money.\" Michaels said in an attempt to lighten the mood of the room, quickly holstering his revolver and walking away.\n\n\"See why I drink?\" Dalton said, turning up a shot glass full of spirits before catching his breath and tossing a spare glass to Roman.\n\n\"I'm starting to paint the picture.\" Roman replied, pouring himself some of the light red bubbly.\n\n\"You know, you may want to be a little more friendly when it comes to Roman, he may end up saving your life one day.\" Adam said, catching up to Kato.\n\n\"That will be the day.\" Kato replied, turning to enter the confined engine room as the Captain stood for a moment; watching him disappear into the steam filled cave made of faded gray steel.\n\n\"System checks out fine.\" Luck said, his upper body under the control panel of the pilot's gauges.\n\n\"Alright, everything looks good up here as well, switching over to self pilot.\" Kelly replied, clicking several buttons as she slowly stood from the plush leather seat to see the Captain board the small bridge area.\n\n\"How's the grid?\" Michaels asked.\n\n\"We didn't pick up anything on our way out other than a little com traffic, looks like a clean getaway.\" Kelly replied.\n\n\"Good. That's good.\" the Captain replied, taking a seat in one of the two chairs that were stationed behind the pilot.\n\n\"We got into a little bit of local trouble with the Legion back there, shouldn't exactly be combing the system looking for us,\" Adam added. \"I need you to plot a new course out for us, we need to make a stop in Tameca before hitting the outer plains.\" Michaels said as both Kelly and Luck looked on.\n\n\"Yes sir Captain. We got a job in Tameca?\" Kelly replied curiously.\n\n\"Not sure just yet, maybe; will be a big payday for all of us if things work out,\" Adam replied, the thought of the Hunters cemented into his mind throughout the entire conversation. \"I'll pull everybody together when we get there, go over all of the details. Try to bring us to the edge of Tameca City somewhere, without drawing a lot of attention. Good job back there.\" the Captain replied with a nod as he left the bridge to head to his rack for a few hours of much needed slumber.\n\nThe hazy gray rain began hammering the Gunship the moment it made its approach into Tameca's atmosphere. It had been a very short flight, having left one of its farthest moons before flying into one of the larger planets in the system. A semi-sweet sight to the Captain as he awaken to see the distant city skyline from a small circular window near his bunk. He was glad to be landing, still he couldn't help but think cautiously of the hidden dangers that always came attached to such a setting. A gigantic planet, which was predominately covered with water, held one of the most highly populated cities throughout the system. Tameca City, known for its massive number of ports; it was a smuggler's paradise.\n\nSure, there was a Legion presence here, however the run of docking ports was so immense that they simply couldn't check them all, relying on the help from its citizens. The same citizens who feared the most ruthless clan of criminals on Tameca, or any of its moons for that matter. The Hunters.\n\nAn almost vampiric group of criminals, they were feared, even by the Legion soldiers themselves; which served almost as a free pass to conduct underhanded business and wreak havoc abroad. It was the cannibalistic nature of the Hunters, combined with the stark white skin tone that caused many people to label them as vampires. Human enough, they bled and occasionally were even killed.\n\nStill, the fact that they moved with exceptional speed and were so proficient with hand to hand combat only added to their legend. It was the Hunters who had brought the Gunship to Tameca, though the rest of his crew remained unaware of the fact.\n\nAdam didn't like the idea of dealing with clientele such as the Hunters; but they had been looking for someone to move goods and were offering a lot of credits to anyone who was brave enough, or stupid enough, to accept the job. A very risky job, one the Captain knew he had to take in order to make financial ends meet; although selling the idea to the crew wasn't going to be the easiest of tasks.\n\nWith the crew gathered in the loading bay area of the ship and the vessel snugly nestled between two large hills of high grass, or as smugglers like to call it, a rural landing pad, the Captain knew that it was now or never. He had to sell the idea of working for a group with a name that was more ruthless than the luck that he had been burdened with his entire life. They would be lucky to finish the interview, much less the job unscathed, and it would take every one of them to pull it off.\n\n\"The Hunters! Have you lost you're damn mind Adam?\" Dalton yelled as the rest of the crew looked on, his loud voice echoing against the hollow walls of the nearly empty cargo bay.\n\n\"I don't care how much it pays! If I can't kill 'em, then I don't want to go into business with the bastards!\" he added.\n\n\"Relax, will ya? We do the job, collect the money. That's it. It is that simple.\" Michaels replied.\n\n\"I'm with you Captain, the Hunters don't intimidate me.\" Kato added.\n\n\"Easy for you to say, sitting back here at the fort while my dick's out there on the chopping block!\" Dalton replied angrily.\n\n\"Captain, what does he mean you can't kill them?\" Kelly asked. Michaels frowned slightly, looking at the floor for a moment before looking in her direction. Before he could say anything, Roman calmly replied.\n\n\"They die. Not easily done, but possible. I've put a few in the grave myself.\"\n\nAdam spun around to see Roman still sitting on an empty crate behind him, quickly asking \"You can? You have?\". Roman replied with a slow nod.\n\n\"Define a few?\" Michaels asked. The look he received from the former Gali commando let him know that it was a good damn many, which Adam wasn't sure should put his mind at ease or throw a red flag.\n\n\"I've put an entire rifle clip into one of the beasts myself! It did little to slow it down; much less kill it!\" Dalton said with disbelief, as the rest of the crew looked on.\n\n\"What do you mean beasts? Captain?\" Kelly asked, glancing hard at Michaels.\n\n\"Go on Adam, tell her.\" Dalton said with heavy sarcasm, earning a long glance from the Captain. \"Everybody just calm down for a minute. Relax. Feels good to be alive doesn't it?\" Michaels said, trying unsuccessfully to lighten the spirit of the crew.\n\n\"Alright, they aren't human; at least not entirely Kelly.\" the Captain said, referring to the Gothic appearance of the Hunters. Their hair and skin void of pigment, solid black leather attire and above all things, their uncanny desire to feast on the flesh of human beings.\n\n\"Any person that eats another person has some damn issues,\" Dalton said with heartfelt emotion. \"Unless she's hot and it aint' for keeps.\"\n\nEven though they kept to themselves, almost like a secret society, they were infamous among the citizens of the star system. Almost demonic in nature; relying on sleek weaponry and a code of honor that rivaled even the Mafia families of the small planet of Benza, which were also notorious for their hardline methods of getting the job done.\n\n\"Doesn't matter. By the time you and Luck get back with the supplies and the ship checks out flight ready, we should be back from our meeting with the Hunters and then it's business as usual.\" Michaels said, trying to calm the crew down before turning to get a list of needed supplies from Kato.\n\nAs Adam turned to the exit of the ship, he could see Dalton and Roman gearing up for the much anticipated meeting; both men looking more than ready. Roman was equipped with nothing more than a large combat knife and a military grade pistol, each strapped to a separate leg with thick leather bands.\n\nDalton, on the other hand, was going heavy. And for him that spoke volumes. He had an arm sized buoy knife strapped tightly to one of his legs, with two older Knocker pistols strapped to the other, earning their unique nickname from the ability to either cut a man in half at point blank range; or bash in the unlucky victim's skull quite easily with the brass shielding at the bottom of the weapon's handle. All of this, however, was overshadowed by his black flack jacket which held several grenades as well as two short barrel shotguns. Both guns over his shoulders and crossed behind his head.\n\n\"A little much don't you think?\" Michaels said as he looked on in disbelief. \"That's what she said.\" Dalton replied, laughing for a moment as he hesitated; finally taking the flack jacket off and tossing it onto a nearby table.\n\n\"Alright, but that's it. The knife stays. The sons of bitches 'aint eating me,\" he replied. \"Hold the fort down now, ya' hear?\" Dalton asked Kato sarcastically as the three men headed for the exit ramp.\n\n\"Kelly, you and Luck grab everything we need as far as supplies go and stay in contact with Kato back here on the ship. Steer clear of any Legion eyes on the street, we don't need that on top of what's already on our plate. Kato, we'll be in touch.\" said the Captain, as he glanced back long enough to see Luck and Kelly prepping the Rover.\n\nIt was nothing more than a large, mechanical vehicle used for carrying cargo, but he sure wished it were him riding inside of it at the moment. They both looked very comfortable to him, meanwhile he started out of the cargo bay door with the others, immediately hammered by a cuttingly cold rainfall.\n\nDalton glanced back for a second, the water falling around them like fireflies as he glanced in Adam's direction, his jacket already thoroughly soaked.\n\n\"If we end up marching in this shit only to die, I'm gonna be seriously pissed off.\" he said as Roman started laughing quietly.\n\nEven Captain Michaels chuckled for a moment. Dalton was right, nearly a mile walk in front of them in some of the worst rainfall he'd ever seen.\n\nThey had walked nearly two hundred yards when the rover passed by, throwing water their way almost as if to mock them. Michaels tried to block out Dalton's cursing and focus on the city that sat on the horizon, but as usual it was easier said than done. He had been here a few times before, but could never quite get past the size of it. To his estimation, millions of people had come from every corner of the system to call Tameca City home. A lot of good citizens lived here, raised families and worked hard everyday to earn their place.\n\nThat said, a city of this magnitude was easy to get lost in; which had a certain luster to it from a criminal's point of view. Although Adam wouldn't admit it, everyone he had ties with in the city was on the wrong side of the legal system. It seemed like everywhere he went in Tameca, he found trouble. Sometimes he had a hand in it. Well, usually he had a hand in it. Still, he tried to convince himself that he had been incorrectly branded because of the few times when he was truly in the wrong place at the wrong time.\n\nIf ever there was a wrong place inside of Tameca City, it was Dusk Tavern. That was one place that never had a right time, full of the scum of the star system from open until close, at which time the more prominent criminals conducted business.\n\nIt was bad enough to be going to Dusk Tavern in the first place, but to march like this; cold liquid piercing their body from head to toe the entire trip? He couldn't think of a single reason that anyone would put themselves through such a drenching march only to wind up at the worst possible destination imaginable.\n\n\"At least they got good drink at the Dusk.\" Dalton said to the group as he grinned from ear to ear.\n\nMichaels just shook his head for a moment before glancing up into the sky, wondering if there truly was a higher power that made a full time job out of torturing him.\n\nAfter walking for what seemed like an eternity in clothes that were clinging to their skin from the rain, they had arrived at the edge of the city. The bright lights and hustle of thousands of bodies were a welcome sight to anyone who had just been on a trip through the system, though the Captain had a knack for attracting the wrong type of attention here.\n\nIt only took a few moments of holding up a fistful of credits before a transport shuttle came to a screeching halt; adding a few more dings to the already wretched yellow paint job. It was like a roll of the dice whenever you used a city shuttle in Tameca City.\n\nSometimes you would land an android at the controls, and they weren't exactly famous for their conversational skills; providing a very serene trip to your destination. Other times, you were presented with a former convict or drunken lowlife who would give you the entire laundry list of rumors throughout the city in five blocks or less.\n\nAfter a couple of minutes of convincing the driver; who Dalton swore did jail time with him several years back on the small moon planet of Jocom, that they truly did want to go to the Dusk Tavern He put down his small flask of booze and began the trip.\n\n\"Everyone is talking about the impending civil war between the planets,\" the driver said as he passed the first intersection on his way to the bad side of town; traffic so thick it was almost unbearable. \"The council should be voting on it one way or another this week, but everyone in Tameca knows that it's just a tactic to stall for time while they raise a large enough army. We will be fighting alongside the Colonial army, or at least that's what every newspaper here has been saying.\" he added.\n\nThe Captain, Dalton and Roman all tried to look and sound interested, though the only person with interest in the war to come was the whiskey laden driver.\n\n\"So, what business do you guys have at the Dusk?\" the driver asked.\n\n\"No business of yours.\" Roman sharply replied, earning him a glance from Michaels.\n\n\"What my friend means is, we are meeting some old friends there. The kind of friends who wouldn't really like to be the subject of conversation.\" Adam replied in a much friendlier tone than Roman had just finished with.\n\n\"Understandable.\" the driver said politely to the Captain as he gave the Roman a look filled with ill intention.\n\n\"I simply meant that it's a rough place. Wasn't sure why anybody would go there willingly is all.\" the driver said in a calm but probing voice as Dalton broke his stare from the window to answer.\n\n\"They got damn good liquor there. Some of the finest I've ever drank, and I've been around.\" The driver looked puzzled for a moment before answering with deep sarcasm.\n\n\"Yes, I bet you have.\"\n\n\"What the hell is that supposed...\" Dalton began to ask, turning his entire body to the driver in the process. But before he could finish, he was cut off by Michaels.\n\n\"Can we stop with the drinking already! Don't you think about anything else?\" he asked in a puzzled voice.\n\nDalton was obviously in a deep, concentrated thought for a few moments.\n\n\"Well yea. Guns. Women. You know, the essentials.\" he responded as Roman broke out into a loud laugh for several seconds.\n\nThe remainder of the ride lasted only a few minutes and was funeral quiet, the shuttle arriving at the Dusk as the driver looked around with paranoia; engine running loudly as the clanging of steel rods could be heard from its engine compartment.\n\nAs Michaels handed the driver a small fist full of credits and thanked him, both Dalton and Roman were already waiting outside, almost as if the drink would run dry if they waited a moment longer.\n\n\"Well, the place hasn't changed a bit.\" Adam said, referring to the borderline condemned look of the Dusk.\n\nWooden boards made up its exterior, the faded red color of the wood washed away with time giving the place a fragile look. The roof of course was still the same shiny aluminum material that had been the topic of discussion for citizens throughout the neighborhood.\n\nIt had been long rumored that the aluminum was put into place to block the overhead scans from the city's security choppers, not that the security force was brave enough to enter the Dusk either way. It was a welcome sight to all three men as they cautiously approached the reinforced steel door that was guarded by two of the largest men any of them had ever seen.\n\nBoth wearing solid black shirts, cargo pants and boots, they fit the profile of higher end mercenaries. Armed with light machine guns, they were the type of security that if you weren't on the list; you weren't getting into anything short of a casket. That is, unless you had a fist full of credits.\n\nAs the three men approached a waist tall podium style computer, Adam placed his hand on the tinted glass top; trying his best to look casual as every fingerprint was thoroughly scanned. After a few moments, the tinted glass illuminated bright green, as the security detail slowly opened the door.\n\n\"Welcome Captain, they're expecting you.\" one of the mercenaries said.\n\nThe men slowly entered, taking extra time to survey the surroundings. It was nothing more that a small wooden bar that was polished to a very fine grain, along with a handful of stools and several thick wooden tables near the entrance. They were also quick to notice a door behind the bar at the rear. Walking into its direction, Dalton would get in position to cover it just in case things went sour; or at least Adam thought.\n\n\"Well, here's the liquor.\" Dalton proclaimed proudly, completely disregarding the rear door while cradling a bottle of molasses black bourbon, smiling as if he had just become a father for the first time.\n\nSo this is what the Dusk looks like after hours. Roman thought as he glanced around the room.\n\nVery dimly lit, there were only a few white track lights on the ceiling and a handful of red lights, giving a subdued crimson glow at the foot of the bar. It was empty for the moment, however that didn't stop Dalton from helping himself to a shot glass, standing behind the counter preparing his drink as if he were working for tips before joining the others at a small wooden table nearest to the center of the room. Michaels kept his eyes locked on the rear door, meanwhile Roman kept watch on the only other door in the place, the entrance.\n\n\"Damn good bourbon, I'll say that much. Of course, I've never really had bad bourbon. Odd, don't ya' think?\" Dalton asked his two comrades in a scratchy voice as he turned his glass up for a second hard shot.\n\n\"I don't like waiting around like this.\" Roman said softly, a statement which Captain Michaels was quick to agree with.\n\n\"So what do you think they are needing moved so damn badly?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"I don't know, but it looks like we are about to find out.\" Michaels replied as two figures appeared from the door directly behind the bar.\n\nAs they slowly approached, it quickly became obvious that they were in fact Hunters. One of them much larger than the other, they both were darkly dressed in all solid black leather, even down to the thick laced boots.\n\n\"Captain Adam Michaels?\" the smaller of the two asked in a curious voice. \"My name is Anwick. There was never any mention of escorts coming with you to the meeting.\" he said, visibly upset by the intrusion of both Dalton and Roman.\n\nHe motioned toward them slightly with one of his hands, prompting the larger of the two Hunters to approach the men. At least a foot taller than anyone else in the room, his arms were swollen from use; muscles rippling throughout the large limbs.\n\nThe same moment that the large Hunter firmly reached for their weapons in an attempt to disarm the unwanted strangers, Roman spun around and onto his feet; grabbing the Hunter's wrist with one hand and using the other to slam its head straight through the table, throwing wooden shards throughout the room. Anwick stood to his feet swiftly.\n\n\"What is the meaning of this?\" he shouted at Michaels as he began to aid his friend.\n\nAlmost instantly, Anwick found himself looking at the bad end of two shotgun barrels, both in the grasp of a slightly tipsy Dalton. \"You realize that at my signal, I could have this room full of soldiers who would kill and dismember you inside of thirty seconds!\" Anwick stated firmly, glancing hard at Adam.\n\n\"Think so?\" Roman asked calmly, applying pressure to the arm of the larger of the two Hunters, earning a painful screech.\n\n\"Relax! Everyone just relax,\" Adam said loudly as he remained seated. \"You honestly didn't expect me to just walk in here alone did you? We both know what kind of reputation your kind has, and I would hope that you would consider me to be a bit smarter than that. You and I are here to do business, so let's do it.\" Michaels added as he motioned toward the chair that Anwick had left only moments ago.\n\nAs Anwick sat down slowly, he immediately glanced at Roman, who still had a commanding hold on his much larger opponent.\n\n\"Roman, let him go.\" Michaels said.\n\nResponding with a slight nod, he pushed the Hunter several feet back, releasing his arm with the same motion.\n\n\"Lexion! Enough!\" Anwick yelled as the larger Hunter began to walk directly toward Roman a second time.\n\nAn awkward moment of silence fell across the entire room as it quickly became evident to the Captain that should the Hunters have their way, Roman was unlikely to walk out of the Dusk alive.\n\n\"Anwick, I apologize. My crew is very protective when it comes to me as well as the cargo we transport. I hope you view this as an advantage when considering us for the job.\" Michaels said in an attempt to settle the dispute.\n\nAnwick gazed through Roman for a few more seconds before breaking his stare and looking directly at Adam\n\n\"Very well. We have business to discuss,\" Anwick replied. \"It is because you come so highly recommended that we are meeting here today,\" Anwick said, referring to all of the friends Michaels had made in the past that were connected to the wrong side of the Legion. \"Simply put, we have a package that we need to you take and deliver in exactly one week to Gastonia. You will earn fifteen thousand today and another thirty thousand at the time of delivery.\" Anwick added, stating the terms with great clarity, his long and brittle white hair moving slightly as he spoke.\n\nMichaels remained quiet for a few moments, finally giving his answer to the business proposal. \"It's going to cost you twenty five thousand up front and another twenty five thousand upon delivery.\"\n\nAnwick took several long, heavy breaths before replying slowly. \"I do not negotiate Captain Michaels. I offer the terms, you take them. That's how I conduct business.\"\n\nAdam glanced over in the direction of Dalton, trying to figure out how many shots that had made for him already. \"I'm not negotiating. We both know it must be a complicated delivery, otherwise you would have done it yourself. A complicated job pays what its worth in risk. Otherwise, I'm not the right man for the job. That's how I do business.\" Michaels replied.\n\nAnwick stood straight to his feet, prompting Adam to do the same a few moments later. \"Very well,\" Anwick answered as both men stood only inches from one another. \"I'll pay what you ask, however let me tell you this. You have one week. ONE. If you are even a second behind schedule on delivery, you should pray to the Gods that the authorities find you before we do. Otherwise death will be the least of your concerns.\"\n\nAnwick gave a slight hand motion, prompting Lexion to walk to the door behind the bar, giving three hard thumps on it with his bone crushing fist. Seconds later, the door opened as four more men dressed similar to the ones outside of the Dusk entered, however, the difference became quickly obvious to Michaels and his crew.\n\nThey were escorting a female prisoner, her hands in tight rope bonding and her head looking toward the floor. The Captain wasn't sure the reason, but as well dressed as she was, he suspected someone in a powerful position would be trying everything they could to get her back.\n\n\"What's with the girl?\" Michaels asked, dreading he already knew the answer.\n\n\"You mean the package,\" Anwick said smiling, the dim light bouncing off of his shard like teeth. \"One week.\" he added, holding a single finger up closely in front of Adam's face before walking through the door and exiting the room.\n\nOne of the armed men dropped a black leather bag to the ground at Adam's feet; several Legion credits spilling out of the bag a moment after hitting the floor. He looked at the men for a moment, eventually reaching down and grabbing the bag.\n\nLexion held the door open, the polluted air of the city sending a glimmer of light from the sunset as well as a push of civilized air into the Dusk.\n\n\"May we meet again.\" Lexion said smiling.\n\nRoman quickly rose to his feet and replied \"I'll look forward to it.\" as he quietly tapped his fingers across the handle of his combat knife.\n\nDalton secured the half-empty bottle of bourbon into one of the cargo pockets of his pants, finishing off the rest of the shot glass in one fast motion; alcohol burning a familiar path all the way down to the pit of his stomach.\n\n\"My compliments to the chef.\" he said as he handed the empty shot glass to the nearest mercenary.\n\nAs they began to leave, Lexion yelled loudly, prompting one of the well armed soldiers for hire to lead a young boy dressed in tattered blue clothing into the room at gunpoint.\n\n\"Wait, they have a child in there!\" the woman yelled loudly, her soft and soothing voice of sincerity catching Adam's immediate attention.\n\n\"Not our fight,\" Dalton said calmly to Michaels. \"We are talking about Hunters here Adam. Two of them to be exact, not to mention a pile of tin soldiers.\" he added as he nervously awaited a response from his Captain.\n\n\"Please! They are going to kill him!\" she shouted desperately with tears flooding her vivid blue eyes, obviously concerned for the boy's life. \"Please!\" she said once more, grabbing Michaels by the arm; their eyes locking together as they shared a moment of fate.\n\nAdam felt the urge to do the right thing beginning to overtake his better judgment, glancing at Dalton for a moment almost in apologetic fashion.\n\n\"Ahh shit!\" Dalton was able to get out softly before the stinging feeling of worth that came attached to helping someone in need hit Michaels as he had turned back into the direction of the door. Kicking it solidly, the reinforced obstacle quickly flew open, smacking abruptly against the wall behind it and gaining the attention of Lexion as well as the four heavily armed men.\n\nAdam's pistol threw two shots from the chamber almost instantly, the first hitting one of the armed men in the forehead and dropping him like a stone. The second shot pierced the chest of another soldier, throwing him against the wall before hitting the floor with an unforgiving thud; a trail of blood painting the wall bright red above him.\n\nMichaels knew well enough to seek cover before attempting a third shot, diving behind a table in the corner of the room just in time as dozens of slugs began to chew at the wooden barricade that separated them. As the two soldiers began walking slowly in the direction of the Captain, escorting themselves with a blanket of lead from their automatic weapons, they were both knocked to the ground forcefully by shells from the shotgun Dalton held in his right hand.\n\nAn expert of his surroundings, he immediately dropped the empty weapon and spun around into the direction of the front door, putting a two handed grip on his other peacemaker. Anticipating the guards out front rushing them, he blindly fired two shots into the direction of the entrance. The first shell hit the frame of the door, sending up a wooden cloud of splinters, while the second shot found a target on one of the soldiers who fell to the ground in pain for a few moments before checking out of this life. Dropping his second empty weapon, he took shelter beside of the door, drawing both of his pistols at once; the dim light of the Dusk's interior shimmering across the brass inlays.\n\nMichaels had made it to the boy and began to free his hands of the tightly bound rope when Lexion threw a backhand into his direction, sending the Captain several feet across the room. Smashing into the stockpile of intoxicating beverages, Adam fell limply onto the floor behind the bar under a storm of broken glass.\n\n\"Son of a bitch.\" Dalton said of the wasted liquor as he continued to exchange gunfire with the remaining soldier outside.\n\nAs Lexion followed the path of destruction which led to the Captain, Anwick once again entered the room, taken back for a moment by the devastation, he quickly focused his anger on Adam; who remained limp on the floor behind the bar. Anwick's hands clamored for revenge as both Hunters approached the Captain.\n\n\"Hey, bitches,\" Roman yelled across the room, successfully gaining their undivided attention. \"Get some.\" he added, daring the walking beasts to a fight.\n\nAnwick quickly made his way into the direction of the marked man, Lexion following suit and releasing the grip he had on the front of Michaels' shirt allowing him to fall back to the ground. Roman pulled his combat pistol long enough to throw it across the room, sliding roughly on the aged floor as he confidently drew his tactical blade and squeezed his hands for a moment; several of his knuckles busting back to life.\n\nThe boy was able to free himself in the following moments, running to the safety of stunningly beautiful lady as she stood behind Dalton. Firing several shots from the two pistols, he finally clipped the soldier outside on the shoulder, putting him down and rendering him defenseless.\n\n\"Kato, I'm activating the beacon. Come get us now!\" Dalton said out of breath as he pushed a sequence of buttons on the com unit, throwing it out into the street; the small globe on the front beginning to emit a soft white glow. \"Now we hold tight and pray that our ride gets here before they finish us off.\" Dalton said to the woman and child, putting them behind a small table near the door and checking the magazines of his pistols; the unmistakable odor of hooch on his breath.\n\nWhen Captain Michaels began to get his bearings in order, he realized nothing on him was broken and began to slowly crawl in the direction of where his pistol had hit the floor; pieces of glass crunching softly under his bare palms. He didn't see his sidearm right away, instead he caught sight of a large piece of mirror laying in the floor at the corner of the bar. He was confident that he had never seen a fight like the one that was reflecting back to him through the reciprocating glass. Glimpses of Roman's body moving with perfect coordination as he carved flesh with both blade and boot.\n\nHe landed several fast punches into the face of Lexion, momentarily stunning him while his kick found its home in the chest of Anwick, staggering him back a few feet. More surprised than hurt, Anwick quickly unleashed a flurry of lightning fast punches and elbows onto Roman, most of them finding their mark as they sent Adam's newest crew member to one of his knees.\n\nFurious, Lexion wasted no time putting a choke hold on Roman in an attempt to snap his neck and be done with the pesky former Gali commando. His grip hold of Roman's neck was released as a shot from the Captain's pistol embedded into his shoulder, causing Lexion to snarl his razor teeth for a moment; eventually casting a stare in Michaels' direction. That is how his life would end. Roman thrust his combat steel into the face of Lexion, following the stab with a swift elbow that broke the blade from its handle as Lexion fell to the ground, blood spilling from the edges of the eternally lodged instrument.\n\nShocked at the death of one of his best and feeling the sudden sense of morality, Anwick quickly began to exit at the rear of the bar, the room now flooding with soldiers armed to the hilt. Roman had reached the point of no return, rage flowing through his veins as if it were the very blood in his body. He let go of an unrelenting assault with his hands, grabbing the first soldier by the neck and using his free hand to pummel the man with the bottom of his fist. He then grabbed a second soldier with a choke hold that eerily resembled that of the now departed Lexion, this time more effective however as he snapped the man's neck in several places; dropping his lifeless body to the ground.\n\nHe was a killer, a damn good one at that. But even someone of his life ending skill was outnumbered as at least a dozen more armed men filled the room in response to the distress call of the soldier who had pleaded for help earlier during his firefight with Dalton. Michaels had made it to his feet and nearly reached Roman when they both realized the circumstances and were ready to accept defeat. As both men began to put their hands into the sky, Roman heard an unfamiliar sound, one that Adam knew all too well. The deep, throaty sound of the Mauler. It was a name the crew had decided on for the largest flash shotgun any of them had ever seen. Kato stood in the doorway holding the mauler, which gained its technical name not from a flash of light, but the flash drum under the barrel which held thirty rounds and required only an instant to reload.\n\nThe room began to thin out quickly as every burst that fired from the chamber of the massive gun seemed to add a larger variety of body parts to the wall. Kato had barely used half of the drum's capacity when the room was clear, other than a few enduring screams and realizations of lives coming to an end. Michaels and Roman helped one another out of the Dusk as Kato walked behind them, Mauler perfectly positioned to slay anything with a heartbeat that followed the crew outside.\n\n\"Damn I love that gun.\" Dalton said from the cozy confines of the Gunship, which was parked in the middle of the street and attracting a lot of local attention.\n\n\"Get us the hell out of here!\" Michaels said in a weak voice as they passed Kelly on their way up the ramp.\n\nThe roar of the Gunship's engines combined with what seemed like an endless cloud of dust as the vessel began to liftoff. Several soldiers accompanied Anwick to the front of the establishment, firing streams of metal piercing shots into the direction of the ship. Only moments later, following a loud burst of air meeting motion, the ship was gone. The soldiers began to check the dead and wounded as Anwick stood there for several minutes, his eyes still locked onto the sky.\n\n\"All Clear.\" Dalton proclaimed as he made his way down the ladder from the gunner's roost and back onto the bridge of the ship.\n\n\"We need to talk.\" Adam said to to the woman as she continued to harbor the boy they had saved not even an hour ago from the clutches of the closest thing to the devil that he had ever known. She nodded and began to stand up, her long champagne colored hair giving the shimmering illusion of velvet perfection as she made her way toward the Captain and the door of the ship's bridge.\n\n\"Hey big man. First time in space?\" Roman asked as he took a seat beside the boy, who was obviously afraid of the situation he had been cast into.\n\n\"Yes. Yes sir.\" the boy answered with much reserve.\n\n\"You can relax, you are safe and among friends here.\" Roman replied, before asking the child his name.\n\n\"Troy.\" the boy responded a couple of seconds later, sounding much less timid than before.\n\n\"Care to explain to me what in the hell just happened back there?\" Michaels asked in a puzzled and desperate tone. Before she could answer his question, he interjected with a bit of sarcasm. \"Feel free to start with who you are and what the Hunters want with you so badly?\"\n\nIt was a legitimate question from where he stood. Adam had a lot of things racing through his mind at the moment. How Roman had handled himself so well against an opponent who appeared far more capable, how many drinks Dalton had actually consumed back at the Dusk and still been accurate with a weapon or how one of the most beautiful women he had ever laid eyes on, stood in front of him about to answer a question that would most likely affect the remainder of of his life.\n\n\"My name is Sarah Blaine,\" she answered in a soft voice, something Adam hadn't heard a lot of in his line of work.\"My father is the Admiral of the newly formed Colonial Army; they want to use me as leverage against him, at least that would be my guess.\" Sarah added, waiting on a response from Michaels.\n\nHe didn't reply, a combination of letting her finish her story and the angelic sound of her voice were to blame. After several tense moments of silence, she began telling Adam how the Hunters had been working with Legion troops for some time now, how her security detail was ambushed back on Tameca and over a dozen soldiers had given their lives to try and protect her.\n\n\"The boy?\" Michaels asked, almost dreading the answer, and praying that it didn't complicate things any further.\n\n\"I have no idea. I had never laid eyes on him before they drug him into that room.\" Sarah replied, watching the stress overtake the Captain as he stood there speechless.\n\n\"You mean to tell me that my crew just put their lives on the line against the Hunters for a kid that you don't even know?\" he asked furiously.\n\n\"Relax Captain, the boy is still alive because of you and your crew's heroic efforts.\" she replied, standing closely to Adam as they both began to feel a nervous interest in one another.\n\nAdam wanted so badly to be furious with Sarah, to lash out at her with anger. Instead, he found himself thinking of how perfect she was in every aspect. \"For what it's worth, you did the right thing back there.\" Sarah said with a soft and thankful voice.\n\nHe looked at her for a moment, his eyes communicating a tale of great sorrow to come. \"Fantastic. Carve it on my headstone, because once the Hunters catch up to me I'm a dead man.\" he finally replied as he walked away, making his course back onto the bridge.\n\n\"Kelly, Luck, set course for deep space. We need to get as far away from the system as possible for a bit; avoid any Legion or Hunter tracking ships that may be looking for us.\" Michaels said as he sat down in an empty chair, physically exhausted and mentally broken down from the day's events.\n\n\"Yes sir Captain.\" Kelly replied as she and Luck both pressed several buttons on the control panel illuminated in front of them.\n\n\"Thanks for saving our asses back there.\" Dalton said as Kato continued checking the navigational system with a small, hand held data machine.\n\n\"Just doing my job.\" Kato replied, maintaining his attention on the work in front of him.\n\n\"You do your job well.\" Roman added as he stood in the doorway of the engine room, Troy right at his side.\n\n\"Thank you.\" he added, giving a long stare of appreciation to the man he had gotten off on the wrong foot with.\n\n\"You're welcome.\" Kato replied, glancing up for a moment acknowledging the sincere thank you.\n\nAs Sarah walked across the steel catwalk above the cargo area, she stopped for a moment to watch Roman and Troy. The highly trained former soldier was walking the young boy through a set of moves with a combat knife. It was a basic set of motions, still it was impressive to see a child handling a blade built for men of combat as well as he was. Lunging forward quickly, then swiping the blade swiftly as he brought it back in to a neutral position. She hadn't known any of these people for long, but she was glad to see Troy finding someone to begin looking up to. At least the time he spent with Roman was time he wasn't thinking about home, if he even had one.\n\n\"Could be worse, he could be learning Dalton's craft.\" Adam said as he approached Sarah, who was still standing there, admiring the young boy's courage.\n\nEventually she broke her stare and glanced at the Captain for a moment, joining him in placing attention on Dalton. The hardened space cowboy was laying on the deck below them drinking from a large green jar. Its contents were unknown, but from the way he was cradling the thick glass container, it was something of significant importance to him. He glanced up at the catwalk with a huge grin on his brushy face.\n\n\"Nice view huh?\" he said, implying he was well worth the effort.\n\n\"So, if you don't mind my asking, what's the plan? I would very much like to see my father again.\" Sarah asked.\n\nThe Captain tightened his grip on the guard rail of pale blue steel, continuing his stare below for a few moments. \"Well, we are painted into a corner at the moment,\" he replied, while finally looking into Sarah's direction. \"We can't go back to the Skyla System, at least not for a while. Sure to be plenty of hunting parties out there looking for us at this very moment. On the other hand, the supplies aren't going to last forever; eventually we're going to have to make our move.\" he added.\n\n\"We are on the verge of war, a war of a scale that we have never seen I'm afraid,\" Sarah said. \"I fear that not so long from now, the entire system will be engulfed in death and destruction. At some point Adam, you will have to decide which side you're on.\" she added.\n\n\"Doesn't matter. I've got a sheet of outstanding warrants as long as your leg, and now I have the Legion as well as the Hunters out for my blood. I'll have you back with your father soon enough, you have my word. In the meantime, we need to fall off of the map so I can figure out our next move.\"\n\n\"Well, whatever you decide, I'm confident that it will be the right move.\" Sarah said in a thankful tone as she began to walk away, reaching the other side of the catwalk before Adam finally responded.\n\n\"Sarah,\" he said as she turned to face him, her comforting smile causing the Captain to fall silent for a second. \"I know we may not look like much, but I won't let any harm come to you or the boy, I promise.\" Michaels added in an attempt to reassure her of safety from the Hunters.\n\n\"I know that Captain.\" Sarah replied, smiling brightly as she she gave an appreciative nod and slowly turned to walk away.\n\nAdam stood there for a couple of minutes after she was gone, trying to convince himself that Sarah wasn't someone he should be falling for. They were from two different worlds, both literally and socially. Still, he began to feel his heart drifting away from logic as he heard Dalton's voice yell from below.\n\n\"She's a keeper Capt'n.\" Adam glanced down for a moment, giving a sarcastic look, even though he couldn't agree more.\n\n\"No sir Captain, I checked three times. The readouts aren't normal.\" Kato said of the navigational information he had recently pulled.\n\n\"Meaning?\" Adam replied, eagerly awaiting a positive answer.\n\n\"Not sure. It's not time to panic; just thought I would bring it to your attention.\" Kato answered.\n\n\"Look into it.\" Michaels said, giving Kato a quiet slap on the shoulder as an unofficial thank you.  \n\"This area looks good.\" Adam said as he leaned between Luck and Kelly, pointing out a small spot on the pilot's grid.\n\nThe bright neon green lights and numbers of the panel illuminating an otherwise dark bridge. \"Sir that area is uncharted.\" Luck responded after glancing down at the grid for a split second.\n\n\"Uncharted is what we need right now.\" Adam replied as Kelly began punching the coordinates onto a touch screen beside her.\n\n\"Should take us a better part of twenty six hours to get there Captain.\" she said as she double checked the numbers before finalizing them into the ship's navigational system.\n\n\"I can do twenty six hours. Set course, I'll let everyone else know.\" Michaels said as he began to leave the bridge while Kelly pressed a sequence of keys that pushed the ship's thrusters even harder; nearly doubling the torque.\n\nMichaels motioned for Roman as Dalton continued, slightly intoxicated, to show Troy how to aim down the sights of an unloaded combat pistol.\n\n\"Hitting an uncharted area in a few days. Gonna sit tight there for while, wait until this thing blows over. Hate to keep the kid off world that long; no choice though, we go back now and we won't last an hour.\" Adam said in a low voice.\n\n\"No hurry. His entire family was executed by the Hunters for aiding the Colonials with supplies. Poor kid, I feel bad for him.\" Roman responded sympathetically.\n\nAdam felt deep sorrow for Troy; glad he had made the decision to rescue the boy from the clutches of the Hunters, while knowing exactly what it felt like to grow up alone.\n\n\"Well, just try and keep him as busy as possible, he seems to cling to you and our resident drunk.\" the Captain replied. Roman agreed as he turned to join Dalton and Troy in learning to do something he had known how to do for decades, handle a sidearm. Of course, hearing the instructional advice from a man with slurred speech was like learning all over again.\n\n\"Give us a couple of weeks Captain, this boy gonna be dropping Hunters left and right!\" Dalton yelled as Troy smiled wide.\n\nMichaels could only try and imagine the grief Troy must be feeling, having those monsters slaughter his entire family, but at least he was safe now. No matter how feared the Hunters were across the system, he knew that his crew would fight to the death for its two newest passengers.\n\nUsually during deep space travel, Adam would sleep very little and spent most of his time admiring the stars and enjoying true freedom. Not this night however. He had been beaten, nearly killed by gunfire, quite possibly met the woman of his dreams and taken on the responsibility of a child with no home to return to. There would be a lot of sleep in the Captain's future on this night, and he wasted no time; hitting his bunk and escaping into a dreamworld of infinite possibilities only minutes later.\n\nOpening his eyes, Adam was first struck by the absolute silence of the ship's thrusters. A person is taken back by the loud roar and torque of things during their first few trips into the blackness of deep space. Adam had been through it hundreds of times however, and he had grown used to both of them. It was the lack of noise and vibration throughout the ship that raised sudden alarm with the Captain. Jumping to his feet, he grabbed his trusted gray revolver from a solid steel bedside table and used his free hand to rub his eyes for a moment, trying his best to wake up and be clear headed as he expected the worst. Slowly making his way down the narrow corridor, his right hand gripping the sidearm as he checked all of the crew's rooms, every one of them coming up empty.\n\nHad the Hunters somehow found them? Legion soldiers maybe? Many scenarios played out in his mind as he continued his slow but determined walk, trying his best not to make any sound in doing so. As his feet hit the catwalk, he slowed his pace down considerably; knowing full well that its grated steel flooring was notoriously loud to begin with. Glancing over the rail as he slowly made his way to the center, he spotted his entire crew down the iron sights of his combat sidearm.\n\n\"Raise it by two credits.\" Dalton said as he threw a handful of poker chips into a pile.\n\nAdam's initial reaction was that of relief, his crew was safe and sound. As that feeling began to fade, he began to wonder why they hadn't invited him to play in a game that he considered himself to be such an expert in. The Captain walked down the metal steps in a much louder fashion, immediately gaining the attention of the entire crew.\n\n\"You would start a card game without me?\" Michaels said as he approached the table.\n\n\"Hell, you been asleep for nearly two days.\" Dalton replied, a primitive looking cigar that looked as though it had been hand rolled by a blind man hanging from the corner of his mouth. Adam shockingly gazed at his green and brown military style titanium watch, astounded that he had slept for such an extended period of time.\n\n\"We're sitting in uncharted space Captain, thought it best to kill the main engines, save fuel and not gain any unwanted attention.\" Kelly said, waiting for the Captain's approval.\n\n\"Good job,\" Adam said as he pulled up an empty chair, sitting beside Troy to help him play his hand with the best chance of winning. \"Where's Luck?\" Michaels asked, doubting anyone even noticed that he wasn't present.\n\n\"On the bridge running more schematics on the ship's vitals.\" Kato replied as he laid his spread on the table, smiling and raking the winnings in his direction.\n\nUnder normal conditions, Adam would remain focused on the hand of cards in front of him, however these weren't normal conditions. They were on the run, sitting in uncharted space and Sarah Blaine sat across the table from him, her beauty almost impossible to put into words. She had a look of such magnificent innocence, every feature of her face glowing with undeniable passion. He tried to keep it at nothing more than a passive glance in her direction every few minutes, until one of his glances had been answered by one of her own. How could he have let it happen? He dared not glance back for several minutes, going out of his way to ignore her while showing Troy the finer points of becoming a world class card shark in only a matter of minutes.\n\nFinally gaining enough courage, he quickly joked with the crew and threw a glance her way; only to find that she had already been watching his every move. Sarah smiled softly as she continued to stare at him, causing him to begin playing nervously. He couldn't understand what was happening. Since when did he ever get nervous around women? In his line of work he met plenty of them, a lot of them tougher than the average girl; most of them could handle a weapon as well as any man and could hang drink for drink with Dalton himself.\n\nNobody like Sarah however, not even close. She was stunningly beautiful, very well spoken and above all, political. Political? His idea of politics involved small arms fire or even a good old fashioned bare-fisted brawl. They had nothing in common aside from being here at the same moment, the same spot together; something he knew deep down would be long forgotten by Sarah the moment she arrived safely back home. Still, the heart wants what the heart wants, and his was becoming increasingly dependent on seeing her as much as humanly possible.\n\nMaybe he was reading too much into her smile addressed to him, he had to be. A love story between two worlds as different as their own is destined to fail.\n\n\"I think Troy has the hang of it,\" Michaels said as the boy played the winning hand and collected the pot with a smile that was larger than Dalton's tolerance for alcohol. \"I'm going to go check on Luck, you guys enjoy the rest of the game.\" Adam added, being much more polite than usual.\n\nAs he stood up to make his way to the bridge, he glanced at Sarah once more, earning another inviting smile as he nodded his head slightly before walking away; trying to concentrate on not walking nervously as every single step landed abruptly onto the cold steel flooring.\n\nBefore the Captain could make it to the bridge, all hell started to break loose. The last thing you want to see during flight as a passenger, much less a Captain is pitch black. Several seconds of darkness stretched throughout the ship as Michaels reached around and found one of the corridor walls to hold onto. There was a flutter of light throughout the ship for a couple of seconds before going back to complete emptiness. The emergency lights, which were nothing more than small red bulbs mounted into the ceiling throughout the ship powered on, coinciding with a very primitive sounding siren that echoed through the entire vessel. Providing very little light, the red glow produced just enough for the Captain to begin sprinting in the direction of the bridge.\n\n\"What the hell is going on?\" Adam shouted as he entered the bridge. Luck, sitting in one of the two pilot chairs spun around to face him.\n\n\"My guess is we took gunfire when leaving Tameca, must have hit our navigational system. Even worse, it wasn't until we went dark that I tried to fire everything back up. One of the thrusters is not functional and the life support system is substantially strained.\" Luck replied, emotionless as only an android could be in this situation.\n\n\"Can it be fixed?\" the Captain asked frantically, taking a seat in one of the vacant leather chairs.\n\n\"No time sir. With limited life support and only temporary use of our second thruster, we are going to have to land somewhere close and soon. Going to be a hard landing at that.\" Luck replied.\n\nAdam buried his face for several long moments in the palm of his right hand before standing to his feet.\n\n\"Find a suitable planet, I'm on my way to break the fantastic news to the crew.\" Adam replied as he walked quickly out of the door leading to still dimly illuminated hallway. Fucking deep space. he thought as Luck began taking scans of nearby planets.\n\n\"So, secure as many of your personal belongings as possible in your rooms and meet back in the armory. It's the safest spot on the ship, and from my understanding the landing won't be pleasant.\" Adam said as the crew looked on, dazed and facing reality.\n\n\"Are, are we going to be OK Captain?\" a scared Troy asked, having already been through a lifetime of trauma in the past few days.\n\nCaught completely off guard by the young boy, Michaels grew very quiet, unsure of how he should answer. Sarah bent over, placing her hand on the Troy's shoulder.\n\n\"You just stay right beside Roman, everything will work out just fine.\" she said in a very calming voice, glancing at Adam for a moment. He returned a nod of thank you as he quickly made his way back to the bridge with Kelly.\n\n\"He's right Captain, we either land to make repairs or we run out of air to breathe.\" Kelly said after looking over the calculations Luck had made.\n\n\"Fine. Let's do this.\" Adam said as he looked at a map of recent scans of nearby planets.\n\n\"This looks to be the spot sir, all of the planet's vital check out and there's a decent chance we could survive the landing.\" Luck added to the discussion, pointing to a spot on one of the black and white scans.\n\n\"Expecting trouble?\" Sarah said as Dalton filled a field bag full of weapons to sit right beside a slightly smaller wooden crate that he had stocked with his finest drink.\n\n\"I like to stay prepared for anything.\" he replied with a slight grin.\n\nAs they made their way to the armory, the rest of the crew had already strapped in. Thick nylon harnesses were bolted to the wall, surrounding the weapons cache in the middle of the room. Kato held his restraints, nervous, but doing his best to hide it from the rest of the crew. Roman appeared to be expecting a lot less trouble, with only a combat blade strapped to his right thigh; he looked as though he was on the verge of falling asleep, Troy strapped in snugly right beside him. As Sarah strapped herself in with help from Dalton, he turned a small flask up and finished its contents before slinging it onto the floor and climbing into position.\n\n\"Well. It's go time.\" he said with confidence, almost as if he had done this dozens of times.\n\nTwo spots left. Sarah thought as she imagined the Captain would pilot the ship down to the surface. What a brave man. A man's man. she imagined as the red glow of the emergency lights did little to brighten the armory.\n\n\"Luck is going to pilot the ship down.\" Michaels said as he and Kelly entered the room and began strapping in. Smiling slightly in Sarah's direction, completely unaware of the faith she had placed in his courage just moments before.\n\nAnyone who has has been fortunate enough to survive a ship to surface crash can attest to the same thing. The fall. Feeling absolutely helpless as gravity pulls you down faster than any human being should ever go, having nothing more to cling to than a safety harness bolted to the steel plated wall as you pray for forgiveness and intervention.\n\nObjects began to fall throughout the armory as the Gunship dove into a deep descent that slowly led to a nosedive into the unknown, uncharted confines of the planet that the Captain had picked under pressure. It was the first time in a long while that Adam was afraid of dying.\n\nSure, the Hunters could have easily killed him back on Tameca. Still, he had a weapon in hand and at least some control of the situation. Falling from the sky at breakneck speeds tended to make him feel just a bit more helpless. Although he feared for his own life, he feared for his crew and the condition of his ship just as deeply.\n\nGlancing around the room, everyone's individual feelings became crystal clear as their faces revealed all. Sarah cried softly, trying to comfort Troy while doing so. Kato stood solid, grasping very tightly to his safety straps, fingers red from the pressure of his clinched fists. Roman showed no fear, holding his crossed arms securely against his chest while his eyes remained closed. Dalton mumbled under his breath, leading the Captain to question if he was praying or cursing. Either way, he held a field supply bag full of weapons and a wooden crate of drink firmly against the wall with his large black boots.\n\nThe ship jolted roughly, causing a massive pull of gravity to one side of the vessel, nearly pulling the crew out of their confines and sending the wooden crate of alcohol smashing against the weapons cache in the center of the armory; shattering its contents.\n\n\"Oh no,\" Dalton yelled angrily as the crew looked on for several moments, waiting to see if he was brave enough to free himself in an attempt to salvage anything he could from the crate. The overhead lights fluttered for a moment before coming back on permanently, making visible what looked like a stream of ale and other toxic refreshments running out of the armory and falling to waste over the side of the catwalk. \"Oh hell no!\" Dalton added, overwhelmed with discouragement before clinching tightly as the ship dipped into a sudden spinning dive.\n\nAdam heard the ship's thrusters trying to engage, which let him know they were inside the planet's atmosphere and it was almost over, for better or for worse. He could tell because of his extensive time aboard the vessel that the sound he heard was only one of the two thrusters, meaning the other was still malfunctioning.\n\nHe could only hope that Luck put the ship down in a spot that would do the least damage possible. If any of the crew survived, they needed enough of the ship left to attempt a repair job, otherwise it could be a very long time before they would leave this rock. If ever.\n\nThe entire crew could hear a loud alarm throughout the ship, those among them who had military training knew that it was a proximity alert, the time had come. Adam glanced at his crew one last time before settling his eyes onto Sarah Blaine.\n\nHe hoped that some higher power had not purposely placed the woman of his dreams into his life, only to end it a couple of days later. I'm sorry for any wrong I've done. Please, just give me a second chance to make things right, a chance to do something positive for a change. Adam thought.\n\nA big part of him wanted to yell to her loudly that he had started to feel himself falling in love with her, no matter how forbidden it was in the eyes of society. What did he have to lose? Adam had convinced himself that if it truly was the last thing he would ever do, he needed to tell her. But there was no time.\n\nThe impact immediately caused the Gunship to go completely dark, sounds of metal tearing from its hinges all around them. Several of the bolts had torn from his harness upon impact, still enough of them remained intact to hold Michaels in place, he had hoped that the rest of his crew had been so lucky. A couple of minutes after the initial impact, Adam realized that he had survived. Good chance his back had been bruised from beating against the thick plated wall, but he was alive. Sparks flew as the main light above them shorted in and out, the live current hitting exposed wires that now hung above their heads.\n\n\"Everyone OK?\" Michaels asked with true concern, although most of his focus was in Sarah's direction.\n\nThe Captain feared the worst as not a single person responded. Maybe he hadn't spoken loud enough for his voice to overpower the sounds of electric showers and hemorrhaging pipes.\n\n\"IS EVERYONE OK?\" Adam repeated loudly, strong enough to be heard several rooms over.\n\n\"Hell no I'm not! You saw the crate shatter to pieces, all my scratch gone in a matter of seconds!\" Dalton replied, prompting laughter and relief from the rest of the crew, putting the Captain's worries to ease.\n\nAs the crew slowly found its way through the complete darkness to the cargo hold doors, Michaels and Kelly made their way through the mangled corridors which were littered with scattered debris, heading for the bridge to congratulate Luck on a job well done.\n\nThe first one out was Dalton, solid black riot style shotgun in front of him, he slowly made his way down the ramp, which was slightly bent into an angle. Dalton, of course, still steaming over his forced alcoholism intervention.\n\nWhile it wasn't worth a plummet to the surface at blazing speeds in the face of impending death, the scenery wasn't hard on the eyes in the least. Vibrant green grass swaying with a slow wind as they sat in a huge field surrounded by small hills and a distant tree line. It looked almost like a destination for someone in search of a getaway, rather than a spot picked at the last minute for a crash landing.\n\nDalton stepped from the ramp onto the welcoming soil, which gave way under his boots, moist from a recent rain as he began panning his weapon around slowly. The next person down was Roman, walking a bit more calmly with a tight grip on a large combat rifle, he immediately made way to the rear of the ship to try and assess the damage. Seeing a large trench dug behind the ship, dragging out for several hundred feet from the recent impact of the crash.\n\nSarah and Troy, obviously shaken up quite a bit, stepped onto the ground and remained close behind Dalton as he continued to thoroughly evaluate the landscape. Kato exited the ship slowly, holding a small pistol by his side and walking slowly toward the group as the Captain was right behind him.\n\nAdam's first thought was of the sun hammering its rays down onto the ship, the slight wind blowing just enough to keep the otherwise intense heat at bay. They could have landed in much worse conditions, leaving him not only thankful for their new lease on life, but a second chance to tell Sarah exactly what was on his heart. All of it would have to wait for the time, however, as he faced the daunting task of giving the shell shocked crew even more bad news; walking down the ramp with a heaviness of heart to face his crew.\n\n\"Luck?\" Kato asked as Michaels approached them solemnly.\n\nAnswering with only a regretful head shake, it quickly hit everyone that the android pilot, the hero who had saved them from a certain death, had himself perished in the crash. Moments later Kelly walked down the ramp, crying just a bit; not really knowing how to react to the demise of a synthetic human being.\n\n\"Now what?\" Dalton asked as he strategically placed a large cigar in his mouth, nearly the length of a human hand as he sealed the deal with what could have passed as a miniature torch.\n\nGiving him a scowl, Kelly walked to the rear of the ship with Roman, Dalton looked into the direction of Michaels with a puzzled look on his face before shrugging it off.\n\n\"Good question.\" Adam replied a couple of minutes later, looking at the nearby surroundings in the vicinity of the heavily damaged ship.\n\nHe honestly didn't know what move to make his next. Even if they could somehow find a way off of this rock, they were wanted by pretty much anything in the Skyla System that was attached to a heartbeat. The Legion wanted them locked up, especially after the assault that Roman had played such a vital role in. If they were lucky enough to avoid the legitimate authorities, the important people of the underground world surely wanted their heads on platters, and Adam was pretty sure there was a decent sized bounty attesting to the fact; meaning they would eventually have to deal with contract killers and mercenaries along the way. None of it mattered right now though, because from the looks of it, the ship was in no condition to fly; even if they somehow managed to repair it.\n\n\"I'll put Luck to rest, he may have been artificial but he deserves at least that much for saving everyone's life. You get with Roman, gear up heavy and scout the area, Kato and Kelly can look the ship over and assess the damage, see how long we are going to be stuck here.\" Michaels said, finally giving Dalton a definitive answer.\n\n\"What about Sarah and the boy?\" Dalton asked as he started checking the weapons he had with him.\n\n\"They'll stay close to the ship, should be safest for them that way.\" Adam replied as he began to head inside to collect the body of someone very important to him.\n\nNo matter how ridiculous it sounded, Luck had become what the Captain considered to be part of the family, he would truly be missed.\n\nDalton and Roman were geared up and ready to move, waiting for the sunset to begin before heading out to survey the area. It was Roman's suggestion to travel at night, it would be a bit harder to move around, but the shroud of darkness would provide additional cover for the two man team in the event that there was life on the planet. Even worse, if they had been tracked by Hunters, they would need every advantage possible in order to try and even the playing field a bit.\n\nDalton was going heavy of course, with a large assault rifle, standard combat pistol and one of the oldest pump shotguns that Roman had ever seen. The majority of the gun was comprised of a faded blue steel, showing signs of significant use throughout the years. Mounted to a thick wooden stock that was marred with scars of abuse and age; it reminded Roman of something seen in a museum. Of course, he could respect the fact that Dalton knew his iron, so he had no doubt that it would follow through with the task of keeping the peace when called into question.\n\nAlthough no bottle or flask was visible, Roman suspected Dalton had one somewhere in those faded brown pants of his. Most of his stash had just been disposed of in the most unthinkable of ways, so it was very possible that he simply had began to ration what remained of the alcohol.\n\nAs for Roman, he carried a standard issue combat pistol as well as a rugged military grade knife. Most of his gear consisted of rations, binoculars, a chart machine used for surveying and graphing a map of the area and a large com unit that could reach the ship from several clicks away. Michaels had insisted that they stay in contact, just in case they had indeed been followed. It was very unlikely, however, as the Captain made his living by walking with caution and today was certainly no different.\n\nThe two men headed out, wading through the tall grass as Dalton took intensely deep puffs from a cigar, the red embers of the burning end glowing in the darkened surroundings as Dalton glanced back to smile at everyone for a moment as if a parade had been assembled in his honor. Roman had left Troy with a snub nosed pistol and the very important task of protecting the crew. The weapon wasn't hot of course, Roman had removed all of the ammunition from it long before turning it over to the boy, still it gave the young man something positive to focus on and that's how Roman had gotten himself through the toughest of times.\n\nAs Michaels finished covering the grave of his high stakes poker winning turned close friend, Sarah and Troy approached him slowly, trying not to disturb him during a tough time in his life.\n\n\"I'm sorry about your friend.\" Sarah said apologetically as they sat on a decent sized rock near the Captain.\n\n\"Thanks. Truth is, I cheated my ass off the night I won him you know?\" Adam replied, trying to lighten the spirits of the boy, while impressing the girl that he had so quickly fallen for.\n\nThey continued to talk for a while, Michaels showing Troy his method of holding a pistol as Dalton and Roman disappeared from sight, beginning to hit rocky terrain littered with thick brush and small patches of lush trees.\n\nThe two men moved quietly as they made their way to a high peak not far from the crash site, the only noise was an occasional curse word ejected from the lips of a painfully sober Dalton. Obviously high ground would save them a long road ahead if they saw anything of interest. Dalton sat down out of breath on a fallen tree trunk as Roman glared through the his set of binoculars, panning carefully as not to miss any details as the digital readouts of the eyepiece showed distance and altitude.\n\n\"Anything interesting?\" Dalton asked, as he complained through body movements of the short walk they had already taken in, obvious after effects of his motivated smoking habit.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Roman replied as he attached the set of lenses to the sketch unit, allowing it to print out the land they had already covered. \"Not a damn thing.\" he added.\n\nAs the men continued on, down the slope and toward the next decent sized tree line, a slight rain began to fall that quickly turned into an unrelenting downpour.\n\n\"Damn, should have just let them arrest us back at Paulie's and been done with it.\" Dalton said as both me started laughing out loud, cold rain hitting them briskly in the face as they pushed forward.\n\nFinally, they found a thick enough section of trees to shield them from a good bit of the rain, still it had taken its toll on the men; clothes soaked and the feel of filth all over them. Dalton kept his stash of cigars tightly wrapped in a thick brown cloth and tucked away in his supply sack along with God knows what else.\n\nTaking shelter under a huge overhanging slate rock, they decided it was time to make camp for a bit and start back at first light. Dalton offered to take watch first, looking above and quickly painting the stars across what sky could be seen through the thick clouds overhead. Roman had heard enough complaining as it was, however, and didn't want to add legitimacy to it; taking first watch so Dalton could get himself a little shut eye.\n\nQuickly taking up the offer, Dalton climbed into the stained green sleeping bag and rolled onto his side, shutting his eyes and within seconds drifting off into a dreamworld that was sure to include alcohol, women and an endless supply of guns and ammunition. Meanwhile, Roman sat solidly with his back against the rock and a battle rifle casually in the elbow sections of his arms, resting himself while indeed ready for anything.\n\n\"Captain.\" Kato said as he approached Michaels, who himself was pulling watch back at the crash site. Sitting at the top of the damaged cargo ramp, Adam was armed only with a solid black military issue pistol and a miniature set of binoculars, keeping watch on the tall grass around them while most of the crew slept.\n\n\"What is it?\" Michaels asked quietly as Kato walked over, standing next to the Captain's position.\n\n\"One of the thrusters is completely gone, from the looks of it, we took gunfire on the way out of Tameca.\" Kato said regretfully.\n\n\"Fixable?\" the Captain asked with glaring hope.\n\n\"It gets worse sir,\" Kato replied, pausing before sharing the bad news with the man in charge. \"The gunfire hit our main fuel line as well, been leaking it out since we took off, good thing we landed when we did, otherwise we'd be stuck in orbit with no fuel to speak of.\" he added.\n\n\"So we look for some kind of fuel source, patch it enough to get into orbit and then send a distress signal. On the run or not, sounds like our only option at this point.\" Michaels answered, prepared for the worst.\n\n\"It gets worse.\" Kato said apologetically as the Captain shook his head for a moment, replying \"How much worse can it possibly get?\"\n\n\"Even if we found a fuel source, which is unlikely at best, four of the seven battery rods were damaged beyond repair. We got enough juice for systems check, possibly heat or emergency lighting if we needed it, but nowhere near enough to launch into orbit,\" Kato added as Michaels continued to shake his head. \"Truth is Adam, we look to be here for a very long while.\" Kato said as he slowly turned and walked off to make his way back into the Gunship, trying his best not to wake the rest of the crew in the process.\n\nMichaels continued to sit on watch, skimming the area with his eyes in the darkness and cursing the moment that Dalton's stash had crashed into a flood of waste. He could damn sure use a drink himself right about now. Stuck on an uncharted planet, next to no chance of them fixing the ship well enough to get off of the ground and being marked men throughout the entire Skyla System. Adam was definitely in the mood for some hard drink, something to to alleviate his mind of problems, if only temporarily.\n\nRoman had settled in and slept for nearly two hours, when Dalton once again dozed off while pulling his shift of watch. It was almost daybreak, the idea was to get a few extra winks in before they were up and at it again, a full day's walk in front of them. Normally, he was a deep sleeper, nobody had ever come close to accusing him otherwise.\n\nIt was the sound of a small branch being pushed into the ground softly that did the trick, Dalton immediately spinning around with his shotgun, eyes wide open and looking into a thin, dark complected man who was obviously scared and appeared to be unarmed. Throwing his hands into the air, they had almost extended fully by the time Roman was on his feet and quickly approaching Dalton.\n\n\"Enough. Can't you see he's scared shitless?\" Roman said of the trembling man as he pushed the barrel of Dalton's shotgun to the ground, making sure it didn't accidentally discharge into the direction of the native stranger.\n\n\"We mean you no harm stranger. My friend and I, we are having some difficulties with our ship; just looking for anything or anyone to possibly help us get back into space.\" Roman said as the stranger continued to look at the barrel of Dalton's so called peacemaker.\n\nRoman grabbed the weapon from Dalton's clutches and threw it onto the ground, holding his hands up slightly to show the strange local that they truly meant him no harm.\n\n\"The name's Roman, this is my friend Dalton.\" After several moments of silence, the stranger finally spoke.\n\n\"My name is Aira.\" he said, his language broken at best as he remained very skeptical of the two men's intentions.\n\n\"Alright Aira. No way you could survive out here dressed like that,\" Roman said, referring to his thin white shirt that had been poorly stitched and makeshift pants of sack cloth. \"Means you must have a camp nearby, can you take us there?\" Roman added in a friendly tone.\n\n\"My village is not that far from here. Yes, I can take you there.\" Aira replied a bit more calmly.\n\n\"We would appreciate that.\" Roman answered as Dalton had picked his shotgun up and was wiping the dirt from its stock.\n\n\"Actually, I would appreciate not having such a fine weapon thrown to the damn ground like a piece of trash,\" Dalton added as he wiped the dirt from its well worn handle and holstered his weapon once again under his thick leather belt.\"Besides, from the looks of him, I doubt they will be of any use.\" he added.\n\n\"Maybe not, but even the most primitive of races stockpile what they consider to the be the best of drink.\" Roman said convincingly.\n\n\"Lead the way friend.\" Dalton replied, speaking to Aira as if they were long time friends.\n\nThe two men quickly disposed of what had been a campsite through the night and began following Aira to the place he considered home.\n\nAs Captain Michaels started to awaken, he was hit with the overwhelming smell of a cooked meal. Easy to distinguish when you become used to eating rations from airtight silver packages three times a day. He wasn't sure what was being cooked at the moment, but it smelled like heaven and that was easily good enough for him. Standing to his feet, he took a moment to try and work a few kinks out of his body from the past several hours spent sleeping on the very unforgiving ground, and then glanced over in Kato's direction.\n\n\"What's going on? What am I smelling?\" he asked, knowing Kato would have the answers having taken over watch in the middle of the night.\n\n\"Sarah's cooking. Found some rations that she said would taste a bit better cooked over a flame, so she's been working on it for the past hour now.\" Kato replied as Michaels walked into his direction, trying his best to fan the wrinkles out of his clothes by hand.\n\n\"Sure in the hell smells a bit better.\" Adam said, both men chuckling for a moment before he glanced around the corner of the ship to see Sarah doing her best to prepare a decent meal for the crew.\n\nAs the crew ate the thinly sliced and perfectly cooked meat, Adam continued to make strong eye contact with Sarah, the woman who had in may ways given him new reason to continue living.\n\n\"Captain, it's Roman.\" Kato said, handing Adam a portable com unit with one hand while holding a fork full of the tender meat in the other.\n\n\"This is Michaels, go ahead.\" the Captain said; trying his best to cover up the joy of the current meal in his voice.\n\n\"We have made contact with some natives here, several hours from your position. Will be speaking with more of them shortly, how are things on your end?\" Roman voice asked through the crackle of the com speaker.\n\n\"Well, we are making it alright. No home cooked meals, but we'll manage,\" Adam replied, prompting the entire crew to laugh out loud. \"Any chance the natives have replacement parts or fuel to trade?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"Doubtful, the scouts are using sharpened sticks as weapons.\" Roman replied.\n\n\"Outstanding,\" Michaels replied in a sarcastic tone, taking a few moments to glance around at the rest of the crew. \"Find out everything you can. Kato and Kelly have been working with the Rover, it's a little beat up but we should be able to use it if need be. At least until the fuel runs dry.\" Adam added as he laid the com unit down on a nearby piece of scrap metal.\n\n\"Will do.\" Roman replied as the steady crackling of the com went to silence.\n\nAs Aira led Roman and Dalton into the front of the camp, several of the villagers ran indoors, watching the group pass by as they made their way to one of the larger huts. Made of scrap wood, bales of grass and mud, it didn't like a place that anyone should even consider living in.\n\n\"Who knows, The Dusk looks like shit too but they had great liquor.\" Dalton said grinning as Roman just responded with a slight shaking of his head.\n\nMeeting someone in charge was never a pleasant experience, that is unless you were the one with the weapons, in which case it couldn't be matched. As Roman and Dalton entered the hut with Aira, they were face to face with an older gentleman, he wore many different necklaces made of shiny rocks and beads which gave them the indication of him being a very important man among the tribe.\n\n\"Welcome friends, I am Ceria,\" the older man said warmly, welcoming them to sit down on mounds of grass that had been formed to serve as chairs. \"Please forgive my people, they are no doubt afraid to see strange faces among them.\" he added, as he too sat with Roman and Dalton.\n\n\"Where are all of the men?\" Roman asked directly.\n\n\"And alcohol. Where is the drink?\" Dalton asked, stringing his question onto the rear of Roman's.\n\n\"Of course,\" Ceria said as he began pouring a green liquid into rough looking cups that were no more that hollowed out stones. \"The men are gone, most of them at least.\" Ceria said as he handed Dalton a cup of the local favorite.\n\n\"Out in hunting parties? I saw only women and children as we walked through the village.\" Roman responded, wanting to know every detail that he possibly could.\n\n\"No hunting parties,\" Ceria said, lowering his head in silence. After a few moments, he looked at the men and explained a ship coming every thirty moons or so, a handful of well armed creatures taking the men aboard, never to be heard from again.\n\n\"That is what my scout had first mistaken you for, but your friend's gun didn't look anything like that of the beast men.\" Aria added to the conversation.\n\n\"What the hell is wrong with the way my gun looks?\" Dalton asked as he began turning his cup up and stopping abruptly. \"This is some strong shit! What do you mean beast men?\" he added, gasping for air as a side effect of the hardened home brew.\n\n\"They never say anything, they only force men onto the ship, knowing well that we have no means of protection against them. Those who have tried to fight back have been slaughtered on the spot,\" Ceria replied. \"They walk as men do, but they are not men. Nearly two feet taller than any of us; brown tinted skin stretched across them as that of an onion, dark hair growing from them in thickets.\" Ceria added with remorse, thinking of all of the men who had departed against their will.\n\n\"This ship, how large is it? Are there any markings on it that may identify the creatures.\" Roman asked sternly.\n\n\"Twice the size of this very hut maybe.\" Ceria answered, as he drew a marking into the dirt floor of the hut, a large teardrop shape with a smaller shape inside of it.\n\n\"Don't like anything I've ever ran across.\" Dalton said, sipping his drink like a baby from its bottle.\n\n\"Husks.\" Roman replied in a grave tone.\n\n\"Husks? No worse than the Hunters that are no doubt combing the star system for us at this very moment.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Much worse. When Hunters have nightmares, they are usually dreaming of Husks. I've only ran into two of them in this lifetime, during my years with the Gali military.\" Roman replied, his eyes locked on Ceria.\n\n\"Well, you're here with us. You obviously killed both of the sons of bitches, so the crew should be able to handle three or four.\" Dalton said as he sat his cup down, not daring to ask for a refill of the strongest drink he had ever consumed.\n\n\"I ran,\" Roman replied, gaining an immediate look of disbelief from Dalton. \"I put five slugs of a pistol directly into the chest of one, it only brought him to a knee. No way in hell I could have dusted two of them,\" Roman added, before switching his attention toward Ceria. \"They usually have a handler with them, a human?\" he asked.\n\"Yes, that is correct. Usually two of the beast men and a human bearing a rifle.\" Ceria replied.\n\n\"The difference between Hunters and Husks, other than the obvious mismatch, is that Hunters kill because they enjoy watching humans die. Husks do everything for the money. Mercenaries you could say, the handler is usually nothing more than the highest bidder at the time. My guess is they are pulling men from this village for off world slave trade.\" Roman said as Dalton remained sitting with a puzzled look on his face.\n\n\"You ran?\" Dalton asked in disbelief.\n\n\"It's the one and only time I've ever ran from a fight. Believe me, I've regretted it every day since then.\" Roman replied as he stood to his feet and approached the door of the hut.\n\n\"Care for more?\" Ceria asked of Dalton, ready to refill his cup. \"No, I'm good.\" Dalton replied, wondering if he had ever muttered those words before.\n\nAs the next few minutes passed, Roman explained through the com system to Captain Michaels about the Husk and it was decided that Adam, Sarah and Troy would load the rover with weapons and supplies and meet up with the others, leaving Kelly and Kato to get the ship in the best condition possible. The villagers weren't expecting a visit from the beast menace for at least another ten days, giving Adam plenty of time to come up with something, anything that got them off of this piece of rock and back into the star system.\n\n\"If we could just send a hail through the com to my father, he wouldn't hesitate to send a rescue ship to our position.\" Sarah said as they traveled to the village, the bumpy terrain of the road that was no more than a path beaten by feet, throwing them back and forth inside of the industrial grade cockpit.\n\n\"The Gunship's com is barely functional, short range for the moment but no way is it capable of reaching off world. Besides, even if we could, as soon as the hail went out everyone with an open com would pick it up. Hunters, Legion, Mercenaries, hell even some of the higher end card clubs.\"\n\n\"What about the com unit of the ship that has the village so afraid?\" Sarah asked.\n\n\"Doubtful. We'd have to somehow overpower the Husk to use their ship,\" Michaels replied, glancing in her direction for a moment as Troy seemed nothing short of amazed by all of the controls inside of the rover. \"Not that I would ever back down from a fight, I just don't see the logic in starting one that we have no chance of winning.\" he added in an attempt to save face in front of the one woman that made his heart thump dramatically faster.\n\n\"We take them out, hijack their ship and use its com to hail Sarah's father, see if he could lend us assistance.\" Captain Michaels said as he sat inside one of the huts, huddled in the floor beside Dalton, Roman, Sarah and Ceria.\n\n\"I thought that wouldn't work?\" Sarah asked, blindsided by Adam's change of plans.\n\n\"Yea. You know I love a fight Captain, but if they are anything close to what Roman says, we'd be in for one hell of a thrashing.\" Dalton added as he regretfully sipped on more of the local drink.\n\n\"It's the only option we have, I've put my head around it a hundred times during the trip from the cash site. Take out the Husk or die on this planet, and personally I'd rather die fighting.\" Adam responded confidently.\n\n\"Even if we did manage to take down the Husk crew, wouldn't a hail bring the authorities right down on us? Not to mention the Hunters, or hell for that matter more Husk?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"Yea, it would. We'd have to pray that Sarah's father got to us first, and be prepared to hold like hell if he didn't.\" Adam replied, looking in Sarah's direction long enough to see a her smile, every inch of her face glowing with radiance as she realized the Captain had placed his faith in her.\n\n\"Sarah, you'd have to be damn sure that your father sends enough of an escort to get us out of here safely, good chance they would hit some stiff enemies on the way back off planet.\" Adam said very seriously.\n\n\"Trust me, the Legion may have us outnumbered in the ranks, but knowing my father, he'll come with more than enough soldiers to get us back safely.\" Sarah replied with confidence.\n\n\"Husk wouldn't expect to find anyone here other than the usual villagers, the advantage of surprise would definitely be in our favor,\" Roman added to the conversation. \"Not to mention, I've got a score to settle with 'em, it's personal for me.\" he added.\n\n\"Well, we got plenty of weapons, the element of surprise and about nine or ten days to prepare for a fight. That should even the odds just a bit.\" Michaels added, making the plan official.\n\n\"Well, I still don't like it, but if there's going to be a fight then you can damn sure count me in.\" Dalton added, already in a fight against the cup of local drink that he had been so eager to get his hands on.\n\nAs everyone started to exit the hut, Sarah stopped Adam, holding him behind long enough to ensure they would be the last people to leave.\n\n\"Captain, why the change of heart?\" she asked cautiously.\n\nAs he stood there, possible reasons raced through mind. What should he tell her? What had truly changed his mind about meeting certain death head on? Was it his growing love for her, had it clouded his judgment? Finally, breaking several seconds of silence he decided to answer her from deep within his heart.\n\n\"It would be easy to lay low, but the truth is I've been doing just that for too long now, taking the easiest roads along the way. These people can't fight them off, hell I don't even know if we can fight them off, but if it's my time to go then I'd at least like to die for something I think is right, and for those I love,\" he said, staring right into her eyes as the words landed on both her heavy heart and confused mind. \"I guess I'm choosing my side.\" he added, earning a huge smile from her radiant face.\n\n\"I'm not afraid of dying, I'm afraid of living past this. Getting back to the system, only to have to sit and watch you walk out of my life. Having to see you walk away for good, that's what I'm afraid of.\" Michaels said, waiting on some kind of response from Sarah, one that would never come as she emotionally turned and walked outside to rejoin the crew and villagers without so much as a word.\n\nAlthough he wasn't ashamed of his feelings for her, Adam waited several minutes before walking outside himself, trying to give her plenty of time to leave the immediate area. He wasn't sure how she had taken his confession and didn't want to make things any worse than they possibly were at the moment. How could he have been so stupid!\n\nHe had overplayed his hand? Much like he had a habit of doing in a game of cards, except this was far more important to him than any game of chance. This was life, his life, and a life that he couldn't bear to even think of living without Sarah.\n\nOnce outside, the Captain was met by Dalton and Roman as they began pointing out the best spots for an ambush and putting together the intricate details of the plan. Adam heard their words, but every one spoken fell on deaf ears as his mind was preoccupied with his love for Sarah as he continued glancing over his shoulder; trying his best to locate his one true love and wondering how she had taken his earlier comments.\n\nThat evening as the sunset began to take form, everyone in the village would gather to eat a large meal, although basic, it appealed greatly to a crew that had eaten only rations for the last several days. Of course, some of them had been fortunate enough to enjoy Sarah's fine cooking, though they had been sworn to secrecy by the Captain as if the incident had never taken place. They had a solid plan when it came to fighting the Husk, which seemed strange to Adam. They could organize an assault on one of the deadliest species known to man, yet he couldn't explain his heart to Sarah without falling to pieces.\n\nHe only hoped that she would join them for dinner, it would give him some kind of idea as to the extent of damage his words had done to her. He couldn't control his feelings, his heart wanted what his heart wanted; but deep down he knew that a relationship between them could never survive.\n\nHe was nothing more than a smuggler who had no real future to speak of, even if Sarah felt the same way about him society would never allow them to be together. Her father, one of the top military figures for the newly formed Colonial Army would never allow his daughter to fall into the arms of a man with such a history of criminal activity.\n\nAs they sat and enjoyed dinner with the rest of the village, Adam remained focused on the empty chair that should have been filled by Sarah's overwhelming beauty. The biggest benefit of the crew spending time with the people of the village was to Troy, making friends with many of the natives who were not much younger than himself, giving Troy a sense of childhood for the moment without the worries or stress that came along with being alone.\n\nRoman continued to spend time with the young man, however most of the crew had noticed a different side of Adam's newest hired gun, almost a sense of urgency on his part as if to think that he would surely fall to the Husk.\n\nAfter dinner and a formal thank you to the villagers who had prepared it, Adam casually left the group, doing everything he could to find Sarah. If he was lucky enough to speak with her, honestly, he had no idea what he even planned to say. Apologize for the way he felt, maybe, although it was nothing that he had planned or could have avoided. On the other hand, maybe he would just reinforce his feelings to her as well as apologize for the inconvenient position that she had been unwillingly thrust into. One way or another, he had to do something. His heart and mind were too clouded to possibly stave off an assault by the Husk, he had to make things right.\n\nThere she was. As he entered one of the smaller huts, Sarah sat at a small table, the room barely lit by the flicker of a makeshift candle. Obviously deep in thought, Adam apologized for the intrusion and began to leave as Sarah stood to her feet, approaching him slowly; her warm hand soothing his tense shoulder with its touch.\n\nThey kissed deeply, with true passion and undeniable love. Even though it would surely have major repercussions if they were lucky enough to make it back to the system, at least for the moment Adam felt completely at peace. He tried his best to collect himself before responding to a few seconds in time that had truly changed his life forever.\n\n\"I know in my heart that when we return to charted space, the standards of society will eventually pull you back out of my life. All I ask for is this moment, to finally know true love, no matter how short it may last.\" he managed to say, forcing every word out as his heart continued to tremble.\n\n\"Shhhh.\" Sarah said softly as she held a couple of her fingers to his lips. \"Neither of us have any idea what the future holds. All we can control is right now, and right now I want to be with you. My heart has been with you since the moment our eyes first met.\" she added as he pushed her fingers away, grabbed her into the clutches of his arms and kissed her as if his heart must be connected to hers in order to survive.\n\nThe rest of of the night, they held one another tightly, their souls embracing one another as the rest of the crew and village celebrated what everyone had hoped would be the eventual downfall of the reign of terror that the Husk had forced upon them.\n\nThe next morning saw most everyone sleeping in late, after effects of the previous night's festivities. Adam was already awake, having been up for some time, he sat comfortably inside the Rover; watching the thick moisture fall from the sky, the water droplets bursting onto the windshield of the cargo craft as he sipped from a small cup of makeshift coffee.\n\nMost of his morning had been spent in deep thought, what a new life with Sarah at his side would mean for everyone in the unlikely event that his plan actually worked for a change. There had also been a few Dalton sightings throughout the night, staggering around drinking from a large glass bottle, relieving his bladder under the night sky and even one instance where both events took place simultaneously.\n\nThe calm feeling throughout the village came crashing down quickly as a loud noise popped nearby in the air, causing the Captain to spill what remained of his coffee; startling him and no doubt pulling everyone else from a deep and restful sleep.\n\nAdam immediately recognized the sound as he jumped from the confines of the Rover and raced to the bulk of the village in the pouring gray rain, looking straight into the sky, confirming the arrival of the Husk.\n\n\"Shit! How long?\" Adam yelled into the direction of Ceria as Roman and Dalton feverishly placed loaded weapons onto themselves as they tried to awaken.\n\n\"They will land in a field not far past the tree line. Five minutes, maybe less before they are here.\" Ceria replied sleepily as Adam double checked his pistol, ensuring that it was full of ammunition and combat ready.\n\n\"Sarah, stay inside! Keep Troy with you, if things don't go well, stay out of sight until they are gone and rejoin Kelly and Kato at the crash site.\" Adam said loudly, glancing through the shower of water into a nearby hut. Without responding, she began to cry fluidly as she grabbed Troy into her arms, holding him tightly in the corner of the primitive dwelling. \"Sarah!\" Adam said once more in a stern tone, making sure she understood her responsibility in case the worst were to happen.\n\n\"Yes.\" she managed to mutter, crying heavily which prompted Troy to become upset, sharing a few tears of his own.\n\n\"I will do everything I can to keep you both safe. Everything.\" Adam said convincingly as he stared into her eyes for a few moments; their hearts sharing a moment of passion through nothing more than a glance of love, before once again being overtaken by the stinging drops of rain. The plan had been cut short, no time for them to bring the mauler to assist them. It was simply a matter of Adam, Roman and Dalton facing two of the Husk monsters and possibly a human handler. Not very good odds for them by any means, but when a man has nothing left to fight for but the beating heart inside of his chest, it makes for a dangerous man indeed. Michaels was gladly prepared to die if it meant keeping Sarah safe.\n\nDalton remained prone at the far end of the village, only his head and arms were outside of the camouflage surroundings of the forest that surrounded them, his hands gripped a large caliber sniper rifle and his right eye pressed against the scope of the weapon. Roman had disappeared from sight, they weren't sure what he was doing for the moment, but everyone knew that when the killing began he would be in the middle of it, one way or the other. The Captain had nothing more than the long barrel revolver currently at his side and two shotguns tucked into the back of his worn brown pants, giving him a second option if needed. He was surgical with the revolver and knew that if he were accurate enough with the weapon, he would give Sarah and Troy a chance of survival as he positioned himself across from them and watching over the love of his life as if he were a guardian angel.\n\n\"If we don't kill these bastards, good chance they will be pissed enough to murder everyone in the village.\" Dalton said through his com unit, broadcasting his thoughts to both Adam and Roman.\n\n\"Then we kill these bastards.\" Adam replied, tightening his grip on the butt of his pistol and waiting patiently for the beasts to appear on the horizon. Minutes that seemed like days passed; waiting for the inevitable as nerves started to overtake logic.\n\n\"We got a problem.\" Dalton said. Michaels started to ask, when he saw the three figures approaching the village through the curtain of rain.\n\n\"Three of them.\" Adam said frantically under his breath, spotting a three Husk group with no handler. The Captain heard more chatter over the com, although he couldn't make the words out; his body numb from the circumstances almost as if he were in a dream.\n\n\"Captain!\" Dalton's voice finally rang out, forcing Adam back to reality and out of the helpless daze that he had succumb to. \"Do we proceed with the plan?\" Dalton added, waiting for a response from the man in charge.\n\n\"We have no choice.\" Adam forced painfully from his lungs, knowing almost with certainty that they had no chance of winning, the appearance of the walking beasts reassuring that with every step closer toward the village. The sheer size of them had Adam stunned, he had never seen such a build on anything living. Add the proficiency with weaponry and the faster than average movements of the relentless killers, he saw no way of winning the battle ahead.\n\nAs Dalton regained his composure, he began placing the scope of his rifle onto the head of one of the Husk. Waiting for an official OK from Adam, he continued to follow the beast with the telescopic lens of the high caliber weapon. \"Say when Captain.\" Dalton said, anxious to begin the blood letting as he noticed one of the villagers stepping out into the direct path of the Husk soldiers, his head covered with the hood of the sackcloth shirt which was quickly darkening with color at the end of the soaking rain.\n\n\"What the hell,\" Dalton mumbled to himself, wondering which of the locals had a death wish; the Husks merely slowing down, also in disbelief that anyone would dare stand against them. Taking his eye from the scope momentarily, he turned his head slightly to get a good angle on the com unit. \"Adam, are you seeing this?\" Dalton asked.\n\nBefore an answer could follow, Roman removed the sackcloth hood, standing in the hammering rain as if to taunt the three much larger opponents, a rugged combat blade in each hand as the wind blew ripples throughout his shirt.\n\nTwo of the three Husks began to slowly run towards him, each with a leg length machete tightly gripped by the superhuman strength of the nearly tree sized arms of the beasts.\n\nAs they were on him, Adam stepped from the doorway he had been well concealed inside of, holding his revolver forward and strategically firing all six rounds from the rolling chamber; hitting the same Husk with all of the piercing steel slugs, four in his upper chest and two punishing the neck of the beast. Obviously crippling the soldier with what would have killed six normal men, it fell to the ground screaming in pain as it bled openly onto the climate drenched ground.\n\nThe second Husk quickly shifted its attention into the direction of the Captain, who tossed the sidearm to the ground, reaching behind his back and pulling two short barrel shotguns from the back of his belt. Without thinking, his instinct pushed him to fire both weapons, one slug hitting the Husk in the chest and the second nearly missing, only grazing its arm slightly; sending a small cloud of skin and patched hair into the rain. Running through the pain of the recent chest wound, the beast leaped towards Captain Michaels in an attempt to kill him on impact.\n\nIts jawbone and a majority of its chin were wiped clean from its face by a single shot of Dalton's long range killing machine. The bolt action gun spitting an empty shell from its top, and falling hollowly to the ground. Dalton quickly began trying to scope the third Husk up as it went into full sprint in the direction of the two downed warriors. He anxiously fired a round that normally would have hit, however the Husk moved much faster than a normal man as the shot missed, firing wide right of the creature which had reached the other members of the crew.\n\nStriking Michaels with maddening rage, the beast sent the Captain flying onto the ground several feet away from him, sliding across the puddled ground. Adam immediately tried getting back to his feet only to fall back to the ground, simply dazed from the impact only moments ago. Roman thrust one of his blades into the direction of the Husk, who's raw strength knocked the combat steel from his hand, grabbing Roman with his free hand into a choking position.\n\n\"Fuck!\" Dalton said loudly as he had another shell in the chamber, but couldn't get a decent shot in the scope because of the choke, which was slowly bleeding the life from Roman's limp body.\n\nAs he began to stop trying to fight back and had accepted his demise, Roman dropped the other blade to the ground as his arms hung straight down by his sides, the Husk yelling loudly as he applied even more anger into the hold, trying to punish his victim brutally. Roman slid to the ground, falling face first into the mud as the monster suddenly let go of his grip of death. Spinning around, he threw his hand out and placed it around the fragile throat of Troy, who had escaped Sarah's clutches long enough to try and save his mentor by stabbing a blade into the back of the Husk.\n\nAs he squeezed firmly around the child's neck feeling small bones breaking as Troy grasped for air, a shot from Dalton's weapon zipped through the air and pierced the chest area of the beast, who immediately threw the young man who was fighting for his life to the ground. Adam stumbled to his feet, his first thought switched from killing the Husk to running to the aid of Troy, who was obviously in life or death condition. As the Husk looked down, realizing the shot had struck no vital organs, it yelled in rage as both of its friends lay dead on the crimson soaked ground beneath him.\n\nDuring the enraged scream, several of its teeth were jolted from their sockets from a hard right hand thrown by Roman, who had lost his usual ice cold swagger and let emotion take control of his moves as he followed with several more punishing hands to the face of the beast. Not used to the defensive side of battle, the Husk could do very little to block the flurry of commanding fists flying in his direction. Letting a loud and tearful yell of his own out, Roman threw a punch that quickly turned into a cupped hand as it penetrated the throat of the monster, ripping several throat organs out in the process. The monster fell to its knees, slowly dying from the wounds as Roman kicked it in the chest firmly, pushing it onto its back in a large puddle of water. Roman fell to a knee, obviously in pain, slowly making his way back to his feet in an effort to check on Troy as did Dalton, who was sprinting to the child's location.\n\n\"Impressive. Stupid, but impressive.\" the crew heard from behind them as the Husks handler stood with a large automatic pistol pointed in the direction of the group.\n\nThree sharp shots later, he lay face down in the rain, Sarah Blaine standing behind him holding an assault rifle that had been kept in the Rover.\n\n\"No sir, that's impressive.\" Adam said, giving a long look of thanks to the woman who had indeed saved his life at this very moment.\n\n\"How bad off is he?\" Sarah asked, sprinting over to check on the seriously injured youth.\n\nDalton looked up at her with the most serious look she had ever seen him carry. \"It's bad.\" he replied, immediately looking back down to help aid in any way possible. The next few minutes played out as if they were but a faint memory that had been faded with time, Michaels rushing Sarah to the spacecraft of the Husk; boosting the signal as much as possible before sending a message to her father of their position and condition. It was a long shot that he would even receive the distress call, however there was no time to properly prep the ship and hit orbit. They had to hope and pray that the long range com unit would do it.\n\nAs they returned to the nearby village, Dalton and Roman had assisted some of the locals in making Troy the best possible recovering setting possible inside one of the huts, placing him on a soft stack of grass and trying everything to keep fluids in the young man.\n\n\"We have to go. Now. Otherwise, the boy isn't going to make it.\" Roman said in a grave tone, passing the Captain and his newly found love.\n\n\"Can't do it. Help is one the way and we have to be here when they arrive.\" Michaels replied as several feet of heavy rainfall distanced the men.\n\n\"I wasn't asking permission, I was letting you know that I'm going to prep the ship for takeoff.\" Roman replied.\n\n\"That's not going to happen Roman, don't press the issue.\" Adam said, hoping the former special forces soldier would come to his senses.\n\n\"I won't let him die Adam, don't try and stop me.\" Roman said firmly, turning to walk in the direction of the vessel.\n\n\"ROMAN! We WILL wait on help to arrive, that is a direct order!\" the Captain said, pulling his revolver and aiming it at the hardened warrior. Stopping in his tracks, Roman turned to face Adam; both men giving impenetrable stares.\n\n\"I'm through taking orders from you. What? You plan to shoot me?\" Roman said, walking closer to Michaels until reaching the end of the revolver barrel.\n\n\"I don't want to, but I will and I think we both know it,\" Adam replied, pulling the hammer back on the weapon, setting it ready to fire with just the slightest pressure. \"You are a member of this crew until we're back in the system. That said, you WILL obey my direct order.\" the Captain added, calling Roman's bluff.\n\n\"The boy dies, and I'll kill you and anyone else who tries to stop me.\" Roman finally replied, walking past both the Captain and Sarah who continued to stand there for several minutes, finally returning to Troy's side.\n\n\"He ain't fucking around Adam.\" Dalton said, staring out of the small hut window as Roman sat on a large stone directly in the path of the relentless rainfall, a strong grip on his combat sidearm.\n\n\"Neither am I,\" Adam replied, giving Dalton a look to reassure him of that fact. \"I don't want anything to happen to Troy any more than he does, but I'll be damned if I put the rest of my crew in danger to fly back into the system for a single person.\" Adam added.\n\nThe next few days were a mixed bag as Troy continued to fight for his mortality, Roman kept to himself, only leaving the confines of his hut to sit by the boy's side; Kelly and Kato made a list of everything they needed to get the Gunship back into the sky and the rest of the crew stayed right by the side of Troy the moment Roman left it.\n\nThe crew, they all were heroes to the people who lived in this village on what could be considered one of the more primitive planets in the star system, or even uncharted space for that matter. They all knew that eventually Adam and his crew would be leaving by sky, to visit other planets that were much more civilized than this one; still, they made every effort to show their thanks to the heroes of the Gunship.\n\nEvery night filled with immaculate dinners and only the best lodging available, which wasn't much, but it was a gesture of gratitude that the crew wouldn't soon forget.\n\n\"Quick Captain, come quick!\" one of the village natives yelled as he burst into Adam's sleeping quarters, which was nothing more than a back area of one of the larger huts.\n\nAs he jumped to his feet, revolver swiftly in his right hand, he could see the native pointing to the sky. \"Quick, come!\" he restated as he rushed back outdoors. As Adam stepped outside, he immediately recognized the sound of the sonic booms caused by several ships hitting the planet's upper atmosphere.\n\nWithin seconds, the sky was littered with military jets flying overhead, no doubt doing scans of the ground below as Dalton broke a red flare across his upper thigh and threw it to the ground. The markings on the ships as they flew overhead were unmistakable. They were the Allied Colonial Forces, Sarah's father had arrived.\n\nAs the ships broke into formation and began doing defensive flyovers, several heavily armored space to surface choppers began a descent, followed by a solid chrome shuttle. The choppers landed with a compelling thump as dozens of tactical soldiers, much like that of Roman's former employer, began doing security sweeps of the village and surrounding areas. As the shuttle touched down,\n\nSarah sprinted to reunite with her father, who had exited and was waiting with open arms. He was a tall, well dressed man who obviously had the respect of his men. His white hair and peppered beard were indications that he had plenty of experience, and to the crew's delight, he had indeed brought a lot of firepower with him.\n\nRather than introduce himself to her father, Adam quickly explained Troy's condition and need of medical treatment, prompting a team to attend to the young man. Seeing the severity of his wounds, they escorted Troy to a nearby chopper, who was carried in the arms of Roman Raines.\n\n\"We picked up a small Legion fleet of ships approaching as we hit orbit. No doubt locked onto your distress call as well, may be a bit of a bumpy ride out.\" Commander Blaine said quickly to the crew as he hurried Sarah to his private shuttle. The remaining members of the crew, including the Captain, hopped aboard one of the choppers.\n\n\"Thank you for the drink my friend, we will return one day soon enough.\" Dalton said as he boarded, arms full of the local tonic of choice, doing his best to wave for a moment before the chopper door came to a close.\n\nThey had only been airborne a couple of minutes when everyone heard the first explosion. Moments later, it was followed by several more thundering booms as dozens of ships began firing tracer rounds. Adam was in a position to see out of one of the small windows of the crew area, and was simply in awe of the firepower that he lay witness to. Legion ships, three capital ships from what he counted, escorted by several smaller cruiser style ships. He only counted one capital ship bearing the Colonial marking, although there were wave after wave of ship to ship fighters that had launched from it.\n\nHe had known for a while that the star system was on the verge of a Civil War, however he had no intentions of being caught in the middle. He quickly realized, however, with the throaty sound of the ship's pounding cannons; that he was indeed witnessing the first acts of this inevitable clashing of the system's two powers.\n\nAs their chopper began docking to the Colonial capital ship, the entire crew could see that it had taken a brutal beating in an effort to rescue them. The docking area looked more like a make shift hospital as dozens of wounded were being pulled from Spartan star fighters as dozens more were suiting up to launch and try to replace the fallen. Soon after their craft had successfully landed and the rest were accounted for, a sequence of loud beeps rang throughout the ship. None of Adam's crew knew Colonial code, although it obviously seemed to be some type of general retreat order for the fleet, who began landing in the docking bay by the dozens.\n\nIt was only a few minutes after the loud screeches of military code that the capital ship began doing a full burn, all four of the huge thrust engines firing as the huge space fortress had soon put a great deal of distance between the fight and themselves.\n\n\"Father, this is Captain Adam Michaels. Adam, my father, Trevor Blaine.\" Sarah said nervously as she entered the heavily guarded bridge area of the ship along side her new found love.\n\n\"Captain, welcome aboard the Colonial Star Five,\" Commander Blaine said, firmly shaking Adam's hand for a moment before hugging his daughter with great joy. \"We were able to bring your ship up from the surface before jumping away, my engineers are working on it for you as we speak.\" Blaine added, bringing a smile to Adam's face.\n\n\"That's great news. Thank you very much, for the rescue as well as the hospitality.\" Adam replied, much politer than usual.\n\n\"I'm afraid I do have some bad news. Our scout teams have reported that Legion forces have combed the uncharted planet. There is a good possibility that the native camp you were holding up in has been wiped out.\" Blaine said, reading from a paper report he held in his hands at the moment.\n\nMichaels was taken back by the news, almost putting him in tears. \"I don't understand that. They were of no threat to anyone. They had nothing to do with any kind of war, they were just innocent people; good people trying to survive.\" Michaels replied dramatically.\n\n\"I understand your frustration Captain. It's that very same reasoning that led to my taking a position with the Colonial Army. I will not fight under a flag who's military slaughters innocent human beings. The sole purpose of the Colonial Alliance is to put an end to the tyranny and death that the Legion uses to maintain its power,\" Blaine replied. \"I must attend to repairs throughout the ship Captain, I apologize. However I would like to talk to you about this in much greater detail a bit later?\" the Commander asked.\n\n\"Of course. Again, thank you.\" Adam replied, ending the tense conversation with a quick handshake.\n\n\"What in the fuck is that?\" Dalton said to Kelly as he lowered a shiny metal cup from his mouth in awe.\n\nNeither of them had ever seen anything like it before. Standing nearly seven and a half feet tall, it was a soldier of some type, pure titanium exoskeleton with mechanical features intertwined with human bone underneath; its solid steel skull moving from side to side as the soldier patrolled that area.\n\n\"First time seeing a Goliath unit huh?\" one of the Colonial engineers said, raising his head from the thruster of the Gunship that was undergoing repairs by himself as well as Kato. \"They're a spectacle, no doubt about it. If you look closely at its right arm, you'll see that it's nothing more than a mini gun built around a titanium rod, damn things can fire up to five hundred armor piercing rounds per minute. That's enough to take down a small aircraft or a whole lot of anything on foot.\" the engineer added before turning back to continue working on repairs.\n\n\"Yea, a shit load.\" Dalton said in amazement as he took another long drink of his brew, unsuccessfully offering a sip to Kelly.\n\nRoman sat in Troy's room patiently waiting for a miracle to happen.\n\nHe never really considered himself to be a religious person, although he had to wonder why any God would allow such a young child to lay here like this. Troy should be out doing things that normal children do, like playing games of chance or pulling pranks on one another. Yet here he was, no family, no home and very little chance of surviving. Maybe he felt guilty, the boy having help save his life only to find himself fighting for his own.\n\nMaybe it was the need to be there for a young man who was doomed to the same kind of childhood he had thrown on him. Being homeless with no family and no means of survival was the biggest reason he had joined the Gali Army to begin with, or at least what he had claimed to be the Gali Army. When a person is faced with insurmountable odds like that, one of two things happens. Either you succumb to the odds that have been stacked against you, or you say fuck the odds and learn to take what you need. That was his attitude, and that's what made him such a dangerous person. Roman quickly stood to his feet as Troy's doctor entered the room.\n\n\"The plan is a simple one,\" Commander Blaine said as he looked throughout the crowd, which included Adam, Sarah and Dalton among many high ranking military officers and several dozen of the best soldiers that the Colonies had to offer. \"A small team inserts near the heavily fortified compound currently being used as a staging area for the Legion, uses timed explosives to take out its major surface to air defense systems. We then hit them in force, crippling their ability to defend themselves, much less continue killing innocent civilians.\" he added, getting nods of encouragement from most of the room as well as a few loud chants of Colonial patriotism.\n\n\"Captain Adam Michaels will lead the first team, which will be comprised of highly trained Spec Ops soldiers as well as a handful of Husk loyalist warriors.\" the Commander said, immediately taking the breath of his daughter Sarah.\n\n\"You can't!\" she said in a low but frantic voice, having fallen in love with a man that would be walking into a hornet's nest of murderers.\n\n\"Someone has to show these bastards that they aren't the highest on the food chain, not anymore.\" Adam responded proudly.\n\n\"That someone would be me,\" Roman said as he entered the room, turning the head of everyone as he did so. \"I'll go in his place.\" Roman added, approaching the Commander.\n\n\"I appreciate the offer friend, however, this mission is for only the highest qualified of soldi, .\" Commander Blaine had said, trying to reply as two of his personal escort soldiers approached Roman, holding him at the gunpoint of their battle rifles.\n\nPausing for a moment, clearly thinking of his next move, Roman struck one of the soldiers in the neck area, grabbing the rifle from his clutches as he fell to the ground. Before the second soldier had time to respond, Roman pulled two vital pins from the gun, disassembling it into three large pieces and using the stock that was no longer attached to the weapon, slicing the soldier across the face and rendering him defenseless.\n\nSeveral more soldiers rushed into the room, weapons drawn and ready to kill if it meant protecting the Commander.\n\n\"I'm the most qualified son of a bitch in this room. All I know is killing, and I'm particularly fond of killing Hunters, which also makes me the most dangerous,\" Roman said, throwing the cluster of loose combat rifle parts onto the ground; showing Blaine that he had no intentions of harming him. \"You just give me a weapon and tell everyone else to follow close behind and pick up as many of the body parts as they can; I'll kill every one of the bastards myself, and the weapon is optional.\" Roman added, having gotten the news that Troy would eventually recover to full health and feeling in the mood for revenge.\n\n\"I can see you are indeed qualified. Captain?\" the Commander said, asking permission before allowing Roman to go in his stead as armed soldiers continued to hold Roman at gunpoint.\n\nLooking at Sarah for several tense moments, Adam once again focused his attention on the Commander. \"I owe this man a great deal. My life, an apology,\" Adam said, turning to Roman with an apologetic glance. \"If it's his wish to go in my place, then all I ask is he kill as many Hunters as possible.\" Michaels added, smiling at the natural born killer.\n\nIndeed, the plan was a solid one. From the personnel who would infiltrate the stronghold, to the weapons and tactics that would be used once they arrived and now the addition of Roman, whose hatred for Hunters nearly matched his skill in combat. A solid plan indeed. It would have to be, the Legion and its Hunter faithful were no pushovers. One of the more feared races in the charted star system, now with the backing of the Legion army as well as the news that Commander Blaine was about to unveil, the Hunters were even more of a solid opponent.\n\n\"We have confirmed through spies within the Legion Army that the Hunters have genetically developed a new breed of killer,\" Blaine said as the room quickly became deathly silent. \"A super soldier if you will, matching many of the dimensions of our own Goliath units, the Hunters are calling this unit the Fang.\" the Commander added as he pressed a couple of buttons on the podium that stood in front of him, displaying a series of photos onto the wall behind him with vivid detail.\n\n\"We are not exactly sure how many Fangs exist, only that they are currently being used as more of a tank, in terms of being accompanied by a small squad of Hunters. We believe there are not many of them yet, which is why it is imperative that we strike them now, before they have a chance to manufacture any more.\" Blaine added as he waited for a response from anyone in the crowd of gathered military brass and trained warriors.\n\n\"Hell, they don't look that tough to me!\" Dalton proclaimed loudly, as the rest of the room grew loud in support of his statement. He had effectively bolstered the moral of the entire room, sadly, he would remember almost none of it as a side effect of his current drinking binge.\n\nHelping both fallen soldiers to their feet, Roman glanced into the Commander's direction with a look as serious as death itself. \"Just give me a weapon, point me in the right direction and watch what happens.\" he said, slowly leaving the room to check on Troy before the upcoming battle of savages was to take place.\n\n\"He's recovering much faster than we anticipated. In due time the boy will be in perfect health.\" one of the Colonial doctors told Roman as they both stood outside of the ship's enormous infirmary, glancing through a reinforced window made of thick and frothy glass.\n\nHe had to recover quickly, it was a sign of his toughness. He would need plenty of that in the years to come, as life beat him down he would have to be tough enough to withstand the punishment and keep going. That was the way of things, the true mark of a warrior.\n\nAs Roman entered the room to see the young boy, he was amazed at how far he had come in the healing process, several of his neck vertebrae crushed, yet he sat up in his bed unassisted.\n\n\"Did I do good Roman?\" Troy asked, wondering if his knife thrust into the Husk had met his teacher's approval. It was the first time in many years that Roman found himself fighting back tears. Eyes watering as he tried to dissipate his extreme anger against the Husk and his overwhelming feeling of joy, knowing Troy would survive something that he should have never even been involved with.\n\n\"Yes, you did good. Without your help, I wouldn't have made it. You saved all of us.\" Roman replied as he pulled up a chair beside the young man's bed.\n\nHe could see the happiness on Troy's face as he began to think of himself as an important part of the crew.\n\n\"Listen, I have to leave in a few hours to take care of some business. Some other people need that same kind of help. While I'm gone, I need you to look after the crew, can you do that?\" Roman said, handing the boy a brand new combat knife he had collected from the ship's armory.\n\nSeeing Troy's face light up, smiling from ear to ear as he eagerly snatched the blade; nearly was more than Roman could handle emotionally. To watch a young child go through losing his parents, nearly dying at the hands of some piece of shit mercenary and then be so enthusiastic about something as small as a blade. Roman held back, choosing instead to funnel his emotion into ending as many lives of the bastards who force children like Troy down this road, bastards like the Hunters.\n\nDeath, imprisonment, torture; none of these things concerned Roman any longer. He had become a monster, one that was hellbent on making the star system a better place to live, one slaying at a time.\n\nAfter Troy had fallen asleep, Roman waited a few minutes to make sure the boy was comfortable before leaving the infirmary, passing Captain Michaels as made his way into the main hall of the ship.\n\n\"Troy alright?\" Adam asked. Roman nodded his head, letting the Captain know that he was fine.\n\n\"Dunno if it was the alcohol talking or he has revenge on his mind, either way I just wanted you to know that Dalton pitched a fit on me, demanding to go with you and the rest of the first strike team.\" Michaels said. A few moments of silence passed, obviously due largely to the Captain having pulled a gun on Roman not so long ago.\n\n\"He's a hell of a shot, I'm sure there will be a few more Hunters laying dead if he's with us.\" Roman finally replied confidently.\n\n\"Listen,\" Michaels said, stopping Roman in his tracks. \"You get in, plant the explosives and survive long enough for us to get there. You got my word, I'll get you back here in one piece.\"\n\nStanding silent for a few seconds, the former Gali warrior finally looked up at Adam with his fiery but determined eyes. \"Just look after Troy while I'm gone.\" Roman responded.\n\n\"You got it.\" Michaels answered as he watched Roman walk to the end of the narrow wide hallway before turning to make his way back to the armory.\n\nIt was a position that he had been in many times over. Roman sat in the back of a Chopper, waiting patiently as the rest of the crew for the operation slowly climbed aboard. Dalton eventually made his way onto the skiff, strangely enough appearing as sober as Roman had ever seen him.\n\n\"Stay calm. About to be something come through here that you don't want to see. Just remember that we are all on the same team.\" Dalton said softly, as the words had just finished escaping his lips when two heavily armored Husk soldiers boarded.\n\n\"Just stay calm man.\" Dalton added, holding his hand near the chest of his friend as he saw the fury of hell in his eyes.\n\n\"Sorry about the young boy.\" the first of the two Husk said, stopping in front of Roman and speaking with true sincerity.\n\nSitting calmly, or at least it appeared, Roman remained silent until the Husk gave up hope for a response and made his way past the men in the direction of an empty seat. Seizing the moment, Roman lunged towards the Husk, pushing him to the ground while holding a combat blade to his throat.\n\nThe second Husk tried to intervene, only to have his face come inches from the deathly hollow barrel of Dalton's pump action shotgun.\n\n\"No offense friend, but if you take another step towards 'em, not even you are fast enough to escape the shell in this chamber.\" Dalton said, wondering if the Husk was indeed fast enough.\n\n\"You ever so much as speak of the boy again, I'll make sure it's the last words that fall from your mouth.\" Roman said, daring the monster to call his bluff.\n\n\"ENOUGH!\" one of the Colonial soldiers said, walking back from the cockpit area into the passenger section of the chopper. Pulling his sidearm out and pointing it daringly at both Roman and the Husk.\n\n\"This ends now. I'm Lieutenant Avery, I'm in charge of this operation and I swear to whatever God it is that you believe in, if this doesn't end here and now, I will personally shoot the both of you and dump you out of the side of the Chopper. Now, let him up.\" the Lieutenant said in a commanding voice, his body decked out in the Colonial blue and gray coloring.\n\nRoman slowly let the Husk up, easing the edge of his blade from the monster's throat.\n\n\"Wanna be careful with that blade, next time you might not be lucky enough to have him save your ass.\" the Husk said with a smile as he slowly pushed himself to his feet.\n\n\"I make my own luck.\" Roman said confidently as he once again took his seat beside Dalton, who removed his shotgun as the second Husk was quick to be seated. As he started to follow Roman to where he sat, the Husk reached for his long blade, which was attached to the long of his leg.\n\n\"Steiner,\" the Lieutenant said loudly, sliding the top of his pistol back into the ready position. \"Sit your fucking ass down, or make no mistake, they will be scrubbing your brain fragments from the inside of this ship before we launch.\"\n\n\"Now look who's getting lucky.\" Roman said sarcastically as Steiner slowly made his way to be seated, upset that a fight would not ensue between the two, at least not at the moment.\n\n\"You think they're gonna try and kill us the first chance they get?\" Dalton asked his friend.\n\n\"You think it matters if they do?\" Roman replied, letting Dalton know that he planned to kill anyone who stood in his way of reaping revenge for Troy's trauma.\n\n\"Either one of them makes a move on the other, shoot 'em.\" the Lieutenant said to another one of the operation's soldiers, this one wearing solid blue with heavy gray leather markings, signifying the equivalent of Colonial Special Forces.\n\nAs the skiff began to lift off, turning before exiting the launch area of the Capital Ship; Captain Michaels and Sarah were among the crowd that had gathered to watch the departure.\"Well, I had Roman figured out wrong, looks like. I thought for sure he'd try and kill a damn Husk,\" Adam said quietly to Sarah, laughing under his breath as the blast of the chopper hitting launch speed quickly drowned out any noise thereafter. \"Yep, I'm proud of him for behaving so civilized.\" Adam added.\n\nThough a small exterior window inside the infirmary, Troy watched as the skiff went into full burnout, disappearing seconds after it had launched from the huge military carrier. He wondered what Roman and his group of soldiers might encounter, wished that he was along with them for the ride and most of all, hoped that man he quickly began to look up to would make it back safely.\n\n\"Bumpy ride, damn you would think with all of this money they are throwing around they would have designed a more comfortable seat.\" Dalton said aloud as he glanced around at the other soldiers in the passenger area, the strong glimmer of red light filling the cabin.\n\n\"Built for durability, not comfort.\" one of the soldiers responded, his solid blue helmet and visor giving away the fact that he was the only sniper among the group. If that wasn't obvious enough, he held a single barrel weapon that stood nearly three feet high, the butt of the weapon resting on the floor of the chopper.\n\n\"Damn fine piece you got there.\" Dalton replied, using the line that he had reserved solely for weapons and women.\n\n\"Thanks. Thermal EM scope let's me fire from nearly two clicks out and cut a man in half.\" the sniper replied, obviously good at his trade.\n\n\"I prefer to kill them up close myself.\" Steiner added, joining the conversation unexpectedly; staring directly at Roman the entire length of the comment. A long pause between the elite fighters, Dalton finally nodded his approval on the fighting tactics of the Husk.\n\n\"Makes two of us. Give me a shotgun any day.\" Dalton responded, if nothing else, to try an built a rapport with Steiner before turning his back on him once the fighting started.\n\n\"I have to admit Commander Blaine, I'm impressed.\" Captain Michaels said \"I didn't expect to see this many soldiers.\" as he looked over a short metal guardrail from above, watching thousands of Colonial soldiers begin to mobilize.\n\n\"The fate of most of these men, if not all of them, rest on the shoulders of the men aboard that chopper,\" Blaine said. \"If they don't get rid of the surface to air defenses, most of these men will be killed long before they reach the planet's surface.\" he added.\n\nAdam didn't doubt for one second the ability of either Roman or Dalton, rather, he worried about what they were flying into. So little was known of this new strain of Hunter, and he had a hunch that no matter how tough the Fang proved to be, neither man would even consider backing down.\n\n\"Adam, I've seen your warrant file,\" the Commander said. Although Michaels didn't reply in words, his expression was one of shame. \"The truth is I looked them over thoroughly, and to be honest, I didn't see a single charge listed that I feel I should be worried about. I think maybe your heart is in the right place and you've just been tangled up with the wrong kind of crowd.\" Blaine added, having no idea how true those words rang to Adam's ears.\n\n\"I've also read your military file, you fought in the Glimmerian Wars.\" the Commander said.\n\n\"That was a long time ago.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"Once a soldier, always a soldier. At least that's my belief.\" Blaine replied.\n\n\"What I'm getting at Adam, is I believe you would be a good fit here in the Colonial Army. You have the right kind of experience, a heart for the innocent and the love of my daughter.\" he added.\n\nCompletely surprised by the statement, Adam soon realized that their love for one another could no longer be kept a secret, no matter how hard they had tried.\n\n\"A clean start. That's what I'm offering you Adam. A chance to wipe your criminal record clean and become a part of the solution instead of the problem, you and the rest of your crew as well.\" Blaine said. Deep in thought over the possibility of starting fresh, the Captain finally looked at the Commander long enough to reply.\n\n\"I'll think it over and speak with my crew.\" Commander Blaine nodded his approval.\n\n\"Of course Adam, of course.\" the Commander replied as he walked down the metal steps nearby to meet with the troops below in an attempt to keep moral up.\n\n\"Two minutes to touchdown,\" Lieutenant Avery yelled to the soldiers in the passenger area of the chopper. \"Strike team goes first, Sweeper team goes second and sniper is with me, understood?\" the Lieutenant added, trying his best to talk loud enough to be heard through the roar of the ship's engines on decent.\n\nThe soldiers all nodded in compliance as the chopper began a solid nose dive, the overhead light changing to yellow as the entire cabin grew bright enough to see the look on everyone's faces. Dalton counted a total of ten souls aboard, including himself and the Lieutenant.\n\n\"I know it's a bad time, but which team are we again?\" Dalton asked Roman in a calm voice. Gaining an immediate stare from his friend, who was glassy eyed with adrenaline.\n\n\"Just follow me and shoot any son of a bitch who shoots at you.\" Roman replied calmly.\n\nThe chopper spun around, doing nearly a two hundred degree turn as it abruptly hit the ground, the cabin light switching from yellow to green.\n\n\"Go, go!\" Lieutenant Avery yelled as the first four soldiers jumped off, all wearing Colonial Special Ops clothing; the standard issue dark blue with brown leather trim covering them from the neck to boot line. As they exited the craft, panning around the darkness with heartbeat sensors attached to their battle rifles, the second group of four hit the ground.\n\nRoman, Dalton, Steiner and his Husk ally all four began searching the immediate area around the chopper, before finally grouping up with the first team. The last off were the sniper and the Lieutenant. Sprinting for the highest ground in the area, the sniper took position on top of a grassy hill, the wavy green blades at least two foot tall. He quickly pulled a thermal blanket over everything but his head and arms, the metal interior of the blanket setup to deflect any type of heat signatures that his body may give off, while the exterior of the blanket was a green camouflage that was designed to blend in with any surrounding. As he quickly set up his long range rifle, snapping it into a portable tripod; he zoomed the scope around to pick up any hostiles who may have seen the ship's approach.\n\n\"I got nothing in the scope, you're all clear.\" the sniper said as the Lieutenant waved the ship off, taking only seconds before it had disappeared into the night sky.\n\n\"Form up,\" Avery said into his com unit, as the remaining eight men bent to a knee close together, waiting on their commanding officer. \"Strike team, move ahead and take out any patrols on the perimeter of the compound. Sweeper team on me.\" the Lieutenant said as the four Colonial Spec Ops soldiers instantly began a defensive sprint into the direction of the compound, which sat in the distance about a quarter of a mile.\n\n\"Sweeper team, we wait for them to clear the perimeter, then we move up and plant the explosives. Should be a couple of three hundred inch rail guns and a control box near the rear of the largest dwelling that controls the surface to air missiles. We need to take out all three in order to give the Colonial Army a clean landing. Understood?\" Avery said as everyone agreed and waited for a signal from the strike team ahead.\n\nThe signal never came. \"Eyes, got anything in the scope?\" the Lieutenant asked.\n\n\"Negative, I got nothing.\" the sniper replied.\n\n\"Something is wrong. They've been gone way too long.\" Roman said quietly in the direction of Avery.\n\n\"Strike team, come in,\" the Lieutenant said into the com unit, waiting an extended period of time for a response that never came. \"Fuck,\" Lieutenant Avery yelled in a low voice as he contemplated his options. \"Eyes, we are moving up. Keep your fucking eye on that scope, any marks show up, don't hesitate to fire at will!\" Avery said as he looked around at the four men.\n\n\"Fire your weapons only as a last resort. Now move out.\" the Lieutenant said as they began slowly making their way to the compound, taking extra precaution with every step.\n\nThe two Husk soldiers were in lead of the group, with Roman and Dalton following loosely behind them and Avery right on their footsteps. Stopping at the security fencing, the group saw a hole that had been made only minutes ago by the Spec Ops team.\n\n\"Slowly.\" the Lieutenant said as he motioned for the soldiers to continue through the break in the fencing. The first two Husk made their way through and threw their backs to the wall to cover the entrance of the other three men. Once everyone was inside, the first rail gun was in sight, only feet away from their current position out in the open. Waiting several minutes to ensure that they had not been detected, Avery finally gave the go ahead to the group; the explosives had to be planted.\n\nAs the first Husk slowly emerged from the corner into the open, he was immediately hit with a high caliber round from a rifle in the distance, the shell piercing his neck, sending him flailing to the ground. The shot hadn't killed him, but left him defenseless on the ground, reeling in pain as he bit down on his arm to prevent making noise that would give the group's position away. Two more suppressed shots followed, one striking his chest and the other piercing the back of his skull and killing him the very moment. A third shot was fired, this time from behind the group. \"Got him, that last shot gave me his position.\" the Colonial sniper said after eliminating he Legion's sniper.\n\n\"Scanning the area, looks all clear but there is a damn good chance that he wasn't working alone.\" the sniper said as Steiner sprinted to plant the satchel of explosives, glancing only for a moment at his friend who lay in a pool of his own blood. With the charges in place, Steiner grabbed the body of his fallen clansman as he returned to the group, trying to remain out of sight.\n\n\"Surface to air missiles are the most likely to cause trouble for the Colonial Fleet, so they need to go first,\" Lieutenant Avery said, checking a map scan of the Hunter compound. According to the map, the STA Control Room should be in this building.\" he added, pointing to a small building on the computerized blueprint.\n\n\"Eyes open, Steiner take point, move out.\" the Lieutenant said quietly, putting the map away and once again firming his grip on the combat pistol.\n\nAs the approached the marked building, Avery checked his watch before informing the rest of the group that the Colonial force would be striking in less than twenty-two hours. \"Still plenty of time, go in quietly and don't get sloppy. Now move!\" the Lieutenant said quietly as Steiner pushed the large red door, which was made of reinforced red steel, opening it slowly with a small creaking sound.\n\nThe room was pitch dark, as Steiner moved inside slowly, his large shotgun in front and at the ready. Following closely behind, Roman and Dalton moved inside of the military target, Roman with a standard issue rifle while Dalton insisted on using his not so standard pump shotgun.\n\nSuddenly, the interior lights came on, giving the soldiers an immediate picture of the building's interior, which was flooded with Legion soldiers who had all four of the strike team members kneeling at gunpoint.\n\n\"You're late.\" one of the ranking Legion officers said calmly as Lieutenant Avery pointed his pistol directly at the skull of Roman.\n\n\"I'm late because your damn sniper pinned us down.\" Avery replied sternly.\n\n\"Anwick requested you hold these three until he arrives.\" Avery said with a more relaxed tone as the Legion officer nodded.\n\n\"You should know, I make it a point to kill anybody who pulls a gun on me twice.\" Roman said calmly, his hands behind his head.\n\n\"I'll make a note of it.\" Avery replied, motioning a group of the Legion soldiers to lead Steiner, Roman and Dalton to a holding cell.\n\nAs they were leaving the large storage area, they were unfortunate witnesses to Legion soldiers firing a single into the head of each of the strike team members, killing them on the spot.\n\nAs they arrived to the holding area, the Colonial sniper lay in the corner of the room, badly beaten and unable to stand.\n\n\"Get inside you Colonial pieces of shit!\" one of the Legion soldiers said, pushing Steiner into the cell with the backside of his rifle.\n\n\"Looks like I don't want to kill you so badly after all.\" Steiner said to Roman as Dalton tried helping the sniper to his feet.\n\n\"We got to warn the Fleet, they, there is an entire regiment of Legion soldiers here, Commander Blaine is walking right into a trap.\" the sniper managed to say as he continued to fight for a deep breath.\n\n\"First thing's first. We gotta get out of this holding cell.\" Roman said with purpose as he extended his hand to the much larger, former foe Steiner.\n\nAfter the two combat juggernauts shook hands, which sent a shiver up the spine of Dalton, who imagined the possibilities of both men fighting together; they began pacing the cell and looking for anything that may aid in their escape.\n\n\"So, you're thinking my father's offer over seriously then?\" Sarah asked as Michaels read through a stack of papers in his room aboard the Colonial Star Five.\n\n\"Of course, just the idea of starting over scares the hell out of me.\" Michaels replied, continuing to glance at unclassified military reports as he tried to get himself up to speed on the war between the Colonial and Legion armies.\n\n\"Well, you know, starting over with me at your side might not be such a bad thing.\" Sarah said convincingly as she slowly walked over to him, putting her arms around his neck passionately.\n\n\"Wait.\" Adam said, jumping to his feet.\n\n\"Wait? I thought that's what you wanted? What we both wanted?\" Sarah said, very confused by the Captain's sudden change of heart.\n\n\"No, wait.\" Michaels said, holding a single piece of paper in his hand, then grabbing several more as he read them thoroughly.\n\n\"Who was in charge of your security detail back on Tameca?\" Michaels asked impatiently.\n\n\"Um, Lieutenant Avery, I think, why?\" she asked curiously.\n\nAdam bolted out of his room without explanation, several papers tightly in his grasp as he sprinted through the halls of the huge ship on his way to the Commander's quarters. Everyone he passed taking a second to watch his movements, wondering about his sense of urgency.\n\n\"Commander, Adam Michaels here to see you sir?\" a Colonial soldier said softly, as he held the door of Blaine's cabin open.\n\n\"By all means, send him in.\" the Commander said politely as he sat in a very lush leather chair behind a huge wooden desk that looked as sturdy as the ship it rested on.\n\n\"Adam, I take it that you have thought on my offer?\" Commander Blaine said hopefully.\n\nThrowing a small stack of documents onto the desk, Adam tried for a few seconds to catch his breath. \"It's a trap.\" the Captain finally managed to squeeze from his lungs.\n\n\"Excuse me?\" Blaine said, standing out of the chair in search of an answer.\n\n\"Lieutenant Avery is working with the Legion. Right here in the documents are at least a dozen cases where his group came under assault from either Legion or Hunter forces, every single time he was the only one to survive. The Hunters do not leave survivors, trust me on that one.\" Michaels said confidently.\n\n\"Adam, that's outrageous. Avery is one of my most trusted officers.\" Blaine replied skeptically.\n\n\"Commander, your daughter's security detail back on Tameca, Avery survived that assault as well. Believe me, I met the monsters behind that, we damn near didn't make it out of there ourselves.\" Adam said in an attempt to force the Commander to see reason.\n\n\"He's right father, Lieutenant Avery was acting strange that entire day. Our group was hit by four Hunters as well as a full squad of Legion soldiers. When I was taken into custody, I thought for sure that we would surely die, the rest of my detail already lay slain.\" Sarah said, arriving at her father's quarters and nodding in the direction of Captain Michaels to let him know that he had her support.\n\nCommander Blaine stood silent for several very long moments, trying to connect the dots inside his mind.\n\n\"Commander, two of my crew are with the strike team. All I ask is the use of a ship; give me a chance to rescue them if I'm right about this.\" Michaels said.\n\n\"If you're wrong?\" Blaine asked quietly.\n\n\"If I'm wrong, then I will apologize to Avery myself. You told me that my heart was in the right place, well my heart tells me that our men are in trouble.\" Michaels responded.\n\n\"Alright. I'll give you a chopper and a four man strike team, on one condition,\" the Commander said as he slid a small blue box across the fine wood grain of the desk into the direction of Adam. As Michaels slowly opened the box, he was nearly taken over with emotion as he saw the insignia medallion of a Colonial Lieutenant. \"The only way any of the soldiers on this ship will execute an order from you, is if you are a commanding officer. Besides, I know I can trust you with my daughter's life.\" Blaine said firmly.\n\n\"Sarah's life?\" Adam asked, confused.\n\n\"That's right. You don't honestly think I plan on letting the man I'm in love with go it alone do you?\" Sarah relied.\n\n\"But I don't thin... \" Adam began to respond as he was quickly cut off by Commander Blaine.\n\n\"Don't worry Lieutenant, she's plenty capable. Who do you think trained many of the Special Ops soldiers aboard this ship?\" Adam gave a long, blank stare in her direction.\n\n\"I know, I know. Us girls and our secrets.\" Sarah said as she smiled wide.\n\n\"You have a go Lieutenant.\" Commander Blaine said as Michaels was still in shock over the events of the past several minutes.\n\n\"Yes sir.\" Adam finally replied, turning to leave the Commander's quarters.\n\n\"So we wait for Anwick to arrive, more than likely escorted by a couple more Hunters, and then we overpower them as soon as the cell door opens? Seriously? That's the plan?\" Dalton asked in a joking manner.\n\n\"Do you see any other way out?\" Roman replied, confirming the plan he had helped Steiner design.\n\n\"Look, I'm one for a fight, don't get me wrong. Hell, I'm even one for fighting against the odds; but damn, we are talking about a small group of heavily armed HUNTERS HERE,\" Dalton replied loudly. \"We are talking suicide and everyone in here knows it!\" he added.\n\n\"They will kill us regardless. We were only spared so the Hunters could slay us with their own hands.\" Steiner replied.\n\n\"So let's think of something that doesn't involve everyone in this fucking jail cell dying!\" Dalton responded animatedly.\n\n\"All systems are checking out fine.\" Kelly said as she flipped several switches at the helm of the reconstructed Gunship. It still had plenty of wrench time ahead, but the craft was starting to slowly look like a spaceship as a small crew had joined Kato in working on it around the clock.\n\n\"Getting good readings on life support, navigational and cabin pressure.\" she added, yelling the information out of a small hole in the side of the bridge that was being reinforced with plated steel.\n\nThe mechanical crew continued working with engineers as several Spartan model fighter ships also were receiving repairs in the same area of the Colonial vessel. Kato had paused for a few moments, watching the welding torches piecing the small ship to ship fighters back together; wondering what it must be like to fly something that was incredibly fast. The speed was offset by the disadvantage of having only a dual gun mounted to each wing that was capable of firing quick bursts of tracer rounds. It sounded good in theory, however, against a larger ship the tracers were only potent when the Spartans attacked in great numbers.\n\n\"I'm heading down ahead of the fleet.\" Adam said. Kato pulled himself the rest of the way out of the confines of one of the ship's thrusters long enough to see Adam decked out in the Colonial blue and gray, complete with his Lieutenant insignia pinned to the collar of his tightly pressed shirt.\n\n\"I like what you guys have done with the ship. Good job. I'll be back soon enough.\" Michaels said, nodding his approval before walking further down the maintenance deck.\n\n\"What was that all about?\" Kelly asked, glaring through the temporary hole of the Bridge.\n\n\"I dunno. Did he shave or something?\" Kato replied, clueless as to Adam's life altering decision to join the fleet. Grease smeared across his face as he held a massive chrome wrench in his right hand, once again pushing the creeper he rested on back under the work at hand.\n\nAdam stood there for several tense moments, looking at the four man team of soldiers that had been assigned to him. Already seated aboard the Colonial chopper, they were ready to launch at the order of the newly pinned Lieutenant.\n\n\"Alright, listen up. \"I'm sure you all have ready the mission brief and I'm confident that you know what you are doing. Simply put, we get in, get our soldiers and get out. Safely. All weapons stay suppressed unless ordered otherwise. If the intelligence on Lieutenant Avery is incorrect, we will then fall under his command and assist the first team with operations until the Colonial Fleet arrives. Any questions?\" Lieutenant Michaels asked as the soldiers simply nodded firmly in compliance before looking into the direction of the loading door on the craft.\n\nSarah had joined the group, wearing an elegant red colored dress, she had accented her already perfect face with vibrant makeup and had her hair arranged as if she were about to attend a social dinner. Adam stood there speechless, wondering how many more tricks the woman of his dreams had up her sleeve.\n\n\"What? A girl's gotta look good.\" Sarah said comically as she finished boarding the chopper, hoisting a large black combat rifle in her right arm.\n\n\"Yes, you do.\" Adam replied as he sat down in one of the rough black leather seats near the cockpit area, nothing short of speechless.\n\n\"We've been cleared by the bridge sir. On your order.\" the pilot said in a disciplined tone as Lieutenant Michaels gave the go ahead, looking one last time at the safe confines of Colonial Star Five. With his order, the chopper slowly pulled from the thick steel flooring of the shipping bay, turning slowly as several of the crew aboard the capital ship looked on. Seconds later, the small craft executed a full burn, disappearing from sight and showing up on the Star Five's radar system.\n\n\"I'm telling you, it'll work,\" Dalton said loudly to the others, referring to his plan to stage a fight and try to lure one of the less prominent Legion guards to the cell. \"I saw Adam do it once in the public jail on Star City.\" he added.\n\n\"A little difference between a local jail on a space station and a heavily fortified compound led by Hunters.\" Steiner replied grimly.\n\n\"It's the best plan so far.\" the Colonial sniper said, speaking up for the first time since being reunited with the group.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Dalton replied sincerely. \"What's your name again chief?\" Dalton asked. \"Corporal Lassiter.\" the sniper replied, obviously still reeling from the injuries he had suffered during his interrogation time.\n\n\"See, I figure we stage a fight. Hell, Roman and the Husk population aren't exactly on the best of terms anyway. The guards come in to shake down the cell, we turn on 'em and get the fuck out of here.\" Dalton said, as if he were throwing a sales pitch for a new home, even closing things with his own variation of a realtor's smile.\n\n\"Sounds like a solid enough plan.\" Lieutenant Avery said as he approached the cell. Roman cut his eyes at Dalton for a moment, as if to mentally slap him across the face, before turning his attention back to Avery. \"Now, let me tell you a really solid plan. The Colonial Fleet arrives, we purposely hold back our rail guns and surface to air missiles, convincing them that you idiots were successful. Then, once they are far enough in, we launch everything we have from the far side of the planet. They will be outnumbered at least three times over, crushing the backbone of the Colonial Army with one fail swoop.\"\n\nThe men stood there for a moment before Roman finally approached the front of the cell; thick steel bars the only thing separating him from Avery.\n\n\"So how much do they offer a gutless piece of shit like you to turn on his own kind?\" Roman asked. Laughing for a moment, Avery returned the stone glare of Roman.\n\n\"Enough. Ask your friend Lassiter back there, they made us both the same offer, he was just too proud to take it.\" Avery replied.\n\nRoman glanced back at the sniper for a moment, nodding his appreciation.\n\n\"He'll live to see the end of this war. You won't.\" Roman replied, walking away from the front of the cell.\n\n\"So sure are you about that? I plan to kill you myself when the Hunters arrive.\" Avery said confidently.\n\n\"Yea, I haven't heard that line before.\" Roman replied, sitting down beside Lassiter in the corner of the cell.\n\n\"Soon.\" Avery replied, walking away to regroup with his security detail of two Legion soldiers.\n\nKato slid out from his workspace for a moment, wiping his face of excess grease and obviously in deep thought. He quickly grabbed a piece of scrap paper from his workbench and began writing several items down in a concentrated manner.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Kelly asked as she peeked through one of the cockpit windows.\n\n\"Hopefully, modifications.\" Kato replied, immediately flagging down a deck hand to see if the listed supplies were available.\n\n\"Less than one minute out! Check your gear!\" Lieutenant Michaels said loudly as the crew area of the chopper clicked over from red to yellow. The soldiers began checking their battle rifles and combat pistols, all of which had been previously double checked. The sun had started to break just a bit as the chopper hit ground, the cabin light turning green as everyone dashed out of the passenger door, their solid black boots crunching onto the brittle ground beneath. The chopper had to land farther out, obviously, because of the daylight that was upcoming; leaving the team with a good hike in front of them.\n\n\"Last chance?\" Adam asked as Sarah just looked at him sarcastically for a moment before climbing down to ground level.\n\nEveryone remained low as the chopper turned sharply, rising from the ground before hitting a full burnout. Shortly after they had made it to a small tree line nearby, two Legion jets flew past as a very high rate of speed. \"Daggers. Moving fast, looks like the chopper didn't make it out of here off of radar.\" Sarah said regretfully. They listened quietly as chatter came across the Colonial com units of two fighter planes intercepting the chopper, soon after, the chatter was cut silent.\n\n\"Get in the supply kit and get the reflector blanket out, sure to be scanning the area soon.\" Sarah said.\n\nSure enough, only minutes later the Dagger ships passed over their area several times, scanning the ground for heat signatures. The crew lay quietly under the reflective blanket, as its exterior digitally changed to adapt to the terrain, camouflaging them from anything overhead as they kept eyes open for anything or anyone on foot. Nearly an hour after the Daggers had executed their last flyover, Lieutenant Michaels deemed it safe to move as the squad made their way to the compound.\n\n\"Well, I guess we're back to plan B huh?\" Dalton asked as the rest of the prisoners sat quietly.\n\n\"First person through that cell door is dead by my hands, and I pray that it's Avery.\" Roman said softly, meaning every word of it.\n\n\"They will come at us heavy, knowing what we might be capable of,\" Steiner said. \"Best chance would be to play it down until we are all out of the cell and under gunpoint. More room to move around.\" he added.\n\n\"For what it's worth, there's nobody I'd rather be busting out of captivity and more than likely dying with,\" Dalton replied, trying to lighten the mood of the men, who had the gloom of a death sentence hanging over their heads. \"Of course, I'd like to be doing it with a bottle of whiskey in my hand, but beggars can't be choosers.\" he added, prompting the men to laugh for a moment.\n\nCommander Blaine stood on an overhead catwalk as he watched regiments of men get into formation before boarding troop carriers. They would have to fly down under heavy Spartan escort, having no ship to ship weapons of their own. As impressive as the Goliath units were, there were still far too few of them to launch as an entire regiment, instead they were packaging two of them per troop ship in order to assist the ground forces. Little was known about the new strain of genetically enhanced Hunter, but he couldn't imagine anything strong enough to take down a Goliath unit, not even a Fang.\n\nEveryone among the Colonial Fleet was prepared to fight and even die if needed be, still the Commander placed most of his respect on the Spartan pilots. Having been one himself before moving up through the ranks, he understood that the survival rate for them were the lowest, seeing the most action in a battle such as the one that was to come. Dog fighting Daggers, escorting the ground force to a safe landing and avoiding rail gun fire; these were only a few of the responsibilities that had been cast upon the Spartan pilots. He was damn proud to have them in the Colonial fleet.\n\nAt first glance, the size of the Colonial attack force looked tremendous. However, it paled in comparison to the troops the Legion had at its disposal, which is why Commander Blaine could only hope that they were successful in catching the superior enemy off guard. Otherwise, it was inevitable that the Colonial Army would face a crushing defeat.\n\nAvery waited outside in a slight rain, accompanied by two Legion troops as a small shuttle began descent, making its approach to the landing pad. The strange exterior, which had a ribbed texture and several pointed overhangs, let them know right away that it was indeed a Hunter vessel. At it touched down on the saturated gray pavement, dust blew out from the bottom of the ship loudly, forcing the men to look away momentarily. Soon after, a metal ramp began to lower, offering a glimpse inside; illuminated buttons blinking against the wall in several different color sequences.\n\nA very heavily armed Hunter was the first down the ramp, surveying the immediate area for any possible threats. Seconds later, Anwick followed the armed Hunter down the ramp, followed by two more of the larger killers, all four dressed in black leather from head to toe, Anwick wearing a white medallion while the three soldiers were blanketed in a much heavier armor.\n\n\"Lieutenant Avery I presume?\" Anwick asked, moving close to him, his skin pigmented with lifelessness as he teeth appeared filed to a point.\n\n\"That is correct.\" Avery replied formally.\n\n\"Job well done. I would much like to see the prisoners at once, especially the one called Roman.\" Anwick replied.\n\n\"Then it will be arranged at once.\" Avery replied, extending his arm as to welcome the Hunters into the compound.\n\n\"Two Hunter Carriers will land here for a short period, deploying troops as well as a handful of Fangs, at which time the Carriers will group with your Legion ships and prepare for an air assault.\" Anwick said as the group walked down a well lit hallway of solid white walls and ceiling.\n\n\"Indeed,\" Avery responded. \"The force that we have assembled should be more than enough to shred the Colonial Fleet within minutes.\" he added.\n\n\"Good. Very good.\" Anwick replied.\n\nThe lights in and around the cell switched from dim to full bright as the prisoners jumped to their feet, Lassiter much slower, pulling himself up through the pain of his injuries.\n\n\"Roman Raines,\" Anwick said proudly as he approached the cell. \"Much has changed since my friend Lexion lay dead by your hands.\" he added.\n\n\"If you are referring to my ability to kill Hunters, actually, not much has changed.\" Roman said insultingly.\n\n\"Yes. I was not aware of your past until your crew slipped from my grasp on Tameca. The deeper I dug into your files, the more impressed I became. So, do you mind if I ask you exactly how many of my kind you killed during your time with the Gali Special Forces?\" Anwick asked, knowing Roman had never officially been a Gali soldier.\n\n\"I stopped counting after the first hundred or so.\" Roman replied, gaining instant stares from the other prisoners.\n\n\"Hundred? You said a couple?\" Dalton added in amazement.\n\n\"You see, it seems that your crew has been carrying a cold blooded killer for some time now. Isn't that right Roman?\" Anwick replied, looking heavily at the hardened soldier.\n\n\"In fact, the only reason he is with you is because he is being hunted by his own government,\" Anwick said as Roman looked up at him brashly. \"Seems he turned on his own kind, killed a handful of Gali Special Ops soldiers in the process. As much as I want to kill you with my own hands, even I couldn't turn down the bounty they have placed on your head. I wonder what your precious Captain Michaels would say to this?\" he added.\n\n\"I'd say ten percent sounds about right, don't you think Roman?\" Michaels said from behind the group, standing beside Sarah and two of the Colonial soldiers, the remaining two on the opposite side of the group.\n\n\"I'd rather rot in this Legion prison cell, ten percent is chump change,\" Roman replied smiling as Anwick and his group stood in shock. \"On the other hand, fifteen sounds about right.\" Roman added as Dalton grinned widely, his beard nearly falling from his face in the process.\n\n\"I can do fifteen,\" Michaels replied, looking over to Anwick, Avery and the escort soldiers. \"Now open the door.\"\n\n\"Captain Michaels. You must know that there is no place you can hide that will be safe?\" Anwick asked.\n\n\"Lieutenant Michaels, actually, and I'm done running.\" Adam said, pulling a long black lever on the stock of his rifle; arming it to fire. \"Now. Open the damn door.\" he added.\n\nAs the group stood there waiting for Anwick's reply, Adam fired a shot, hitting one of the Legion soldiers in the head and deadening him on the spot. Pulling the pin back again, Avery stepped to the front, yelling, \"Open the damn door!\"\n\nAs Roman and Dalton exited the cell, Steiner followed close behind, helping Lassiter. As Michaels began to hand the men sidearms, Sarah walked toward the group, bluntly slapping Avery across the cheek of his face.\n\n\"That's for handing me over to them!\" she yelled as Anwick, the three escort Hunters and a Legion soldier looked on.\n\n\"You bitch! I should have killed you myself and been done with it!\" Avery managed to yell before having nearly an entire side of his face blown off by Roman's combat pistol.\n\n\"That's me keeping a promise.\" the Gali warrior remarked as they bolted the cell door shut, getting into position to move out.\n\n\"Ya'll hang tight now.\" Dalton said tauntingly.\n\n\"This isn't over Adam, I promise you that.\" Anwick said calmly with his face pressed against the bars of the cell.\n\n\"If not, this puts you down two to nothing.\" Michaels smiled, infuriating the Hunter, who began shrieking loudly.\n\n\"Damn glad to see you guys.\" Dalton said, getting a slight pat on his shoulder and nod from Lieutenant Michaels.\n\nCommander Blaine stood in the command center of the Colonial Star Five, which was rendezvousing with three more of the Colonial Stars before launching the assault against the Legion. It was nothing more than a staging ground, ships falling into formation, giving the operation the best chance for success while limiting damage as much as possible. Surrounded by neon green grids on all of the walls and a huge grid which was mounted to the floor in the center of the room, crewmen used special graphing markers to update the grids with the position of the ships, while Colonial chatter broadcast throughout the room on several com units.\n\nEven Blaine, who was the ranking officer on Colonial Star Five, didn't know what each panel in the room was used for. All he knew is that they were individually manned by members of his crew, who monitored everything from communication between Spartan pilots to damage control and assessment of the ship. There was no window in the Command Room that overlooked the stars; instead, he had to rely on the information of the grids to be correct. As he watched, a crew member listened to the chatter over his headset for a moment, before aligning the three ships on the central grid that represented the Colonial Star Ships.\n\n\"Everyone is in position Commander, awaiting your go.\" the crewman said as Blaine took one last look around the Command Center, taking in the sights of a ship untouched, the looks on every soul's face as they awaited his command to officially send them into war with the Legion army.\n\n\"I wanted to take a moment to personally thank each and every one of you for your service to the Allied Colonies. To say that it is an honor to serve with you would be an understatement. Even as we get set to embark on an act of war that will forever change the complexion of this star system, I want you all to hold to the belief that we are doing so in the most innocent of fashions. To preserve our freedom and the freedom of those citizens who cannot defend themselves. Good luck and God speed,\" the Commander said proudly through a hand held com unit, his message ringing throughout every ship, every headset and every Spartan pilot's helmet. \"You have a go.\" he calmly said to the crew member as he mounted his com unit back onto the wall.\n\n\"So where's our ride?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"There is no ride, at least not yet. We find a place and dig down until the Colonial force arrives.\" Adam answered.\n\n\"Nice, but there will be thousands of people shooting, and that's only here on the ground. How the hell do they expect to find us?\" Dalton replied, looking at Adam dumbfounded. Rather than replying, Lieutenant Michaels simply grabbed the medallion signifying his rank and flipped it over, exposing a tracking beacon.\n\n\"Oh, well, I guess that will work, but I would have done it differently.\" Dalton replied in an attempt to save face.\n\n\"We need to make it to the outer perimeter of the compound, much better chance of hanging out unnoticed.\" Adam said to the group as he strategically scouted the horizon.\n\nSeveral rifles shots rang out as two of the Colonial soldiers fell to the ground abruptly. The rest of the group dove for cover, finding refuge behind a stack of metal shipping crates nearby. A small squad of Legion troops had noticed the intruders, sounding a screeching alarm that rang throughout the compound, prompting several sets of soldiers to follow in the pursuit of the Colonial group.\n\n\"Well, there's our dick flapping in the wind,\" Dalton said, pulling one of the seriously injured soldiers to cover, his body dragging roughly across the solid dirt surface. \"Well, not all of us.\" he added after a punishing stare from Sarah. It was a solid spot of cover, but it wouldn't last long with the large number of enemies closing in on them, the metal shipping crates taking a pounding from the relentless gunfire.\n\n\"Well, looks like this may be it.\" Lassiter said.\n\n\"Just hold as long as we possibly can.\" Lieutenant Michaels replied as Roman and Steiner both grabbed rifles to join up with Dalton while Sarah helped tend to the fallen troops.\n\nPressing a makeshift bandage down firmly onto one of the gunshot wounds of a Colonial solider, Sarah stopped suddenly as she heard a thunderous scream nearby.\n\n\"What... the fuck...was that?\" Dalton asked cautiously, joining the other men in staring at one of the Fang soldiers. Hulking tall, it was at least ten feet in height and the largest creature any of them had ever seen walking on two legs. A huge fang extending from the bottom of its mouth on each side, at least as wide as a human hand, solid white hair thickly braided and falling down the upper portion of its back. Heavily armored with a thick chest plate of black plate mail, it quickly became apparent to the Colonial soldiers that the weapons they were firing were having little to no effect as it continued a full sprint toward them unhindered.\n\nThe commanding officer of the group simply stood in amazement, having never seen anything like a Fang before.\n\n\"Adam! We need to move, NOW!\" Sarah yelled, bringing him back into reality for a moment.\n\nHe nodded, frantically checking his surroundings in hopes of finding a way out of the impending slaughter of his team. He needed a miracle of some kind, they were surrounded and pinned down in a spot that provided no exit.\n\nThe bloodcurdling screams of the beast grew louder, before suddenly being silenced by the overpowering booms of hundreds, if not thousands of ships hitting the planet's atmosphere at full burn. The Colonial fleet had arrived with not a second to spare, the attack force descending onto the Legion fortress quickly and without retaliation. Adam noticed the Legion troops, who had been moving in on their position, had began scrambling to nearby buildings to prepare for the inevitable battle at hand. He prayed that the Fang who was bearing down on them would follow suit.\n\nNo such luck. Michaels quickly checked, only to see the monster continuing his rush towards them. Trying his best to hold back his emotion; wanting only to begin firing his rifle into the sky and curse the Gods who had returned the favor his entire life, he simply threw the rifle to the ground in favor of his two revolver style pistols. Adam closed his eyes, tightly gripping the wooden handles of the weapons as he knew the Fang would be on them in only moments.\n\n\"Adam get them out of here, now.\" Roman replied, as he stood there holding a combat pistol and hand length blade.\n\nSteiner quickly joined the other hero, unsheathing his machete and pulling a shotgun to the ready with his free hand. Adam realized at that moment, Roman was prepared to die in a much different fashion than the one he had lived it, as a hero.\n\n\"GO!\" Roman yelled as the Fang was close enough to hear the warrior's command. Adam pointed into the direction of the nearest building he could find as Sarah, Dalton and the remaining Colonial soldiers who were able, helped the wounded quickly to the building's position.\n\nLieutenant Michaels slowed his run down long enough to turn and look back at his friend, who alongside Steiner, was fighting valiantly in the face of death.\n\nHaving been shot several times, at least two rounds hitting it from point blank range directly in the face, the Fang fiercely struck Roman in the area of his neck and face; dropping the former Gali warrior. Before Steiner could intervene with a swing of his machete, the Fang fired two shots from a Hunter rifle, both finding their mark into the chest of Roman who lay limp in a quickly formed pool of his own blood.\n\nTime seemed to stop. Adam considered going back for his friends and trying to help them take out the Fang. He also knew in his heart that Roman was either dead or committed to the act of dying. He glanced the other way, seeing Sarah waving him to her in slow motion, Dalton yelling to him with no sound reaching his ears. This was truly a moment that would stick with him for the rest of his life. He had to make a decision between what he knew was the right and running to the woman that he loved. He was tired of running.\n\nAs he loosened the grip on the handles of his pistols only slightly, Adam turned his attention back to the Fang, who was fighting fiercely with Steiner as Roman continued to lay lifeless in the same spot; blood soaking into the surrounding ground. It was time to fight back or die trying. Adam started a path in the direction of the fight when he was thrown several feet, before hitting the unforgiving dirt with tremendous force by a nearby blast. Explosions rang out around him as the Spartans had made it to near ground level, firing their weapons onto the compound in unison.\n\nIt took only moments for Michaels to recognize the desperation of Sarah's voice, yelling loudly enough to get his attention; his ears still ringing from the deafening explosion. He slowly stumbled toward them, shell shocked and heavily disoriented.\n\n\"What were you thinking?\" Sarah yelled as she and Dalton helped the Lieutenant into the door of the small building. He didn't reply, instead, looking back to his friends only to see nothing but empty ground.\n\nThe thunderous booms of the explosions began to multiply as Legion forces sprang the trap, sending hundreds of air defense missiles into the sky followed by squadrons of Strikewings burning at full speed. Tracer rounds finished lighting the breaking dawn sky as hundreds of Colonial ships engaged the Legion attack planes in dog fighting tactics. Meanwhile, the Colonial Stars moved into position, firing their multiple ship to ship cannons at the approaching Legion Capital ships and Hunter Carriers.\n\n\"Have you located Lieutenant Michaels' tracking beacon?\" Commander Blaine said, standing firmly at the central grid inside of the Command Center.\n\n\"Yes sir, he's indoors and the area is too hot for extraction. Will have to wait for the area to secure or they will have to come to us.\" one of his crew replied, charting several positions on a nearby wall mounted grid.\n\n\"Very well. Concentrate guns onto Legion ships, they will be much more populated than the Carriers.\" Blaine instructed as his crew members acknowledged the order and began relaying the instructions to the ship's weapons room.\n\n\"Our Spartans are taking a pounding up there.\" Lassiter said as the strike team continued to look outside.\n\n\"The entire Fleet is taking a pounding,\" Sarah replied. She was right, the Colonial Fleet was heavily outnumbered and taking great losses across the board. \"Listen,\" Sarah said, quieting the rest of the crew. \"Mini-guns!\" she added as a Colonial sweeper team moved into sight, escorted by two of the very capable Goliath units.\n\nThe heavily armored soldiers of steel slowly made their way through a small portion of the compound, mowing Legion forces down in their wake. The lead continued to pour out of their automatic weapons, chewing into the flesh of the outmatched foes in red and black leather as the Colonial forces had almost reached Lieutenant Michaels and his team; when a group of two Hunters escorted a single Fang into the area. Aiming down the sights of one of his pistols, Adam's arm was quickly pushed away by the swift hand of Sarah.\n\n\"We are no match, not without Roman and Steiner. Gunfire would only give our position away.\" she said, pleading with Adam as he looked back at his team for a moment.\n\nLassiter, as well as two of the Colonial soldiers were wounded, one of them life threatening. She was right, they would be of very little help to the Colonial force outside, all they could do is remain sheltered and wait for the skirmish to end, hoping the Goliaths could end the life of the Fang.\n\nHowever, hope was soon cut short. As the half dozen Colonial soldiers exchanged fire with the two Hunters, the Goliath units began to circle the Fang. The small-arms fire of the others tapered off quite a bit, which was an indication that everyone was watching the battle between the Goliaths and Fang ensue. It was the first of its kind, and a very good bookmark as to which side had the advantage throughout the star system.\n\nFor several minutes, the Goliaths maintained a combination of gunfire and punishing punches by way of their solid titanium arms. As it seemed the mechanical menaces were gaining the upper hand of the fight, one of the Goliath units made the mistake of overreaching during a wide angled punch, the Fang thrusting up to tear the mechanical arm from the shoulder of the super soldier. As the Goliath staggered several feet back, the Fang then pummeled the unit to the grown using its closed fists, turning its attention to the second Goliath. Falling back, the remaining Goliath began to lay down cover fire as the Colonial soldiers retreated.\n\nIt had quickly become obvious to Adam and his crew that the Colonials would fall in defeat at the end of this battle. Their only hope now was to find a way back to the Colonial Star Five before time ran out. The courtyard of the compound was littered with fallen Legion soldiers, ship wreckage from the thick sky above, Colonial men and women who had died for a cause they believed in and even the occasional Hunter.\n\nThey covertly moved from position to position, careful not to alert any of the units in the open that were engaged in the mass bloodshed. The plan was to move back to the rear of the compound, leaving the same way they had arrived and hope that Colonial ships spotted their beacon before Legion forces caught up to them. It wasn't the greatest of plans, but Adam had thrown it together under fire and it was all they had to go with.\n\n\"Lieutenant Michaels.\" Commander Blaine's voice announced through Adam's ear mounted com unit.\n\n\"Go ahead!\" Michaels replied, shocked to hear the Blaine's voice in the midst of he loud fighting around him.\n\n\"We have picked you up on the grid. If there is any chance you can move two clicks to the Southeast, there is a large Colonial unit dug in there to assist you.\" Blaine replied.\n\n\"Southeast. Move out now!\" Michaels yelled to his group, responding to the Commander's request. \"Yes sir.\"\n\n\"Is Sarah alright?\" Blaine asked cautiously, the few seconds of silence seeming like eternity.\n\n\"Yes sir. I have three wounded, four confirmed dead and two missing, presumed dead.\" Adam replied gravely.\n\n\"Understood Lieutenant. Get your people Southeast.\" Commander Blaine replied as the Colonial Star Five shook fiercely, several missiles hitting the large starship at once.\n\n\"Report!\" Blaine yelled as the ship's interior lights continued their fluctuation.\n\n\"Structural damage to the starboard section of the ship, shields have absorbed substantial damage but are holding.\" one of his crew members said lifelessly.\n\n\"Take us down close to the surface. All cannons redirect fire to surface, make my daughter a safe path to walk through.\" Commander Blaine said before slowly taking a wall mounted com unit into his hand.\n\n\"This is the Commander. I am issuing a general order to abandon ship. All remaining Spartans are cleared to launch, remaining soldiers are instructed to rally on the surface and support existing units. It has been my honor to serve as your Commander.\" Blaine said as he slowly returned the com unit to its cradle as the ship was hit with several more breaking explosions.\n\nThe Legion and Hunter ships knew the Colonial Star Five was in serious trouble and had begun concentrating their fire onto the dying masterpiece, which was starting to tear apart at the welded seams. Dozens of Spartan ships launched simultaneously in an effort to protect the sinking ship, most of which were nothing more than small explosions shortly after launching directly into the concentrated gunfire from the Legion ships.\n\n\"Lieutenant, take care of Sarah. That's an order.\" Commander Blaine said across the com unit as the Colonial Star Five exploded, causing a rippling wave of fire throughout the sky.\n\n\"FATHER!\" Sarah screamed as she began weeping uncontrollably, quickly grabbed by Adam as he stood speechless.\n\n\"Lieutenant Michaels, this is Spartan Nine One.\" Adam heard in an unfamiliar voice through his com.\n\n\"Go ahead.\" Michaels said, trying to hold himself together as Sarah continuing to cry loudly in the background.\n\n\"We have your position and are ready to assist you to the rally point.\" the pilot said as eight Spartans flew overhead at incredible speeds.\n\n\"Copy.\" Adam said softly, numb from everything he had lost in only a few short hours.\n\nAs the group looked ahead, they could see a flashing blue light, which every Colonial soldier would immediately recognize as a signal for friendly ground.\n\nThe group began to move as quickly as possible, Adam carrying Sarah as Dalton escorted them by shotgun. Lassiter was slowly moving unassisted, while the remaining Colonial soldiers were responsible for moving the wounded to safety. As they had almost reached the Colonial camp, empty brass shells rained from overhead as the Spartans passed, firing their tracer rounds and killing nearly a dozen nearby Legion soldiers. Moments later the Spartans were heavily engaged by a squadron of Strikewings, however they had been successful in getting Michaels and the crew to safety.\n\nMet by several Colonial troops, the wounded were immediately taken by medics who were decked out in solid blue with white trim.\n\n\"Lieutenant Michaels, you're needed in Outpost Command one of the soldiers said, pointing to a large blue tent which was surrounded by sandbags and three large rail guns pointed into the sky. Sarah accompanied Adam as the rest of the crew got a quick look over by one of the field medics.\n\n\"I'm fine, other than being in serious need of a damn drink,\" Dalton said loudly, wiping a blanket of dirt from his face. \"And a hell of a lot of therapy.\" he added.\n\n\"Sarah, I'm sorry about your father.\" one of the officers said sincerely, placing his hand on her arm for a few moments. Although she had obviously been crying heavily, she did her best to put on a front of strength in front of the soldiers inside of the tent. She had to. They looked at hear as a beacon of strength. They had all lost during this short lived war, she had to press on, at least publicly.\n\n\"Lieutenant Michaels. We've lost the Colonial Star Five, seven of our larger cruise ships and the Colonial Star Three is in danger of being lost to us as well. We have sent a relay back to Colonial Command for reinforcements, it was swiftly denied.\" the officer said.\n\n\"Denied!\" Sarah yelled as Adam try to hold her back while keeping her calm.\n\n\"Yes ma'am. There is a second battle happening this very moment on Tameca. Command relayed back to us that Tameca City is currently controlled by Legion forces, while Colonial forces are mounting to attempt a takeover of the city.\" he replied.\n\n\"What's the plan?\" Michaels asked.\n\n\"Well Lieutenant, two Colonial Stars have been dispatched to help us evacuate everyone from the surface. The plan is holding onto as much rock as we possibly can until they arrive.\" the officer replied.\n\n\"Evacuate! We have lost so many men here, for nothing?\" Sarah asked animately.\n\n\"There is no hope of winning this battle, we were outmatched minutes after hitting the atmosphere. Command wants us to group up with the remaining forces on Glimmeria, become the last line of defense in case Tameca City is a loss.\" the officer added as mortar explosion burst in the background.\n\nGlimmeria. Now there was a word Adam hadn't heard in quite some time, but was far too familiar with. Having fought alongside Dalton in Glimmeria several years back, he was one of the few lucky ones to survive. It was primarily a wasteland, steep canyons of rock and scorching sands marked with the occasional small city. From what Adam had heard over the past few years, the larger of the cities had rebuilt after the grinding war, however the outskirts of the planet remained in ruin, controlled by smaller organized crime families.\n\nWhen the war ended, he had promised himself to never return. Too many of his good friends had fallen, most of them right in front of his very eyes. Now, he was hoping to last long enough for a rescue, only to set a course straight for a planet that had haunted his dreams many nights over. As terrified as a reunion to the soil that had taken part of his soul, strategically it made sense. The Glimmerian government, as well as every crime family with Glimmerian ties he had done business with, had two things in common.\n\nThey were among the toughest people he had ever known, and they had a mutual hatred for the Legion.\n\nSure, their army was miniscule compared to the Legion's forces, but traveling across the system to fight on Glimmeria would put them at a huge disadvantage by stretching them thin and placing a huge strain on their resources. It would give the Colonial army, at least what was left of it, more than enough time to regroup, recruit new planets to their cause and prepare for an assault by the Legion.\n\n\"Well, then let's hold our ground. What do we have to work with?\" Michaels asked.\n\n\"Sarah's father sent us everything he had on Colonial Star Five. He could of turned and ran, but I think he was more concerned with getting his daughter off of this rock safely.\" the officer replied, bringing Sarah to a emotional state.\n\n\"Colonial Star Three is sending us a bulk of its ground force before leaving the battle, should be here and ready within the hour. Looking at about forty battle ready soldiers, a dozen or so Goliath units and by the looks of it; just a handful of Spartans.\" the officer replied.\n\nThe meeting was cut short as the rail guns outside of the tent began thrusting pounding shots of lead into the air, Strikewing units flying overhead firing tracers into the encampment.\n\n\"Good bet if they didn't know we were here, they do now!\" Lieutenant Michaels yelled to the officer as the sound of the gunfire pierced their ears loudly.\n\n\"Sir! Small group approaching on foot!\" one of the privates yelled through the entrance to the tent, prompting the officers to flood outside to direct their squads.\n\n\"Hold this damn ground!\" Adam yelled loudly, walking outside to regroup with Dalton, who had taken position beside Lassiter.\n\n\"Do you think they made it off of the Colonial Star Five before it...?\" Sarah asked before being cut short by Adam.\n\n\"I wouldn't worry, I'm sure they did.\"\n\nIt was a lie of course, Michaels himself had been worried about Kelly, Kato and Troy from the moment he saw the ship go thermal in the explosion. It was a justified lie though, knowing Sarah was still hurting from the death of her father.\n\n\"Holy shit,\" Dalton yelled ecstatically. \"It's Roman and Steiner!\" he added.\n\n\"Give them cover fire!\" Adam yelled, seeing the two friends being closely pursued by a small group of Hunters.\n\nAs the they continued to sprint for the Colonial encampment, Dalton stood up, waving his friends to their direction. Four Goliath units were quickly dispatched to intercept the Hunter party, and intercept they did; the titanium peace keepers sprinted past Roman and Steiner as their mini guns began unleashing a flurry of grave digging lead.\n\nThe Colonial soldiers counted five Hunters, who outnumbered the Goliaths, but were solidly outmatched from the start. Within the span of one minute, all but one of the Hunters lay dead, the fifth fleeing back the way he came only to regroup with a much larger Legion group of attackers. Obeying orders, the Goliaths began sprinting back, two of them not lucky enough to make it, taking a beating from the Legion gunfire until they finally could function no more.\n\nJumping over the sandbag barrier, Roman quickly fell face down, letting the man made shield absorb several shots that were fully intended to end his life. Steiner dove over just seconds behind, not as lucky as he took a piercing shot into his left biceps muscle and taking a good portion of it when it exited. In obvious pain, he remained on the ground for a few seconds as two of the Colonial field medics began numbing the pain while bandaging it the best they could.\n\nDirt began flying as bullets zipped through the Colonial outpost, soldiers diving for cover any place they could find refuge.\n\n\"The more of these bastards I kill, the better I feel about myself and life in general.\" Dalton said to Lasstier as they both fired long range rifles at the approaching group.\n\n\"Pretty accurate with that rifle, huh?\" Dalton asked as Lassiter glanced down at the sniper insignia sewn onto his Colonial uniform.\n\n\"Yea, yea. Well I still say fightin' up close is the best way to handle things.\" Dalton added snidely.\n\nFor hours, the Colonial forces and Legion troops exchanged gunfire from only a short distance; the occasional flyover of aircraft, usually Legion Strikewings spraying stinging clouds of ammunition to the ground below. Roman had joined the fight, gaining a combat rifle from a fallen soldier and using it with precision. Steiner on the other hand, rested near the back of the encampment, a long barrel shotgun in his better arm as the few officers that remained met with Adam.\n\n\"We're being cut to pieces!\" Lieutenant Michaels told a couple of the officers loud enough to overpower the sound of gunshots, who were quick to agree as huge chunks of rocks and debris flew around them while mortar shells hit throughout the camp.\n\n\"We have to fall back.\" Adam said as a rare Spartan squadron flew overhead.\n\n\"There's no place to fall back to. A couple hundred feet behind this camp, nothing but cliffs. Seemed like a strategic advantage at the time, no way of being flanked by a ground assault.\" one of the few remaining officers replied, immediately thrusting Adam into deep thought.\n\nSure, he was Lieutenant Michaels of the Colonial Fleet, but underneath all of that he was still the same guy who specialized in getting himself out of a pinch.\n\nAs he glanced around the Colonial controlled soil, he realized that over half of them were wounded, many who were doomed to perish before day's end. The Legion continued pounding them with fire, although it had slacked up just a bit; which was a good indication that they were organizing a mass assault to overrun the Colonial outpost. Adam saw no way out except for surrender. He knew a lot of the men wouldn't simply lay down arms knowing the Legion and Hunters intended to kill them regardless. Still, the blood wouldn't be on Adam's hands. Rather than leave it in the hands of the remaining officers, he decided to take it upon himself to tell the soldiers on the front line himself.\n\nAs he walked into the direction of Roman, Dalton and Lassiter who would be the first to hear it, three squadrons of Spartans flew past at dazzling speeds. Quickly after, several more squadrons flew past, causing everyone in a Colonial uniform to turn away from the Legion force and stare into the sky behind them. Two of the huge Colonial vessels had entered the fight, pounding the Legion's forces with their cannons without regard.\n\n\"Lieutenant Michaels, this is Commander Douglas of the Colonial Star One Seven, prepare your men for immediate extraction.\" a voice rang out inside of Adam's com unit.\n\nFinally. Finally the Gods above had given him a break, and he wasted no time replying to the Commander emotionally. One of the Colonial Stars moved in directly over the Legion compound, as it began firing relentlessly, causing multiple explosions throughout. Shortly after, two Hunter Carrier ships had come to the aid of the Legion; engaging the Colonial Star as the three ships returned earthquake equivalent shots onto each other.\n\nThe Colonial troops who had fought so bravely to hold their ground, had little time to celebrate as choppers began landing to pick them up literally moments after Michaels had received the message. The Colonial wounded were the first off of the surface, as Michaels opted to stay with his team until the final pickup to provide cover for the other soldiers evacuation.\n\n\"Sarah. Please.\" Adam asked, praying that she would be on one of the first choppers up and out of harm's way. Instead, she refused a reply, grabbing her combat rifle and joining Roman, Dalton and Lassiter on the line. Even Steiner scoured the ground, eventually finding a long range weapon of his own and slowly joining the group in providing cover.\n\n\"We'll be on the next one up! Tell them to save a place for us!\" Lieutenant Michaels said loudly to one of the officers as the chopper's thrust engines nearly consumed the conversation. \"Will do Lieutenant! Good luck!\" the officer replied as he motioned the rest of the survivors onto the skiff, leaving a handful of the Goliath units behind to assist the group of heroes.\n\nAs the chopper left ground, a huge explosion brightened the sky as if it were a sun on the brink of extinction. The Hunter Carriers had eliminated one of the Colonial Stars and every soul aboard it. Adam and his crew simply stood in amazement as thousands of lives came to an end at the hand of those who had murdered so many before.\n\nWith the explosion of the Colonial Star, the Legion ground force that had massed began an all out charge to the crew's location in an effort to eliminate any survivors. Lieutenant Michaels countered the assault the only way possible, unleashing the remaining Goliath units directly into the charging enemies. They stood no chance of course, but they would at least thin them out a bit and maybe buy enough time for the next evacuation chopper to land. As they cut loose the mini gun fire, dozens of Legion soldiers fell instantly, many others joining only seconds behind. Returning fire, and aided by a small group of Fangs; within minutes the Goliaths were nothing more than metal to be recycled long after the battle had come to an end.\n\n\"Just hold them! Hold them long enough for... \" Adam began to yell to his crew before the second Colonial Star started backing away as well, no match for the Hunter Carriers.\n\nContacting them by com was of no use, the chatter through his ear piece was condemning evidence that they were being left to die. A full retreat ordered by the Commander, as those lucky enough to have gotten off this rock would be headed to Glimmeria to fight another day, while Adam and his crew remained.\n\nHe could see it in all of their eyes. The look of defeat, the submission to the inevitable. Sure, they had weapons and would take several of the bastards with them, but in the end there was no way out. Adam threw his combat rifle to the ground and pulled the two revolvers into position. He could think of worse deaths than fighting beside the woman you love, friends who would die for you and above all, freedom. They simply took a few moments, glancing at one another; nodding their appreciation and respect without saying so much as a single word.\n\n\"Let's take as many of the sumbitches to the grave with us as we can.\" Dalton said, readying his favorite toy, the snub nosed shotgun.\n\n\"It's been my honor everyone.\" Michaels said with respect as they heard a Strikewing approaching, coming in at blazing speeds from the sound of it.\n\nHe was wrong, it wasn't pushing high speeds, and it wasn't a Strikewing, it was his ship, the Gunship! He smiled as wide as he ever had before, his eyes full of tears as the titanium skiff lifted up beside them from the cliff below. Even Roman caught himself tearing up a bit as Troy looked out of the passenger window of the cockpit, sitting beside Kelly as Kato manned a large mini gun that had been mounted to the outside of the crew area. It was vastly smaller ship than the day of its crash landing, still Adam had never seen a more beautiful sight in all of his life.\n\nThe mini gun began to ring out, the tearing flesh of Legion soldiers falling from the bone as they screamed in morbid agony. The first in was Sarah Blaine, who immediately turned to begin firing her combat weapon into the direction of the attacking force. Next, Lassiter climbed in before going prone and using his long range rifle to end a few lives of his own. Adam stood there firing one round at a time, dropping a few Legion faithful before Roman could interject.\n\n\"It's your ship Adam, GO!\" he yelled, his chest covered with bloody bandages proving the capable handy work of the Colonial medics. Michaels hesitated for a moment before sprinting to the Gunship to reunite with everyone.\n\nAs Roman and Steiner began to make a run for it, Roman's leg buckled as a bullet passed through, sending him to a knee. Stopping to help him to his feet, Steiner was immediately overtaken by a Fang, jumping on top of him as it tried to rip meat from his skeletal frame. It took four shots from Roman's rifle to get the attention of the beast, who pounced from Steiner to Roman, slicing its claws across his already wounded stomach, as Roman did his best to try and fight back. The gunfire from the ship was enough to hold the Legion guards at bay, but it wasn't possible to get a clean shot on the hulking beast without risking friendly fire.\n\n\"Fuck this!\" Kato said, grabbing the Mauler that he had become so comfortable with over the years and jumping down to assist the members of his crew, while Dalton quickly took his place on the minigun. He sprinted to the fight as the Fang thrust his claws into Roman a second time, tearing vital organs and opening a river of blood onto the ground. With Roman defenseless, Steiner swung his machete with every ounce of power in his body, nearly severing the head of the Fang, which combined with several shots from the Mauler, was enough to send the monster to the ground screaming in pain. Steiner quickly hoisted Roman onto his shoulder and sprinted as best he could to the Gunship, Kato clearing a path behind them with the Mauler.\n\nReaching the ship, Steiner lifted his fallen friend carefully into the arms of Lieutenant Michaels, who was covered in blood within seconds of the transaction, laying Roman onto the floor of the ship as he frantically tried to stop the bleeding. Steiner looked back as he boarded long enough to see Kato fall to his death, several gunshot wounds leading him to it. A small group of Hunters sealed the deal as they sent nearly a dozen more shells from a pistol into the chest of the fallen hero, who lay dead with Mauler in hand.\n\nIn shock from the events, Kelly trembled in the pilot's seat, thinking of nothing but the death of Kato and the imminent demise of Roman Raines.\n\n\"KELLY, GO!\" Adam yelled with no result. \"Damn, we gotta go now!\" Dalton yelled inside the ship as gunfire ricocheted around him; prompting Sarah to quickly make her way to the pilot's chair, tossing Kelly, who was obviously in shock onto the floor.\n\nSarah quickly assumed control of the ship's flight stick, bringing the vessel to a full burn as Dalton shut the exterior door and helped Adam tend to the dying warrior.\n\n\"We've got to catch up to that Colonial Star, otherwise he isn't going to make it!\" Adam yelled desperately, trying to stop the internal bleeding of the former Gali commando.\n\n\"He isn't going to make it either way Adam, it would take a miracle.\" Dalton said solemnly as the Gunship blazed a trail of neon colored fumes across the sky, hitting orbit as it chased its only hope for a miracle to Glimmeria.\n\nBook 2\n\nGlimmeria\n\nThe wind blew steadily through the lush leaves that gave such a buxom appearance to the thick trees behind as Roman stood there, facing the pastel shimmer of the river before him. It was almost a surreal sight, the sky above filled with cotton white clouds moving slowly as he knelt to rub his hand in the dirt of the riverbed, small rocks slipping through his fingers and falling from his battle hardened grasp.\n\nIt had been such a long time since the warrior's eyes had last seen serenity such as was laid out before him at this very moment. Every second that he stood hypnotized by the perfected body of water, he made use of his senses, pulling every small detail into reality. Everything from the birds singing in their melodic language overhead to the sound of the small waves crashing against the front of his boots on the shore. Everything seemed so perfect.\n\nHis attention was immediately broken by movement to his left, a nearing boat full of passengers who stood grouped together on the front deck as it slowly made its way to the edge of the river. Roman's first reaction was to reach for his combat blade, he was a warrior well trained, and any soldier who had seen what his eyes had witnessed through decades of gruesome killing and tasteless wars would be quick to draw a weapon from suspicion. He realized quickly, however, that he was unarmed.\n\nUnusual for the former Gali commando, but that feeling soon dissipated as Roman began to recognize the faces on the boat that was docking with the river bank in front of him. Some were fallen warriors who had passed away beside him during one of many conflicts through the years, while others were familiar faces of family and close friends long deceased.\n\nWhat kind of madness was this? A multitude of things began to run rampant through his mind as he cautiously watched a man step off of the boat, his boots digging firmly into the water drenched sand as he slowly walked directly for Roman. Dressed in official blue, gold buttons holding the jacket closed, the man fit the part of someone who seemed in be in charge of a ferry such as this. As he approached Roman, the commando began calculating self defense tactics in his mind, just in case. He had never laid eyes on the stranger before and wasn't about to let his training go to waste. But there was no time.\n\n\"They are waiting for you Roman.\" the calculated man said in a somber voice, obviously referring to the faces aboard the ferry.\n\nHaving decided he had seen enough, Roman began to slowly back away before turning to quicken his pace into the direction of a heavily wooded area nearby.\n\n\"IT'S YOUR TIME!\" the ferryboat operator yelled in a demonic voice, grabbing Roman by the upper portion of his arm in an attempt to force him onto the vessel of souls.\n\n\"FUCK YOU!\" Roman yelled, pushing the man down onto the ground and quickly turning to run for the thick trees that were only feet away.\n\nThe perfect world of vibrantly painted surroundings soon blended with bright white lights as Roman tried to make sense of things, the birds quickly becoming sounds of advanced medical equipment as he lay on an operating table under nearly a dozen doctors and nurses, the flood of overpowering white lights blinding the man who had cheated death.\n\n\"I've got a pulse!\" one of the doctors yelled loudly, as several machines remained attached to the hardened warrior, giving a readout of every vital sign in his body, both the human and the mechanical side.\n\nRoman let loose a loud shriek of pain that was terrifying for everyone close by, a damn stern reminder of this being the first lifesaving surgical attempt using Goliath parts on a living human being.\n\nSeveral hours passed as Adam, Sarah, Dalton and Steiner waited patiently for some official word on their friend. Kelly and Lassiter had offered to watch over Troy, who was still recovering a bit from his injuries at the hands of the savage Husk and was trying his best to adjust to the desert planet of Glimmeria.\n\n\"Lieutenant Michaels,\" a doctor dressed in solid white said as he entered the waiting room, Adam immediately jumping to his feet, a standard issue Colonial combat pistol having replaced his trusted revolver in the holster on his side. \"Your friend should eventually make a full recovery,\" the doctor said, bringing immediate celebration among the crew who sat behind Adam. \"We lost him for a couple of minutes, but he came back to us on his own. It's unlike anything that I or any of my colleagues have ever seen. He is one tough man. It will take some time for him to get used to the idea of being half mechanical, however I hope he eventually understands that without the Goliath parts, he wouldn't be alive.\" the doctor added.\n\n\"Thank you.\" Adam said, shaking the doctor's hand before turning to his crew.\n\n\"This calls for a damn celebration!\" Dalton said, hinting to everyone that he needed a drink.\n\nGlimmeria may have been a desolate place for the most part, but the Colonial forces had sat down in and around Kamira, which was the planet's largest city. Dalton translated that into having drinking locations nearby, and now that he knew Roman was going to pull through, it was all about keeping his self proclaimed reputation intact.\n\n\"I'm going to stay here, sit with Roman and try to get Troy settled in with a local family.\" Adam said. The Colonials had recently started to place homeless children with families on Glimmeria, which was a much better fate than they would have had if taken in by Legion forces, which would have amounted to nothing short of forced slavery. After the crushing defeat at the hands of the Legion in Tameca City, there were plenty of children without homes, and even on a large planet such as Glimmeria, placing the children would be a daunting task at best.\n\n\"I'm game.\" Steiner said, volunteering to go with Dalton and rage a bit at any of the drinking establishments nearby.\n\n\"Just keep your asses out of trouble, understand?\" Adam asked as Sarah slowly placed her arm around his lower back in order to hold him with affection.\n\n\"Yes sir!\" Dalton said sarcastically as the idea of playing hide and go seek with full bottles of whiskey danced in his head.\n\nHaving caught one of the Colonial Star ships in a narrow escape was the biggest factor in saving Roman's life. As impressive as it all was, it paled in comparison to the sight of things when Dalton and Steiner left the Colonial hospital and made their way onto the sun scorched streets of Glimmeria's largest city. Kamira looked almost as if it were one huge military base now, the outskirts of the city protected by huge underground Mack guns, which were nearly two hundred yards in diameter and could fire bursts of lead from the surface into space, essentially punching holes through the largest of ships.\n\nThey were protected by Razor turrets, nothing more than a clever term for huge steel towers, each manned by two soldiers and fired a twenty inch rail gun in the direction of anything that approached the city unwelcome on foot.\n\nThe new Goliath Model Two soldiers patrolled the city streets, having replaced the original units with much thicker armor plating as well as the addition of carrying surface to air missiles. Last but not least, the Colonial Marines. They weren't as feared as the larger Goliath units or weaponry, but in force, they were still the backbone of the Colonial war effort.\n\nThis was literally the last place that the Colonial forces had to go, and they had thrown all of their eggs into a single basket in order to assure the safety of Glimmeria's citizens. With everyone in Adam's crew having officially joined the Colonial ranks, they all had sworn the allegiance and wore the uniform. Of course, that didn't stop Dalton from covering his with the brown duster that he had become so used to wearing. As much as the rest of the crew dreaded the mere sight of that raggedy ass leather duster that had followed his back so long that it was starting to fall apart at the seams, it was his security blanket, especially when preparing to hammer back as many drinks as he possibly could.\n\n\"Where's the closest pub?\" Steiner asked as they stood in the street, the torturing rays of the blistering sun reddening them every single moment of it.\n\nTwo Swordfish fighter jets quickly blew by overhead, drowning out Dalton's response. They were the design of the Glimmarian military, the extra long nose of the ship as well as the unique ability to hug the ground within a few feet during flight making them virtually undetectable on radar.\n\n\"I dunno, but when we find one, if we see two Swordfish parked out front, somebody's taking an ass whipping.\" Dalton said loudly, upset over the intrusion as Steiner mockingly laughed.\n\n\"I think we can all agree that the ones fighting for control of the Skyla System are not the ones who should be in power.\" Anwick said as he sat at a large wooden table that was polished to a gleaming shine.\n\nHis teeth filed to a razor sharp point, the dead white pupils of his eyes fixated themselves on his business partner. Two of his toughest escort Hunters sat with him, stark white hair also flowing from their scalps as they remained stone faced and heavily armed. Across the table, three well dressed members of the Benzan Mafia sat, finely pressed suits and ties accented by sunglasses of solid silver.\n\n\"The weak do not concern us. Our only wish is to be left alone, so that we may continue to live in true freedom.\" the man sitting in the middle of the Mafia members replied, his lenses reflecting back nothing more than the look of the Hunters to Anwick.\n\n\"True freedom always comes with a price. Always,\" Anwick replied calmly. \"It's time to weed out the weak and useless from our midst, and that begins with Adam Michaels,\" Anwick added, throwing down several sheets of paper that included Adam's photo. \"Prove your capability to me by getting rid of him and in return, I will ensure that the Legion leaves your kind well enough alone once they have crushed the Colonials.\" Anwick said, eagerly awaiting a response from Cyrus.\n\nYelling a handful of words loudly in Benzan, a large man entered the room, very well dressed in a gray pinstripe suit with a face that was without emotion, as if it were cut from marble slate.\n\n\"I will leave the choice to Draco. Should he choose to enter into an arrangement with you, it will remain between the two of you. I have no desire to kill by way of contract, nor do I wish to be directly involved. That said, should he choose to decline, then we are done here.\" Cyrus replied.\n\n\"I'm sure if the money is right, Draco won't mind doing the dirty work. Am I correct Benzan?\" Anwick asked, throwing a sackful of Legion credits onto the table, easily ten thousand or more. Walking over to pick up one of the photos of Adam, Draco smiled widely.\n\n\"Consider him a dead man. Officially. We fought together in the first Glimmerian war. I know how he thinks, how he moves.\" Draco replied in a deep tone of voice, leaving little doubt of his ability to end lives.\n\n\"Very well then. I look forward to hearing from you my brother,\" Anwick said, standing to his feet while smiling wide, the low light of the room reflecting from the large razor's edge of his teeth.\n\n\"Now if you will excuse me, I must meet with the Legion regarding our next major assault.\" Anwick added as Cyrus slowly stood and extended his arm as the two men in charge sealed the deal with a firm handshake, which was a legally binding contract in the world of terrorism.\n\n\"Anyone ever tell you that you are magnificent with children?\" Lassiter asked as Kelly answered his question with only a glowing smile. They had spent the last several hours helping Troy get what few belongings he had together, which amounted to nothing more than the few clothes he had gotten since arriving and a combat blade given to him by the Gali warrior.\n\n\"Kelly. Will I ever have a chance to say goodbye to Roman?\" the young boy asked, his question taking her by complete surprise.\n\n\"No need for a goodbye. As soon as he is done recovering, I'm sure he will visit. The family you have been placed with is right here in Kamira, so you will be seeing plenty of all of us.\" she replied, bringing a brilliant smile to Troy's face.\n\n\"You need a hand getting Troy to his new home?\" Lassiter asked, a bit nervous, but trying to hide it behind the mask of calmness that he wore to disguise his feelings for her.\n\n\"I can handle it,\" Kelly replied, pausing for a moment. \"When I get back though, maybe you'd be interesting in going into the city together? I haven't had a decent sit down meal in a long time.\" she asked, her shoulder length blonde hair keeping his undivided attention.\n\n\"I would love to, as long as it doesn't include Dalton and an open bar.\" he replied, laughing a bit to calm the mood in the room, their unexplored love having grown every single moment since arriving on Glimmeria.\n\n\"Alright, I'll see you soon then.\" Kelly replied smiling happily as Troy gave Lassiter a hug before grabbing his bag and heading for the front door of the small apartment.\n\n\"Not soon enough.\" Lassiter said to Kelly with a smile before turning to Troy, bending down so they could speak at eye level.\n\n\"Don't worry, I'll personally make sure Roman comes to visit soon, alright?\" Lassiter said as Troy grinned ear to ear, shaking his head in approval.\n\nIt was a huge bar, one of the largest Dalton had found himself at in many years. He had long considered himself not only an avid connoisseur of the full spectrum of alcoholic drinks, but a critic of drinking establishments both large and small. Sitting on a wooden stool beside Steiner, he was amazed at the number of tables, nearly a hundred of them, full of people playing cards, drinking and exchanging exaggerated truths.\n\n\"I'll say one thing, these umbrellas are damn classy.\" Dalton stated, referring to the wooden umbrella in his latest mixed drink.\n\n\"Agreed, but some of us are more about quantity and less about quality.\" Steiner replied loudly, trying to talk over the background noise as he held an unmarked brew in each hand.\n\n\"I'm about both, I just call a spade a spade. And these umbrellas are all class, right down to the neon pink.\" Dalton replied, turning up his drink and downing in one lengthy swig what would have taken most men an hour to nurse into their bloodstreams.\n\nMaybe it was the alcohol casting illusions in front of his eyes as it had done so many times before, but Dalton had convinced himself that a brunette sitting at a nearby table, the kind that became more attractive as the drinks became more available, had been throwing stares in his direction. Never mind the fact that she sat at a table with another female and two men wearing the Colonial uniform, or that it wasn't true love. In Dalton's mind a casual glance from the end of an alcoholic beverage was true enough.\n\n\"Sit tight buddy, and watch the master work.\" Dalton told Steiner as he slowly got up from his stool, patting his much larger Husk friend on the back for a brief moment before attempting to walk into the woman's direction.\n\nHis lack of speed was a direct effect of the workload he had recently placed into his bloodstream, still he managed to stagger with swagger as he eventually made it to his destination. Preparing for the show, Steiner turned to watch the events unfold, a frothy glass of house brew in his his oversize hand. Quickly, he realized how he and Dalton viewed the world through different lenses. How the young lady looked very happy with the group she sat with, not to mention the fact that she was far from being even decently attractive.\n\n\"Excuse me miss. Care to join me for some fine wine and casual sex?\" Dalton asked blatantly, causing an immediate look of disgust to fall across the woman's face as he reeked of anything but fine. \"What? You don't like wine?\" Dalton added, confused at being shot down on one of his best pickup lines.\n\nIt had worked so many times before, granted most of them were not that easy on the eyes, in fact they were slumming it at best according to his standards. Still, at his age, getting turned down using his best line made him begin to question if he still had charm.\n\nBoth Colonial soldiers stood to their feet abruptly, one of them calling Dalton a string of words that would scar a child's ears for life, prompting Steiner to stand to his feet as well, the over abundance of muscular tone that was all too common with the Husk race was ever intimidating.\n\n\"Sit down big man, I got this,\" Dalton said loudly, turning to Steiner as he motioned him to sit and let things unfold without his intervention. \"While you're at it, order me another drink. One with the pretty umbrellas.\" he added.\n\nAs Dalton began to turn back, the Colonial soldier who had cursed him only moments ago, struck him across the face with a hooking punch, knocking him onto a nearby table and slinging several drinks onto the floor beneath it.\n\n\"You son of a bi..\" Dalton began to reply, before the second Colonial soldier kicked him in the ribs solidly, knocking the air from the drunken warrior's lungs.\n\nDalton tried to yell for help from Steiner, extending his hand in a begging fashion as he fought to catch his breath. Steiner remained calm, drinking slowly from his glass as he watched the master at work. Scooped up and thrown several feet, Dalton landed on one of the nearby tables, clearing everything from the top as it followed him to the floor, crashing all around him like a glass filled grenade.\n\nSlowly standing to his feet, he finally responded with a thrashing punch of his own to the face of one of the attackers, followed by a punishing kick to the stomach of the other.\n\nAt least that was his intention, but with things blurred extensively because of the night's binge drinking and beating, he wasn't convinced he had even hit the right two men. Standing there for a moment, trying to get his bearings straight, he randomly sucker punched one of the customers who had been sitting at the now flattened table.\n\nFirst on the scene, two Glimmerian warrant officers raced through the door of the large bar, quickly flattened by a sweeping elbow from Steiner, who had watched his friend endure enough. Dalton staggered behind the bar, looking deviously at the coward bartender for a moment as he began pouring a large glass of whiskey, the tall glass nearly emptying the entire bottle before it topped off.\n\n\"And I want a fuckin' umbrella.\" Dalton slurred loudly, pulling one of the neon umbrellas from another patron's drink and placing it in his glass of whiskey.\n\nMoments later, he and Steiner were standing at the end of Colonial rifles held by warrant officers of their own military.\n\n\"Well, I guess we're cut off.\" Dalton remarked softly as both men were escorted out in hand restraints to be processed at a local holding facility.\n\nAdam and Sarah sat in illustrious surroundings as they ate one of the finest dinners he had ever seen, the type of establishment that was usually reserved for those in high political position and the absolute wealthy. Tonight was different however, tonight was the turning point in his life, the defining moment of his soul. With nearly eighty people eating in the large ballroom of red velvet and stained wood finish, Adam stood to his feet for a moment, drawing Sarah's immediate attention as he softly placed his thick red linen napkin onto the table before taking a place beside her on one of his knees.\n\n\"Sarah,\" Adam said with truth and integrity of the heart. Her eyes exploded with emotion, filled with both tears and emotional connection as she stared at Adam, hanging on his every word. \"The moment I met you, I became a different person. What you've taught me is that I have always been this person deep down, I have lived my life, destined to get to this very moment. You bring out all of the best in me, without you I would be a broken man, both heart and soul. I am asking you from the bottom of this thing inside my chest that beats uncontrollably when you are near if you would do me the honor of being my wife?\" Adam asked as the entire ballroom full of citizens looked on.\n\n\"Yes, of course!\" Sarah replied without hesitation.\n\nEveryone started clapping quietly as Adam rose to his feet slowly and embraced Sarah into his arms, kissing her as deeply as the concentration of stars that filled the night sky. After several minutes of affection, the waiter slowly walked over to give Adam the news of his friends checking into lockup. Not the first time Adam had bailed Dalton out of jail, but to have to put such a magical evening on hold to do it should be a felony within itself.\n\n\"It's alright Adam, let's go get our boys out of lockup and spend the rest of the night planning the first day of the rest of our lives together.\" Sarah said softly.\n\nHe nodded, although he planned on giving both Dalton and Steiner a damn good ass chewing when and if he could actually talk the Colonials into releasing them. As they began leaving the confines of the lavish restaurant, everyone once again clapped softly to let them know they had been touched to be a part of such a magical moment.\n\n\"What the hell is your problem?\" Dalton asked Steiner as both men stood in a small holding cell, Dalton pacing a path in front of the door while Steiner stood in a rear corner.\n\n\"Just watching the master at work.\" Steiner replied with heavy sarcasm. Before Dalton could answer with a small piece of his self proclaimed infinite wisdom, they both recognized footsteps approaching.\n\n\"You have a visitor.\" a well dressed and lightly armed Colonial soldier said to Dalton.\n\n\"About damn time, hell Adam's usually here to pick me up long before now.\" Dalton said with relief as Steiner slowly approached the front of the cell. Rather than seeing his longtime friend walking up to the cell, the young woman from the bar cautiously approached.\n\n\"The master son. Don't forget it.\" Dalton said softly as if to pour salt into the wounded pride of Steiner before pausing to grab his brown coat and fluff it a bit.\n\nSeveral hours had passed, which were filled with lies, bedroom eyes and the aftermath of barroom lust between Dalton and the young woman. Never asking her name, it was his belief that a woman's name just complicated things unnecessarily, especially through the steel bars of lockup.\n\nIt was a bittersweet feeling for Kelly. Troy had been lucky enough to find a stable home on Glimmeria with a family that would love and care for him deeply. Still, like the rest of the Gunship crew, she had grown to love and care for him deeply as well. He would be safer here however, there was a raging war that would soon enough reignite only a few miles away.\n\nShe was quickly reminded of that as she stepped outside of the housing unit onto the crowded urban street as a full squadron of Swordfish jets flew overhead. She couldn't wait to catch a transport and get back to the arms of Lassiter, having come to feel a comfort and peace around him that she had never known, a feeling that only true love can bring.\n\nShe never made it back. Standing respectfully as only a Colonial soldier could, she felt a sharp piercing band of lead cut through her chest. Her first reaction was to draw her sidearm, maybe the Legion invasion had began? As she slowly turned, her sidearm shaking roughly while her body fought to remain alive, a second shot hit her chest only inches below the first, the muzzle flash of Draco's sniper rifle alerting her to his position in a second story window. Moments later she died, falling soundly onto the streets below.\n\nDraco tossed a large golden coin out of the window, landing near her lifeless body. A Glimmerian coin that had been out of mint since the day they had lost the first war to the Legion, his calling card to Adam Michaels.\n\nSeveral hours later Adam and Sarah were the first to join the Colonial investigators at the scene of the shooting. Visibly shaken by the body of someone who he had looked at as a little sister, someone he felt compelled to look after, Adam trembled uncontrollably as Sarah held his hand and tried to convince him that there was nothing he could have done to help her. It wasn't his fault. Or was it?\n\nAdam spotted the golden coin laying near her body, immediately recognizing it and deciding there was a huge problem. The coins were only issued to a limited number of Glimmerians nearly a decade ago, a special group, the group he fought beside. His unit. He quickly realized that Kelly had died because of him, as would everyone else around him unless he could somehow find a way to protect them, like he should have been there to protect her.\n\n\"Kelly,\" Lassiter screamed as he sprinted across the street and fell on his knees trying to revive the lifeless body of his lover. \"Get off of me!\" he added as Adam grabbed him, both arms clinched around Lassiter as he drug him away from her body unwillingly.\n\n\"She's gone.\" Adam said softly as Lassiter cried uncontrollably.\n\nThe Colonial jailer escorted Adam down the corridor, the striking of their boots against the stone tiled floor making their presence immediately known.\n\n\"About fucking time. You forget about us or something?\" Dalton asked arrogantly as the cell door opened.\n\nWithout a word, Adam simply turned and grabbed Dalton firmly by the front of his brown coat, picking him up a few inches from the ground and holding him against the cold brick wall. Exchanging nothing more than deep stares, it quickly became obvious to Dalton that his friend was a different person than he was only hours before.\n\n\"Get your fucking hands off of me!\" Dalton yelled as Adam dropped him and loosened his grip. Steiner quickly intervened, easily holding Dalton at bay as Michaels looked onto both of them for several moments with the eyes of a man hellbent on revenge.\n\nA few painstaking days had passed before Adam found himself standing under the large canopy surrounded by friends as a Colonial priest spoke words before committing Kelly's body to the ground. The only sounds that kept the entire funeral from seeming like a dream were the shots from Colonial rifles as the twelve soldiers fired them into the air in unison. Adam watched Lassiter deal with the loss of someone he couldn't manage to live without, he felt for the young man as he tried to imagine losing Sarah Blaine the same way. The thought of it was unbearable.\n\nAfter the service and departure of a majority of those in attendance, Adam gathered his crew.\n\n\"We have a problem. The person who shot Kelly, left this.\" Michaels said, holding the gold coin up as the sunlight shimmered across it.\n\n\"Bullshit, ain't no way Adam. Those coins were specific to our platoon back in the first war. I should know, I dropped hundreds of them at every bar on this fuckin' rock,\" Dalton replied.\n\nAdam answered only with a dedicated stare. \"I'd say we do got a problem then, a big fucking problem.\" Dalton added, feeling Adam's sense of urgency.\n\n\"Whoever did this is coming for Dalton or myself, maybe both of us. The marksmanship and weapon they used to kill Kelly lets me know that none of you are safe. From this moment forward, nobody goes anywhere alone. Nobody.\" Adam added to the conversation.\n\n\"Steiner. You and Lassiter will stay with Dalton at all times. Pack plenty of firepower and stay indoors as much as possible. If they used a sniper rifle the first time, chances are they plan on striking again from a distance,\" Michaels said. \"Roman, you will be with Sarah and I. Lassiter, I realize this is a very tough time, but I have to ask you to stay focused. Until we catch the person who did this, none of us are safe.\" Adam added.\n\nLassiter agreed with a nod, still visibly shaken.\n\n\"I know what Kelly meant to you, she was like a sister to me. I will go through the rest of my life blaming myself for not being able to protect her from this, but you have to shake it off for now. Put it on a shelf, the only way we can help her now is by catching the son of a bitch who did this. Understand?\" Adam said.\n\n\"Yea, I understand.\" Lassiter responded after a long pause.\n\nAs the group split up and walked toward two different Colonial transports, Adam turned to face the others.\n\n\"Dalton, keep your ass out of trouble.\" Dalton stopped walking for a moment.\n\n\"Who me? Sure thing, scout's honor.\" he replied with a smile before once again joining his group.\n\n\"Dalton used to be a scout?\" Sarah asked surprised.\n\n\"No, he didn't. That's what worries me.\" Adam replied, drawing a bit of laughter from Roman.\n\n\"Based on the information our spies have given us, the Colonial base is heavily defended. Our forces will take heavy losses on their way to the surface.\" a Legion advisor said as Flag Officer Andrews stood for a few silent moments watching his forces staging on a wall mounted grid, his crimson red officer's uniform lined with thick black to match his shoes.\n\n\"We will send the invasion in two waves. Send the mercenaries and newly trained soldiers down in the first wave, let them take the blunt of it. Send the officers, battle tested soldiers and heavy equipment down with the second wave. Have them set up a forward base of operations so we can begin to funnel supplies and reinforcements to the front lines.\" Andrews replied.\n\n\"Yes sir. And what of the Hunters?\" the advisor asked.\n\n\"Have them wait in orbit with Legion High Command. If the Colonials attempt an early retreat, the Hunters should be able to finish them off easily. If the Colonials dig in, we'll have the Hunters drop down to the surface to reinforce our lines.\" Flag Officer Andrews replied.\n\n\"Yes sir!\" the advisor responded, immediately ordering his communications officer to relay the message throughout the fleet.\n\nAndrews stood there for several minutes, admiring the view from the other side of the thick plated glass of the ship's bridge. Dozens of Legion capital ships and cruisers along with three Hunter carriers, all working together as squadrons of Legion fighter jets flew past, running drills in preparation of the upcoming battle.\n\n\"Sir. We've picked up a large fleet broadcasting Legion code in outer orbit of the planet!\" one of the grid operators yelled as Commander Edwards walked swiftly toward his station.\n\n\"Set our condition to one, recall all Colonial soldiers and make them fully aware that this is not a drill,\" Edwards replied. \"They are staging from the looks of it, we still have some time. Order all Mack stations fully loaded and Swordfish and Spartans fueled and standing by. Bring every Goliath unit that we have online.\" he added.\n\n\"Yes sir!\" the grid operator announced loudly, punching the orders into a computer that would mirror them to every outpost on Glimmeria.\n\n\"Better not be a fucking drill because this is the first time I've ever left a pitcher of beer sitting,\" Dalton said angrily as Steiner and Lassiter both had their thoughts on the impending battle rather than Dalton's lust for man drink. \"And another thing, they need to find a way around this sweltering fucking heat, I'm already sick of it.\" Dalton added sharply as the group quickly left the Colonial bar along with everyone else, the exterior neon sign easily overpowered by the strength of sunlight as they began their walk back to the Command Center.\n\nHaving almost made it back, the men continued their slow march as they absorbed Dalton's constant barrage of bitching and moaning. Steiner had intended to let him know that his ranting was beginning to resemble that of a married woman, when the right thigh of the massive Husk warrior was struck with a shotgun blast, immediately putting him down to the ground yelling in agony.\n\nDraco walked from an alley nearby, firing the second shotgun blast of the double barrel in the direction of Lassiter, barely grazing his back with the hot lead spray as he dropped the emptied weapon and calmly pulled two pistols. Lassiter found refuge behind a parked transport, drawing his combat sidearm and looking several feet down the road, watching a suddenly sober Dalton pull Steiner to the rear of another one of the transports which lined the sides of the city's streets.\n\n\"Adam! Where the fuck are you! We got the shooter a couple of blocks from HQ, we're pinned down and taking fire!\" Dalton yelled into his com, throwing it to the ground as he stood to fire a blast from his own short barrel shotgun before dropping back down quickly behind cover.\n\nDalton's blast was returned with three ringing pistol shots, shattering the window above the head of the roughly bearded man smothered in his favorite brown coat as he sat with his back firmly against the thin steel of the makeshift barricade. As Draco approached the transport, he slowly rounded the front end, Dalton and Steiner easily in his sights. Before he could finish the task, however, his ribs felt the penetrating plunge of a shot from Lassiter's combat pistol.\n\nThe Colonial sniper had recovered enough to go on the offensive just in time to save the life of his friends.\n\nDalton aimed his shotgun in the direction of the assassin, but it was quickly brushed to the side as the shot made its way deep into the transport, the steel pellets scattering in a circular design as they embedded themselves into the thin steel and aluminum. Draco used his second arm to throw a hooking punch into the face of Dalton who crumpled at the bottom of the transport and laid motionless as Lassiter had began closing in on the Benzan contract killer.\n\nSteiner, still reeling from his flesh wound, realized that if the assassin was to be caught or killed, he was the only one capable of doing so.\n\nDalton was incapacitated, while such an experienced killer would have made short work of a Colonial sniper. Grabbing Draco in a tightly clinched hold, the Husk used all of his strength to tighten the grip even further trying to snap the bones of the assassin. Draco finally was able to loosen himself just enough to swing his right elbow around and bury it into the face of Steiner, who was stunned but still on his feet. A hard right kick from the assassin changed that, sending Steiner to his back with a thud as Draco spun quickly, doing a back fist with his clinched knuckles wrapped in black leather glove, knocked the pistol from Lassiter's hand.\n\nForcefully pushing Lasstier to the ground, the much more qualified Draco jumped onto him, his arms pursuing the neck of the Colonial sniper in an attempt to snap it and be done with the pesky commoner. It was his own neck, however, that felt a sudden stiffness as Dalton wrapped both of his arms around it, burying his elbows deep into the shoulders of Draco. After several moments of struggle between the two, Draco clinched the back of Dalton's brown jacket and using most of the strength he had left, launched Dalton over his shoulder through the air as the wiley soldier of fortune crashed into one of the nearby parked vehicles, knocking him virtually unconscious.\n\nAs with any assassin, Draco had grown tired of the hands on fighting and picked up Lassier's pistol, which was the closest weapon to him, laying just a few feet away.\n\nHe hesitated for a moment, unsure of who to kill first, deciding finally to send Dalton to the afterlife as he aimed down the crisp iron sights at the man he had once fought beside. Meat tore from his shoulder first, followed by skin and muscle from his ribs as\n\nAdam had arrived just in time to fire two shots from his pistol, both hurting the assassin a great deal. Draco quickly made it to his feet just in time to be blinded by several reeling punches and a solid elbow, all thrown into the Benzan's face by Roman Raines.\n\nDraco tried to fight back, throwing several punches with deep intention that would have seriously wounded a normal man, but Roman was no normal man, the farthest thing from it would be the best assessment.\n\nBlocking the punches with the thick aluminum on the backside of one of his partially mechanical arms, the other was thrown to the body of Draco, the sound of ribs breaking under pressure echoed loudly as Roman threw Draco face first into one of the transports, putting him out of commission.\n\n\"Enough,\" Adam said, doing everything he could to pull Roman off of the Benzan assassin. \"We need to find out why.\" he added, Roman stepping away as Sarah continued to tend to Lassiter, Dalton and Steiner.\n\nFlag Officer Andrews watched from a tall glass balcony as thousands of Legion soldiers had gathered in formation under him, awaiting his final words before boarding their drop ships which would be descending in only minutes to the surface of Glimmeria to begin the largest battle ever recorded. The ships were solidly constructed with steel plating thick enough to deflect the paltry shots of small arms fire, however they could hardly withstand the pounding of the surface based Mack cannons.\n\nEvery Legion soldier knew this, understood the significant chance that once they entered the drop ships, they could be entering nothing more than a death sentence. Still they stood loyal as their Flag Officer placed his hands tightly around the bannister and prepared to speak.\n\n\"It is my belief that only the strong should lead. Survive. Take a moment to look around, look into the eyes of those which you fight beside on this very day. You are the strong, and because of this you will survive. The Colonials have tried to separate themselves from the rest of the Skyla System, and in doing so have made a mockery of our very way of life. Today, it is our turn. The Colonials will either submit to our way of life, or they will perish to the will of the strong. May the gods be with all of you!\" Flag Officer Andrews said boldly as every soldier began to cheer before chanting the Legion name.\n\nShortly after, each soldier began boarding their ships with great reserve as Andrews returned to the bridge which would serve as the control center of the Legion High Command for the upcoming battle.\n\nDraco sat on a wooden stool, his hands bound with thick rope and his face bloodied like a scene from a horror film. He knew he was still alive, yet it all seemed surreal, almost as if he were placed snugly into a dream. Steel plated walls surrounding him, the serene silence of emptiness penetrated the air throughout the room as he sat there with no idea of what was to come next. Thick steel began to grind as the door slowly opened, Adam Michaels entering the room and pulling up a wooden chair to sit within arm's reach of the man who had taken the life of Kelly and nearly several others.\n\n\"Funny. Nearly ten years ago, you, I, Dalton and a couple dozen other lucky souls made it off of this rock in one piece. We would have given our lives for each other back then, and when we left we were on good terms Draco, so my only question is why?\" Adam asked. Draco continued to stare at the solid steel door without so much as a blink, no response and no acknowledgement of Adam's presence, well versed in the tactics of interrogation due to his extensive Benzan training.\n\n\"Draco, I am the carrot. I'm in here to try and get the answers I need and maybe let you live to see another day. The rest of my crew is waiting right outside that door, including the man who was deeply in love with the young girl you killed. They are the stick, and trust me, none of them have a problem with cutting the answers out of you and leaving you here to die. So again I ask y..\" Adam said, cut off by Draco.\n\n\"I did it to save my family.\"\n\n\"Who?\" Adam asked in a demanding tone.\n\n\"You're in way over your head here Adam. If you plan to kill me, do it and get it over with. If I say anything, my family is dead, and I promise you I'm not going to let that happen.\" Draco replied.\n\n\"About three years ago, I was in a bad spot Adam. I needed money...a lot of money. I met a few people and before I knew it I was in with the Benzan Mafia. Yea, I know what you must think of me. I kill people, usually in cold blood and I do it for a paycheck.\" Draco said, turning to look into the eyes of his former brother in arms.\n\n\"Adam, you have to believe me when I tell you I didn't have a choice. Usually the people I kill, hell they all deserve it. I do society a favor by erasing some of the worst people you can imagine. This was different. Yea, it paid a lot of money and I know she was innocent Adam, but my family? What was I supposed to do,\" Draco added as Adam turned away. \"WHAT WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO?\" Draco shouted.\n\n\"So the Benzan Mafia is responsible for the death of one of my crew?\" Adam asked bluntly.\n\n\"No. In fact, they wanted no part of it. They just allowed me the meeting, that's it.\" Draco replied.\n\n\"I need you to arrange a meeting, put me in the same room as the head of the Benzan Mafia.\" Adam said boldly.\n\n\"You know I can't do that! Adam, I'm low level with the family, I can't just call 'em up and start demanding that kind of shit!\" Draco replied.\n\n\"I'll do it,\" Michaels said bluntly. \"Who do I need to contact and how do I go about it?\" Adam asked as Draco directed his attention on the other side of the room, reluctant to answer the question. \"WHO GODDAMNIT!\" Adam yelled, pulling his sidearm and pressing it onto the forehead of Draco.\n\n\"This is Commander James Edwards, the superior ranking officer of Colonial Command. Earlier today, our grid systems picked up a large Legion presence entering the orbit of this planet, leading us to only one conclusion, war is imminent. We have solid defenses set up on the planet's surface, the most capable soldiers in the Skyla System, but above all else we have reason. While the Legion looks to impose its will on a free people, we fight for the reason of freedom,\" he said, pausing briefly as everyone near a com unit on Glimmeria's surface continued to stop whatever they were doing to listen to the breaking news.\n\n\"A society in which innocent people may live in peace rather than be slaughtered because of a political agenda. I ask that you all fight with reason, vigilance and the memory of those fallen Colonials who have allowed our freedom up until now. Good luck and God speed.\" Commander Edwards announced throughout every Colonial radio and com unit on Glimmeria.\n\nTurmoil set in as Glimmeria's citizens faced the facts, a war with the Legion was at their doorstep, one that would forever change the face of their planet and those who inhabited it. Most of them were quick to evacuate indoors, trying their best to safeguard their families.\n\nGroups of the mechanical masterwork Goliaths accompanied squads of Colonial soldiers who were armed to the teeth, requesting the citizens stay inside of their homes as Colonial Spartan fighters and Glimmerian Swordfish screamed overhead, their thrusters at full burn and ready for the upcoming fight. The Mack stations were already online, however there became a sense of urgency with the staff as they hustled to run full diagnostics and double check the ammunition storage for the surface to space cannons. They were the primary line of defense for the Colonials and the backbone of their strategic war effort.\n\nMeanwhile, Commander Edwards strengthened the security forces inside of the Colonial Command Center. The large, atrium style room, which was made of plated steel and shatter proof glass, was designed to survive a nuclear strike. Therefore, all of the high ranking officials collapsed into the room with equipment enough to run the entire Colonial war effort behind the closed doors of what everyone had began to refer to as the \"vault\".\n\n\"Where are Lieutenant Michaels and Roman Raines?\" Commander Edwards demanded to know as Dalton, Steiner and Lassiter stood front and center.\n\n\"I'm sorry sir, who?\" Dalton reluctantly answered.\n\n\"Do not play with me at a time like this Dalton!\" Edwards shouted, smelling the hint of soured lager on his breath.\n\n\"Sir. They left to meet with the Benzan Mafia in reference to Kelly's kille...\" Lassiter finally admitted, interrupted by the Commander.\n\n\"THEY DID WHAT? AT A TIME LIKE THIS!\" Commander Edwards added in hysterical disbelief. Steiner and Lassiter both sunk their heads toward the floor as Dalton began to recite his soldier identification number as if being interrogated by the enemy.\n\n\"ENOUGH!\" the Commander shouted, bringing his face within inches of Dalton's own, the sight of his stubbled brown beard furthering the blurred vision of a furious commander.\n\n\"I should have your ass thrown in the brig for such blatant insubordination,\" Commander Edwards yelled as Dalton stared back planning his exit strategy, just in case. \"However, with Lieutenant Michaels off doing business that is completely unauthorized, you are next in line in the chain of command Sergeant. I have no choice other than to put you in charge of the security detail of this building.\" Commander Edwards said.\n\n\"I'm sorry?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"I have to put you in charge. You can't follow orders worth a damn, but if the Legion makes it this far, I have no doubt in my mind of your ability to give them hell to protect the lives of everyone here.\" the Commander answered.\n\n\"In charge? You mean like, as in giving orders of my own?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"Yes, in charge. Unless you are too drunk to do so?\" Edwards asked.\n\nDalton stood motionless for a moment, cursing his chewing gum for failing to mask the stench of the morning's alcoholic adventure.\n\n\"No sir, I'm ready and capable.\" Dalton finally replied, stretching his eyes for a moment in an attempt to pull himself from an intoxicated daze.\n\n\"Good. You three hit the ammunition reserve down the street, grab plenty of small arms weaponry as well as the nearest Colonial squad, and then double-time your asses back. Set the squad up strategically and you three collapse inside and protect the vault as a last defensive resort. Sarah Blaine will remain inside of the vault with us, it will be a huge boost to everyone's moral hearing her voice through the com system,\" Commander Edwards ordered, turning to enter and seal the vault.\n\n\"Oh, and if you see Lieutenant Michaels before I do, send him directly to me. Understood?\" Edwards asked.\n\n\"Aye Captain.\" Dalton answered.\n\n\"It's COMMANDER!\" Edwards shouted. \"Huh?\" Dalton confusingly asked.\n\n\"JUST GO!\" Commander Edwards yelled before turning to seal the vault.\n\n\"I wonder what's crawled up his ass?\" Dalton mumbled as the three men turned to walk down the narrow hallway and onto the street.\n\n\"Now what?\" Adam asked as he stood with Roman and Draco, who's hands were tied snugly with thick rope.\n\n\"Now we wait.\" Draco replied.\n\n\"Just to be clear, even though he's given me his word that we will not be harmed, if he does try anything, your ass will be the first one dusted.\" Michaels said of Draco.\n\n\"Relax. The Benzans are always good to their word, especially Cyrus. Of all of the Benzans I have met, he considers a man's word to be as important as the soul in his chest.\" Draco replied as they remained standing beside three of the mangiest horses Roman had ever seen.\n\n\"Looks like you guys have a friend coming.\" Draco said sarcastically.\n\n\"Fuck.\" Michaels replied, catching a glimpse of a Glimmerian lawman approaching them on horseback.\n\n\"Good afternoon.\" Adam said charmingly, unsuccessfully trying to change the scowl on the Sheriff's face as the dust settled around the hooves of the solid brown steed.\n\n\"Adam Michaels, Sheriff Barker. I have a warrant to bring you in to the Colonials.\" Adam hung his head for a moment before looking back at the lawman, who was still mounted on his horse, a large rifle laying across his inner elbows.\n\n\"Can't do it, at least not at the moment. I'm out here on business, when I'm done you can take me wherever you like.\" Adam replied. Sheriff Barker pulled the rifle up, aiming directly at Adam.\n\n\"I'm not in the business of making suggestions, a warrant hits my desk and I go out and fetch 'em. That's how it works.\" Barker said, his rifle's aim still true to Adam's upper body. Putting his hands in front of him to try and keep the peace, Adam replied. \"May want to put the gun away, my friend doesn't take kindly to having them pointed in his direction.\" Barker adjusted the gun barrel slightly to aim it at Roman.\n\n\"Can your friend dodge bullets?\" the Sheriff asked.\n\n\"Well actually.\" Michaels replied, knowing damn good and well that if Roman was pissed off, Barker would have been dead already.\n\nThe Sheriff started to reply, but was quickly drown out by the thrusters of a ship breaking orbit, falling quickly from the sky and hastily approaching to land near them. They all watched as the elongated blade design of the ship's front gave away the fact that it was Benzan, huge clouds of dust rising from the ground as the ship rocked back and forth slightly, finally touching ground.\n\n\"Sheriff, you need to leave now. Please.\" Michaels pleaded, not knowing what the reaction of the Benzans would be.\n\nAs the shuttle door began to open, the Sheriff glanced in its direction for a split second, which was all the time Roman needed. Pulling his combat blade and throwing it end over end with blazing speed and unparalleled accuracy, the knife digging into the flesh of Sheriff Barker's shooting hand and throwing him from the horse.\n\n\"Just stay down until the ship leaves, otherwise they may kill you.\" Roman said to the Sheriff as he walked over to him, grabbing his rifle and tossing it far enough away from him to be irrelevant.\n\nSheriff Barker remained on the ground, doing his best to stop the bleeding as he held the wound moments after Roman recovered his blade with a tug. Obviously enduring a tremendous amount of pain, the Sheriff did his best to remain silent as two Benzans exited the shuttle.\n\nThe first was a tall, slender man with dirty blonde hair braided down his back. He wore a pair of reflective silver sunglasses, a white long sleeve shirt with buttons and carried a solid black pump shotgun. He was everything the men had pictured a member of such a notorious crime family looking like. The second Benzan out, not so much.\n\nBrunette hair with a slight but lustrous curl, she moved with perfect symmetry, deep blue eyes, a white v-neck shirt and gray cargo pants, she had a small machine gun pistol hanging from a black leather strap that draped over her shoulder. Unlike anything Adam or Roman expected, she was simply too damn beautiful to be in this line of work. Not society's definition of beautiful, which amounted to makeup, empty talk and a glamor filled wardrobe. She was a pure beautiful. The kind of woman who could make men do almost anything with a simple request. Of course, if that didn't work, she still had the machine gun pistol as leverage.\n\n\"The agreement was three passengers, not four.\" the tall Benzan man said as the attractive female kept a finger on the trigger of the rapid fire pistol, its barrel pointed to the ground.\n\n\"Relax Oz, the one laying down is a Sheriff who decided to show his damn face only minutes ago.\" Draco replied. With a slight nod of Oz, the female began to walk toward the lawman with intentions of ending his life.\n\n\"No! Please, he is of no harm. Simply came to serve a warrant on me is all.\" Adam said, stepping in front of the Sheriff in an attempt to plead for the man's life. It would be the very first time Adam and the young lady of such immaculate beauty locked stares.\n\n\"It's alright Sasha, leave him be.\" Oz said, standing by the ramp of the ship as he waited for everyone but Barker to board.\n\n\"Weapons.\" Sasha said as she began collecting everyone's killing devices on their way up the steel ramp which was outlined with glowing red bulbs. Taking it upon herself, she quickly reached out and grabbed the combat blade of Roman, attempting to pull it from its casing which was strapped around his leg. Meeting her grasp with one of his own, he gripped her wrist strongly as a warning.\n\n\"Careful.\" Sasha warned, breaking his hold on her and removing the blade as Adam nodded slightly to keep Roman calm.\n\nHe was calm enough, in fact he was impressed. A woman who knew her weaponry, could hold her own with words and had a undeniable beauty throughout her entire body. Not the textbook definition, Roman never had a need for that type of woman, they were much too weak for his taste.\n\nSure, she could have easily worn the clothes of a princess and blended well with the title. However, he thought she had a more gritty perfection about her, she could handle herself well in a fight, this much Roman knew the moment she walked from the ship for the first time. She was the first woman in a very long time who had gained his respect.\n\n\"If they so much as move the wrong way, shoot them.\" Oz said to Sasha as the two men began to buckle their flight harnesses.\n\n\"Get this fucking rope off of me.\" Draco said demandingly as Sasha quickly used Roman's blade to do so, sliding the steel between his wrists and the thick rope, which fell into pieces like a child's toy as she gave a simple upward thrust of the knife. Both Adam and Roman sat there, amazed at a woman who knew her steel well.\n\nAt the moment his bonds were no more, Draco's hand lunged to Sasha's leg, pulling her combat sidearm made of solid black steel and pointing it at the two men. As swiftly as he aimed the weapon, the barrel of Oz's shotgun touched the back of his neck, his tiny hairs standing to attention as the circular design of the barrel commanded respect.\n\n\"No harm is to come to them while they are under safe harbor from Cyrus.\" Oz said, holding the shotgun at point blank range.\n\n\"You would shoot me and watch them go free?\" Draco asked loudly, surprised by the thought. Oz simply answered his question by pushing on Draco's neck with the shotgun, the unforgiving steel digging into his skin and quickly convincing him to lower Sasha's sidearm.\n\n\"It won't be forgotten my brother.\" Draco said sarcastically as Sasha forcefully grabbed her pistol, placing it back into her leg holster.\n\n\"The memories of a man who gets himself caught on a simple hit are of no concern to me.\" Oz replied with a touch of sarcasm himself as he strapped into the pilot's seat.\n\nOnly minutes later, Sheriff Barker stood to his feet, his injured hand wrapped as he collected his rifle and watched the Benzan shuttle once again hit Glimmeria's upper atmosphere.\n\nAlthough Adam was preoccupied with hoping he and Roman would live to see another sunrise, at the same time he found himself intrigued with Sasha's intoxicating beauty and skills with a weapon. Moments after hitting the thin layer of the planet's atmosphere, his attention was quickly drawn to a small window of the shuttle as they entered space. Legion ships as thick as the sand on Glimmeria's surface bunching together for the invasion to come, as he and Roman both sat silently in awe of the force they would soon be fighting against. Within seconds they both knew that the Colonials were outnumbered at least three to one, and there was no doubt that the invasion was being carefully planned before execution.\n\nAdam suddenly found himself wanting to be back on the planet's surface, helping his friends prepare for a fight which would surely lead to the death of them all. Meeting with the Benzans to find the person who initiated Kelly's death was deeply important to him, however, she was gone and nothing would ever bring her back. But he still had a chance to inform his friends of the fight to come, maybe talk them out of a battle in which they had no chance of winning and in doing so, save their lives.\n\n\"Hey, check it out.\" Lassiter said to both Dalton and Steiner as they began the short journey on foot to the ammunition storage building as ordered, the Husk still moving rather slowly as the soreness of his bandaged right thigh had started to catch up to him.\n\n\"What is it Private Lassiter, I'm a busy man.\" Dalton replied, flexing his newly assigned command.\n\n\"Private?\" Lassiter replied, amazed at Dalton's newly found dedication to the uniform, not to mention his ability to use the term outside of the bedroom.\n\n\"Didn't see this coming.\" Steiner said laughing as Dalton returned the comment with a stern look before noticing what Lassiter had seen only moments ago.\n\nGlimmeria's citizens had began crowding the streets, cheering the many soldiers who were preparing for the upcoming battle against the Legion. Many of them clapped loudly, while a few of the women had thrown flowers as a sign of respect. In only a few hours they would no doubt be instructed to remain in their homes, preparing as if a disaster was inevitable while forced to huddle around small radios and listen to the progress of the war. Still they welcomed it with open arms, realizing that these soldiers represented a free tomorrow for each and every one of them.\n\nIt was a very emotional moment for all three of the men, leveled by the sight of so many people who were counting on their help to remain free, rather than slaves who would spend the remainder of their days under horrible conditions while doing the Legion's manual labor. Both Lassiter and Steiner secretly wondered if Dalton's stare of concentration was one of gratitude or lust, as he continued glancing for several moments at the flower bearing women with saliva ridden lips as they slowly continued their course to collect ammunition.\n\n\"Looks like this is the place,\" Dalton said, several armored skiffs exiting through a huge set of steel bay doors which carried the painted insignia of the Colonials. \"Automatic rifles, grenades and as much damn ammunition as we can carry, got it?\" Dalton ordered, flashing his Colonial badge to an officer behind a thick steel desk as Lassiter and Steiner both began to join dozens of other Colonials in rummaging through huge wooden crates full of precision weaponry.\n\n\"What the hell is this,\" Lassiter asked as he began to laugh, Steiner looking for a moment before shrugging without an answer. \"Looks like it belongs in a museum.\" he added, tossing the gun back into the direction of the storage bin.\n\nThe beat up wood grain stock of the single shot rifle, instead found its way to the palm of Dalton's hand as he snatched it from the air just moments before it would have been discarded.\n\n\"This, greenhorn, is a Glimmerian Thumper.\" Dalton said insultingly as he stroked the weapon with vain intention.\n\n\"And they wonder why the first Glimmerian War was lost.\" Lassiter replied with heavy sarcasm of his own.\n\n\"Don't look like much at first glance...\" Dalton said as he was interrupted.\n\n\"Actually, I glanced at it three times, and it still looks like a raggedy piece of shit.\" Steiner said, bursting into laughter as Lassiter quickly joined him.\n\n\"Laugh it up.\" Dalton replied, sliding the thin metal chamber cover open for a second to make sure it was loaded, before sliding it shut forcefully and aiming it to a corner of the warehouse, a quickly created smirk on his face as he fired the weapon.\n\nEveryone's attention was instantly abducted by the loud pop of the shell jolting from the gun's chamber and slamming into the thick stone corner, rock shrapnel flying several feet as the round exploded with force.\n\nStill holding his shit eating grin, he turned to the other Colonial soldiers, who had stopped collecting gear to stand and watch. \"Say something,\" Dalton dared of them as he turned back to his friends. \"I don't give a damn what uniform a man is wearing, one of these exploding rounds hits him and it'll ruin his weekend.\" he added, smiling so widely that his whiskey scarred teeth made a rare appearance.\n\n\"Report!\" Commander Edwards demanded as he leaned over to view the large monitor of one of the many Colonial workstations that was tucked snugly inside of the vault as its alarm rang loudly.\n\n\"Sir,\" a lower ranking officer said, standing to his feet to face the commander. \"Our grids show the Legion staging area has reached the fringe area of our Mack Cannons.\" he added.\n\n\"Good. You have my permission to make them pay for their first mistake of the day. Start pounding the son of a bitches out of the sky.\" Commander Edwards said sharply, ordering the first shot of the battle as he glanced around the room for a moment to admire such a group of loyal Colonials.\n\nOnly a few moments later, everyone on Glimmeria's surface heard the first shot fire. The large, pounding hollow burst of one of the Mack cannons illuminated the sunset filled sky for a moment, sending dedicated lead screaming into outer orbit. Everyone on the street stopped to watch as the city's fallout siren began blaring with painstaking volume, a mask of silence falling onto the city as everyone began to get indoors as quickly as possible. It had begun.\n\nThree more thumping blasts fired in unison, this time panic and screaming overtook the city as everyone both Glimmerian and Colonial began to quicken the pace of whatever they were doing, sprinting for either safety or the nearest military outpost.\n\n\"Ahh shit,\" Dalton said in a dedicated tone of voice, upset that they had not had the adequate time required to fetch a full array of weaponry. \"Grab the whole damn crate, we 'aint got time for bullshittn'.\" he added, Lassiter and Steiner looking at each other and both quickly coming to the solid conclusion that Dalton had been the only one bullshitting.\n\nSteiner easily pulled his end of the huge crate from the floor, his hulking arms barely straining as he hoisted his half to waist level, strength in full supply.\n\nMeanwhile, Lassiter struggled with the other end, repositioning himself several times and trying to find the easiest spot to grab hold of. Finally managing to pull his end off of the floor a bit, doing everything he could to keep it raised at the height of his knees and punishing his back in the process while the rest of his body shook slightly from the immense weight.\n\n\"Let's go private, cowboy the fuck up.\" Dalton ordered, walking quickly outside carrying nothing more than the badly scarred Thumper and leaving the men to follow slowly. Lassiter doing his absolute best to convince himself not to drop the crate of weapons and begin pistol whipping the arrogant man in command.\n\nA few transports zoomed by them before Dalton saw an opportunity present itself, walking in front of the large flatbed truck and holding his newfound rifle in the face of its driver.\n\n\"Need this vehicle, official Colonial business.\" he said brashly.\n\n\"But...but I'm not Colonial.\" the Glimmerian stated, obviously shaken. Rather than give a reply, Dalton simply pulled the ready pin back on the weapon which led to the driver jumping out of the transport as if his clothes were on fire.\n\n\"Aight' boys, throw it in the back,\" Dalton ordered, Lassiter barely able to continue walking, much less throw it anywhere with the additional weight of the crate pulling his frame within a foot of the ground. \"Hey, where the hell do you think you're going?\" Dalton asked, pointing the gun back at the Glimmerian driver and then flicking the barrel in the direction of his struggling Colonial mate.\n\nOutraged at the idea of not only having his transport stolen red handed, but having to help the thieves load their belongings was unheard of in the man's opinion. Of course, opinions don't mean a damn thing when you have a long barrel rifle pointed in your face.\n\nMoments later the man helped Lassiter with his side of the crate, finally lifting it onto the flat bed well enough to appease their ranking officer.\n\n\"Thanks bud.\" Dalton said with gratitude as the man simply told him to fuck off in native Glimmerian and walked away. \"When this war is over, you're hitting the gym little man.\" Dalton said to Lassiter, which would almost have certainly started a fight if the Colonial sniper could have walked upright.\n\nDriving the vehicle only a couple of traffic congested blocks, Dalton leaned out as he spotted a small Colonial assault team setting up a defensive barricade on the corner.\n\n\"Hey you. Take this group to the Colonial Command Center on orders from Commander Edwards, get inside and await further instruction.\" Dalton said loudly, trying to vocally overpower the blasts from the Mack stations which had now become nonstop.\n\n\"Yes sir!\" the squad leader yelled, sprinting for the command center, his eight man squad tucked in closely behind him.\n\n\"Get the lead out, it's about to be on!\" Dalton added.\n\n\"Double time it!\" an impatient Dalton yelled to Steiner and a nearly crippled Lassiter as they had resorted to dragging the crate from the parked vehicle's location into the command center. Opting to pull a small flask from his brown coat and consume a great deal of the contents, Dalton gritted his teeth from the burn before looking into the sky to see the beauty of distant death. The Mack shots streaming as well as the thruster burns of hundreds of Colonial and Glimmerian fighter ships lit up the early night sky as if it were one big fireworks exhibition.\n\n\"Sir, early reports indicate several direct hits on medium size Legion ships in orbit. Still no indication of return fire.\" one of the Colonial officers stated as Commander Edwards stood with Sarah Blaine, dozens of high ranking officers checked data from all of the monitors throughout the room.\n\n\"There won't be any return fire. We are hitting troop ships, they intend to take heavy losses in exchange for getting Legion boots on the surface.\" Sarah said.\n\n\"She's right. Contact all Colonial outposts within the city, tell them to be prepared to cut off the power grid and have every rail gun they have go to standby.\" Commander Edwards ordered as the officer began to relay the message to every military building in the city.\n\n\"I'm not getting a great feeling about this.\" Roman said as he sat with Adam at a huge table made of solid glass inside of a heavily wood trimmed room on board the Benzan base ship. It was a smaller, cruiser size ship, but they had seen plenty of effective cannons on its exterior when the shuttle was boarding. They both had little doubt that the Benzan ship, although a small one, could hold its own against any Colonial or Legion base ship if needed be.\n\n\"Relax. If they would have wanted to kill us, they could have done it as soon as we boarded the shuttle.\" Michaels replied as the security coded door quickly opened.\n\n\"Adam Michaels I presume,\" Cyrus said, entering the room with Oz closely by his side. \"I must admit, I'm surprised that you would have the testicular fortitude to ask for a meeting with someone in charge of a family that has such, well, questionable notoriety,\" Cyrus said curiously. \"My question is why?\" he added, sitting down at the table in front of both men while Oz remained standing.\n\n\"Your assassin killed a young lady that was a member of my crew. Not only that, but she was like a sister to me.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"Yes, Draco informed us of the kill, for the record, I am sorry for your loss. She was collateral damage from what I understand.\" Cyrus replied.\n\n\"Under normal circumstances, I would have buried your knuckle dragger in the desert and been done with it, but these are not normal circumstances.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"No. No, indeed they are not. You are a guest on my ship, at my mercy and alive right now only because I have allowed it to be so.\" Cyrus replied, letting Adam know that he was in control of the meeting.\n\n\"I understand, and I respect the fact that you are a man of your word. My quarrel is not with you, or anyone aboard this ship. Just the person who ordered my execution and in turn led to Kelly being assassinated.\" Michaels replied.\n\n\"I see.\" Cyrus said.\n\n\"I want to know who it was, so I can cut out the middle man and either end his life or my own in trying to do so.\" Adam replied.\n\nCyrus stood to his feet quickly, momentarily startling both Adam and Roman as they remained seated.\n\n\"Adam Michaels, walk with me for a few minutes,\" Cyrus asked as Roman looked at his friend as if to talk him out of it. \"I am a man of my word, do not worry,\" Cyrus replied. Adam slowly stood to his feet, skeptical of the Benzan's intentions but seeing no other choice. \"Hold him here until I get back.\" Cyrus said as Oz nodded, his gun remaining in the direction of Roman Raines.\n\n\"I like you Adam Michaels, it seems as though your heart is in the right place, and on top of that you have zeal,\" Cyrus said as they exited the room, slowly walking side by side. \"It's because of this that I am about to share some privileged information with you, information that only a handful aboard this ship themselves know.\" Cyrus said as he stopped to look over the edge of a very long catwalk of glass which was positioned directly in front of a huge shatterproof window looking out into space. \"I can give you this information, along with the name of your killer, but before I do, you must agree to remain on this ship until the battle on Glimmeria's surface has begun.\" Cyrus said, turning to look at Adam as he awaited a reply.\n\n\"What? My friends are down there this very minute preparing to be invaded. They are counting on me to join them.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"Join them in what, Death?\" Cyrus responded. \"Take a look at the armada that the Legion is staging outside Adam. You and I both know that the Colonials have absolutely no chance of victory here. Your friends will be wiped out inside of a week.\" he added.\n\n\"Maybe, but they are the closest thing to a family that I have,\" Adam replied, gaining the full attention of Cyrus with those very words. \"You have to try and understand, I would rather risk my life to try and save them than to live and watch them die from a distance.\" he added.\n\n\"Interesting.\" Cyrus said, turning back to the thick shatterproof glass which separated them from the stars. \"Alright Adam Michaels. You agree to remain on this ship until the Legion launches their forces. In return, I will personally send you with a crew of my best down in a shuttle to rescue those you speak so highly of. You have my word.\" Cyrus added.\n\nAdam stood there for several moments, trying his best to think the decision through clearly before turning to the head of the Benzan family. \"Deal.\"\n\n\"The man you seek is not a man at all, he's a Hunter named Anwick.\" Cyrus said before pausing.\n\n\"FUCK,\" Adam shouted, putting his fist against his forehead slowly as his knuckles began to turn red from the squeezing of his clinched fist. \"I had that son of a bitch in the sights of my gun and let him go. Kelly would still be here,\" he added as his eyes began to tear a bit with both sadness and anger. \"He's fucking dead!\" Adam yelled, throwing his fist down as rage began to consume him.\n\n\"Indeed. At least he will be if our upcoming meeting ends poorly. It was recently decided among the Benzan family that we will sever all ties with the Hunter tribes. It was an agreement that we were forced into, and it's one that my people simply have had enough of. We are not the murdering mafia that we have been labeled, and any kind of arrangement with the Hunters only strengthens that stereotype of our people. I have asked Anwick to meet with me so I can deliver the news face to face,\" Cyrus said, pausing to look through the large window that held back deep space. \"There is a good chance it will not end well for one of us. It was bound to happen eventually though, the two toughest kids in the school yard fighting,\" Cyrus replied. \"Which is why I need you to remain on this ship.\" he added.\n\n\"But I want to kill Anwick with my own...\" Adam said, Cyrus immediately cutting him off.\n\n\"Have no fear, he may hunt men, but the men aboard this ship he wants no part of. He will be dead within minutes by my own hands if the discussions end as poorly as I believe they will, I can assure you of that.\" Anwick replied.\n\nAdam looked out across the sharp contrast of the stars as he simply replied with a nod of approval and wishing he could go back in time long enough to take care of Anwick when he had the chance.\n\n\"You know Adam, the way you speak of your friends as family, it begins to remind me of myself at a younger age,\" Cyrus said calmly, Michaels giving him full attention. \"I think when all of this is over, you and I should have another talk.\" he added.\n\nThe city streets were littered with Colonial choke points, its military establishing sandbag bunkers on almost every corner which usually protected a large rail gun. Sweeper teams of two Goliaths and four Colonial soldiers patrolled the streets to soon be used as backup firepower against the Legion as both Swordfish and Spartans flew overhead in attack patterns, waiting for the first sign of contact. And the Mack cannons continued to fire. The thumps of life ending lead being launched into the air sounded almost harmonic, their neon blaze trailing behind them momentarily illuminating the sky with every shot.\n\n\"Set up a perimeter here and do not fall back unless I give the order.\" Dalton said, ordering the squad of Colonial soldiers to position themselves in the front lobby of the command center.\n\n\"Yes sir!\" the squad leader quickly replied, motioning his men to take cover with all eyes on the front door as Dalton, Steiner and Lassiter continued to the center of the building to position themselves outside of the vault.\n\n\"We're in place.\" Dalton yelled loudly, his voice penetrating the thick glass of the vault, Commander Edwards nodding his appreciation as he turned to face Sarah Blaine, who's mind was obviously on other things.\n\n\"I wouldn't worry, I'm sure Adam is alive and well.\" Edwards remarked.\n\n\"I just can't understand him willingly going to the Benzan Mafia, they are not a group to be pushed.\" she replied.\n\n\"Based on what little time I have spent around your husband to be, neither is he.\" Edwards replied.\n\n\"I just wish he would contact us, only long enough to let us know that he's alright.\" Sarah added.\n\n\"I'm sure he will soon enough, however, I think the bigger issue is when he returns.\" Commander Edwards said regretfully as Sarah turned to face him, dreading the words she knew would follow next.\n\n\"Sarah, you know that once he has met with the Benzan people, he will be considered a fugitive himself and no longer a part of the Colonial effort.\" Commander Edwards said.\n\n\"I realize that's usually the case, but with everything he has done for us, I thought that maybe...\" she replied, Edwards cutting her off sharply.\n\n\"No Sarah. He cannot be an exception to the rule, you know that. If your own father were here this very day he would tell you the same. You are going to have to put your personal feelings aside if and when he returns. I don't expect we will go as far as to incarcerate him, but I do expect you to stay clear so that I can enforce Colonial law when I dismiss him from duty.\" Commander Edwards said.\n\n\"I understand.\" Sarah replied.\n\n\"I will allow him to stay here on Glimmeria, ensuring that you two may still be married and have a life together.\" Edwards added.\n\n\"Sir!\" one of the Colonial officers yelled across the vault as the grid began picking up contacts. Walking quickly to the station, it soon became evident to everyone inside of the glass chamber that the Legion had launched its invasion.\n\n\"Darken the city and sound the alarms, now we meet them face to face.\" Edwards ordered as every officer who sat at a computer began relaying the message as well as monitor all of the movement from both sides of the battle.\n\n\"My god, there are so many of them,\" Sarah said softly as her eyes locked onto one of the Colonial grid monitors, watching waves of dozens of drop ships begin hitting Glimmeria's atmosphere. \"All squadrons, this is Sarah Blaine. Multiple incoming contacts, cargo unknown, you are authorized to go weapons free. Repeat, weapons free.\" she said into her headset sending the orders to all Colonial fighters in the air.\n\nMoments later, the entire city fell under a shroud of darkness, its electricity cut by Colonial Command, which was using the strategy of forcing the Legion to attempt to land blindly while masking any potential casualties on the ground. Several minutes later, dozens of large blue flares were vaulted hundreds of feet into the air, casting enough light onto the Legion's ships to present them as targets to the Colonial aircraft and rail guns, which had began to stream bursts of piercing metal into the air.\n\n\"Sir, early reports indicate at least a dozen Legion cruisers, each dropping dozens of Spider Pods from the sky.\" one of the Colonial officers said.\n\nThe Commander had encountered the Spider Pods only once before, nothing more than a small round ship that carried a dozen soldiers and once landed, transformed into a mobile rail gun that would escort its cargo.\n\n\"Tell our air units to continue to fire on the small targets, and have the Mack stations redirect their fire from the cruisers to the small targets as well.\" Commander Edwards ordered, knowing the cruisers had no intention of landing.\n\nThe Mack cannons began angling their shots, ripping each Spider Pod it hit into thousands of pieces, the light armor no match for a weapon designed to destroy the largest of ships. Their pounding bursts of lead, combined with the array of rail guns and attack fighters had eliminated nearly half of the small, troop filled ships when the first one landed on Glimmerian soil, marking the first time a Legion military ship had touched the planet's surface since the original Glimmerian war nearly a decade before.\n\nDistant explosions continued to ring out as both Adam and Roman watched Glimmeria through a small glass window inside of their sleeping quarters.\"We've got to get back down there and help them.\" Roman said with desperation as Adam continued to watch the planet, which looked like it had fallen victim to a large thunderstorm, fully engulfed in brilliant flashes and explosions.\n\n\"Not much we could do to help, only two of us Roman,\" Adam replied. \"Besides, they should be able to hold them off long enough for us to get down there with the Benzans.\" he added.\n\n\"Do you think we can trust Cyrus?\" Roman asked, also considering the possibility that the Benzan leader was simply holding them there until Anwick arrived in order to be turned over to the Hunters for reward.\n\n\"I think so, at least that's what gut tells me.\" Adam replied, both men startled suddenly by a light knock at the door of the sleeping quarters.\n\nRoman slowly walked to the small steel door, spinning the large circular handle to unbolt the door to be opened. Sasha stood there trembling, an emotional wreck as she looked at both men with her eyes fluid with tears before falling into the arms of Adam.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" he asked, glancing at Roman curiously. It took Sasha a few moments to collect herself, the woman who had broadcast such a hard appearance when they first met had become nothing short of hysterical.\n\n\"They plan to kill him.\" she managed to finally push from her lungs as she sobbed uncontrollably. Adam continued to look puzzled as Roman spoke up to ask.\n\n\"Kill who?\" Sasha began to pull herself away from Adam just a bit in an attempt to stand on her own as he found himself not wanting her to leave his grasp, which scared the hell out of him.\n\n\"Cyrus. I overheard Draco in his room speaking with the Hunters through a secure com link, he plans to kill Cyrus when the meeting takes place and then turn you both over to Anwick.\" Sasha said a bit more calmly as if to try and suddenly mask her emotions.\n\n\"Why are you bringing this to us? Shouldn't you be having this conversation with Cyrus?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"I tried, but he is in a meeting with Oz and to be honest, I don't know how far this goes. I'm not sure who I can trust with this information, other than Cyrus himself and both of you.\" she replied.\n\n\"What makes you believe you can trust us?\" Roman asked suspectingly.\n\n\"When you first contacted our ship, Cyrus had me run a complete background check on both of you. Adam, you showed up on the sheet twenty seven times for various offenses,\" she said as Michaels smiled wide, proud of his criminal achievements.\n\n\"It was you however, Roman, who threw us for a curve. You showed up but once, almost as if you had never existed. The Gali Special Forces had a condition one on you. Such a high priority to them combined with the fact that the Hunters want you dead so badly could only mean one thing. Greyspine. We know what you've done.\" she said tactfully.\n\n\"Greyspine? What the hell is she talking about Roman?\" Adam asked, never having heard of the small moon planet before.\n\n\"No time for that now Adam. Can you get us any weapons?\" Roman asked of the girl, eager to avoid talking about his past.\n\n\"Small ones. Two pistols would be about all, otherwise they would pick up on them quickly.\" Sasha responded.\n\n\"Pistol works for me.\" Adam replied confidently.\n\n\"I'll pass on the pistol if you can just get me that blade back.\" Roman said speaking of his tactical knife.\n\n\"I'll take care of them both at once. Cyrus has already arranged for the Hunters to dock a shuttle within the hour, so if I get the chance to speak with Cyrus in private...\" Sasha said before being cut short.\n\n\"No. Let us handle this. We just need those weapons and to be put close to the initial meeting, if that's possible?\" Roman asked.\n\n\"I'll make sure you are close.\" she replied as she turned to Adam. \"Thank you.\" she said softly, having regained her composure as she quickly left their quarters to retrieve the two weapons.\n\n\"What's this about Greyspine?\" Adam asked as Roman had sealed the door back tightly with a firm turn of the handle.\n\n\"It was a long time ago Adam. Besides, the real question is what is this shit about soon to be married, but falling for Sasha?\" Roman replied with a question of his own, desperate to avoid the subject for as long as possible.\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Adam asked, although he knew Roman spoke the truth. He never was very good at masking his feelings for others.\n\n\"You know what I'm talking about. The air in here got thick real quick from the tension you and Sasha were sending back and forth,\" Roman replied. \"Right now though, we both need to concentrate on getting off of this damn ship alive. The rest will work itself out in the end.\" he added.\n\n\"Redirect all Mack and ship to ship fire onto the larger Legion vessels on their way in.\" Commander Edwards ordered.\n\n\"But sir, in doing so we will allow thousands of Legion boots to hit our soil.\" a Colonial petty officer replied.\n\n\"Let them land, but we WILL control the skies of Glimmeria. Now execute my order!\" Edwards replied bluntly.\n\n\"Right away sir!\" the petty officer replied, quickly making his way to a nearby com station to relay his commander's wishes.\n\nAfter taking nearly a minute to readjust the trajectory of the huge subterranean guns, their gleaming shots began tearing into the flag ships of the Legion which had all began to descend behind a cloud of smaller ships filled with grunts. The first few minutes saw a handful of the very large spacecraft ripped to shreds, the rocketing lead punching holes through their most vital areas as they soon became nothing more than large masses of fire free falling to the planet's surface.\n\nThe Legion tried countering the shots with the deck guns built onto the ships, however they were of little to no effect as the overpowering torque of the Mack shots continued reaming not only their most decorated officers, but much needed supplies as well.\n\n\"The Colonials are completely ignoring the smaller craft! Our command ships are being cut into pieces! Call the Hunters from orbit and get their asses down onto the surface!\" one of the Legion Captains commanded, screaming the order across the bridge of the ship as pounding shots steadily hit its reinforced exterior.\n\n\"Yes sir!\" a seated crew member replied, attempting to make contact with the Hunter vessels in orbit as his own ship's power began to flutter from the substantial damage of the Colonial shots it had absorbed.\n\n\"Tell them to wait,\" Anwick replied through the com system aboard his private shuttle as it made its way to the docking area of the Benzan warship. \"Do not follow them into battle without a direct order from me. Do you understand?\" the vampiric monster added.\n\n\"Yes my lord.\" his second in command responded with absolute obedience.\n\n\"Thank you Garrison, I can always count on you my friend. This will not take long. Tell them to stand on their own two feet for a change.\" Anwick said, smiling of the insult and also the excitement of learning that Adam Michaels was being held by the Benzans.\n\n\"Believe me my friends, I have no intentions of turning you over to them. Anwick will arrive and try to force my hand, at which time I will gladly discontinue the treaty he has seemed so willing to force upon us.\" Cyrus said to Adam as he stood with Roman, their hands in front of them locked in thick chains.  \n\"The restraints are necessary only that Anwick would not suspect anything as he boards our ship.\" he added. Adam nodded to agree, a small pistol tucked snugly under his belt and hidden by a lightweight brown jacket. He glanced at Roman, wondering where his friend had hidden the tactical blade delivered to him by Sasha as well as to ensure he was ready to fight, which he was indeed.\n\nOnly two of the Legion's flagships survived the Mack onslaught which was accompanied by both Spartan and Swordfish gunfire. Though intact, both were seriously damaged on their way to landing several miles from Glimmeria's capital city, immediately setting up a forward operating base for the massive group of soldiers on foot who had hit Colonial soil less than an hour before.\n\n\"Any word on the estimated time of the Hunters arrival?\" the highest ranking surviving Legion officer, Sky Admiral Cook asked.\n\n\"They refuse to engage without Anwick, who is tied up in a meeting at the moment.\" one of the deck officers replied.\n\n\"MEETING,\" Sky Admiral Cook yelled loudly as he looked around the badly beaten bridge area of his ship, loose wires sparking as they hung from overhead like snakes from a vine.\n\n\"Have all units fall back and establish a perimeter with the forward operating base. The last thing we need is to be scattered throughout the wastelands of Glimmeria to be picked apart!\" he added.\n\n\"Yes sir, right away.\" the deck officer replied firmly, sending Cook's orders out through the ship's on-board com.\n\n\"Commander, they have set up a few clicks from here.\" Sarah said, pointing to a map in the vault that was made of thick glass and colored marker.\n\n\"No doubt trying to regroup,\" Commander Edwards said as he approached Sarah steadily. \"Have our birds run patterns over that entire area and give them orders to fire on anything that moves. In the meantime, order a large ground assault team to assemble, we need to hit them before they have a chance to dig in too deeply.\" he added.\n\n\"Right away sir.\" Sarah replied, speaking clearly into her headset so all of the Colonial soldiers would understand his orders without question.\n\nWhen Anwick began to exit the Hunter shuttle slowly and board the Benzan warship, an exuberant smile painted to his face as his narrow eyes of emptiness locked onto both Adam and Roman.\n\n\"Cyrus, I must admit that you have done the job well. I did not expect to see both men standing before me so soon, their hands wrapped in chains.\" Anwick said as two very large and heavily armed Hunters followed him down, their semi-automatic rifles looking as though they could have easily punched a hole through the most battle tested of metals.\n\n\"It was nothing of my doing. In fact, they came to me.\" Cyrus replied, as Adam wondered how many more of the Vampiric monsters waited on the shuttle of pointed steel which gave the illusion of fangs.\n\n\"Is that so?\" Anwick said, puzzled but excited nonetheless.\n\n\"It is, as is the fact that I have no intentions of turning them over to you,\" Cyrus said, his words freezing the Hunter in his tracks as he slowly turned his white complexion of death to the Benzan leader. \"Furthermore, this treaty of peace that seems to exist between our two people is no more. We want no part of this political war and refuse to be included in the same sentence as those who mercilessly slay men for pleasure.\" Cyrus added.\n\n\"You should consider your last words wisely Cyrus, as you are no longer the leading member of the Benzan Mafia. I have promised that position to Draco in exchange for his unwaivering loyalty.\"\n\nAnwick said with gleaming confidence as he glanced in the direction of Draco. Pulling his long barrel shotgun up to the face of Cyrus, Draco slowly cocked the hammer of the weapon and solidified his position as the new leader.\n\n\"Tell your people to throw their guns to the floor and I might spare your life.\" Anwick said as both Sasha and Oz had began lifting their guns into the direction of Draco and the Hunters.\n\n\"Draco? I pray that you understand the consequences of your actions.\" Cyrus said as he turned to plead with a man he had placed full trust in.\n\n\"Shut the fuck up old man! Better do as he says and have 'em drop their pieces before all of you die here standing.\" Draco yelled, breaking the heart of Cyrus in the process. \"Do as he says.\" Cyrus said as he nodded uneasily to the remaining Benzans.\n\n\"I'm surprised that you have made it this far Adam.\" Anwick said bluntly as he began to approach both of the prisoners.\n\n\"No choice. Had to find out how deep this treason went.\" Adam replied as within but a single moment's breath, he pulled the small pistol and cemented a hole into the forehead of Draco with unmatched speed. Having taken the entire group by surprise, Adam quickly adjusted his aim, which was still hindered by chains and fired a second shot at the Hunter's head man.\n\nThe uncanny ability to move with urgency was the only thing that saved Anwick's life, a shot which would have penetrated his heart instead passing quickly in and out of the flesh of his shoulder as he turned away. Both of Anwick's escorts turned their weapons in Adam's direction, the first firing wide as Roman clinched his hands together and thrust them upward, knocking the rifle from the grip of the beast.\n\nAs the second escort soldier tried redirecting his aim into the direction of Roman Raines, the blade which had been snuggly tucked into the length of his boot was now in hand, the serrated edge cleaving into the chest of the soldier. Both Sasha and Oz scrambled for a moment to regain hands on their weapons as Cyrus just stood silent, deeply impressed with Adam's pistol skills, Roman's ferocity and above all, the fact that they had went to battle for him. It was in the waiting moment of that very breath that his heart decided both men had earned his respect, which is something the cold body of Draco lacked.\n\nWith Anwick fleeing to his shuttle and both escort soldiers locked into a crimson filled fight to the death with Roman, two final Hunters emerged from the Hunter craft in reaction to the gunfire. One was immediately cut to his grave by the punishing shots of both Sasha's machine gun pistol and Adam's weapon. His one final shot before reload desperately seeking the back of Anwick, but instead striking the back of his leg, crippling the beast momentarily as the remaining escort soldier dragged him onto the shuttle.\n\nRoman had given his best effort, but a mortal man wrapped in chains, no matter how skilled he may have been, was simply no match for two of the toughest soldiers that the Hunter clan had to offer.\n\nHis blade knocked from his hand, the only thing that had kept him in the fight and alive up to this point was his mechanical side, which had began to surrender as well. One of the Hunters dove at him with numbing rage, its teeth fully exposed in an attempt to kill the human menace once and for all. Never making it to him, the Hunter's face and shoulder region became nothing more than a cloud of soiled fluid at the end of the shotgun held by Oz. The second close enough to attempt the same, was faster than a reload by Oz, but not by Adam. He had reloaded his pistol with more speed than any of the Benzans present had ever witnessed, aiming and firing all six shots directly at the beast.\n\nRiddled with holes and screaming in life ending agony, the Hunter was short work for Roman after he reclaimed his tactical knife, making it slow as he carved an apology out of the dying beast. The Hunter's shuttle quickly disengaged, pulling from the deck in a last ditch effort to return to it's base ship. Everyone with a weapon fired into the air, but it was Sasha's gunfire that hit the fuel tanks which burst open and began to bleed a trail of fire and smoke. Anwick had made it back into open space, but with no hope of returning to his ship, they simply began a steep dive into the atmosphere of Glimmeria.\n\nAdam walked with purpose toward the Benzan shuttle which had brought him here.\n\n\"Adam. What are you doing?\" Sasha asked.\n\n\"I think it's time the Hunters became the hunted,\" Adam replied as he made it to the entrance of the craft. \"That son of a bitch will not live to see tomorrow's sunrise, I promise you that.\" he added as he turned and disappeared into the shuttle.\n\nAdam had begun pressing the necessary sequence of buttons when he turned to see Oz carrying Roman on board as Sasha followed closely behind. \"We're going with you, it's the least we can do.\" Sasha said softly as she shut the hatch of the shuttle and sat down to strap in for the decent.\n\n\"Sir! Picking up a warship with Benzan identification firing on the Hunter ships in orbit!\" Sarah exclaimed loudly, knowing in her heart that Adam Michaels had played a role in the unfolding events.\n\n\"The Benzans are still wanted fugitives, stay focused on the battle here on the ground.\" Commander Edwards replied as Sarah patiently watched her com screen hoping the Benzan warship survived the fight.\n\n\"Continue firing all main batteries onto the Hunter Carriers. Those blood sucking bastards have just started a fight they can't win.\" Cyrus said from the elegance of the Benzan ship's bridge. Taken by surprise, the Hunter ships fell victim to several devastating shots before turning their own weapons into the direction of the Benzan Warship.\n\nSeveral minutes passed as they exchanged knockout punches of lead, the surviving Hunters abandoning their sinking Carriers by the dozens in small escape pods, all dropping hastily into the atmosphere of Glimmeria on their way to the surface.\n\n\"Commander, all three Hunter ships have dropped from our grid system but the Benzans remain.\" Sarah said with relief filled joy.\n\n\"Alert the Mack stations, have them fire on the Benzan vessel until it is destroyed.\" Commander Edwards replied sharply.\n\n\"But Adam?\" Sarah asked with desperation, turning to face her commanding officer.\n\n\"Adam isn't up there. We are picking up his Colonial beacon several clicks away from here,\" he replied. Sarah sat motionless, unsure if that was good or bad news as she feared for the man she loved so dearly. \"Don't worry Sarah, I'm assembling a strike team to reach the beacon as soon as possible. In the meantime, have the Mack stations fire on the Benzans, as well as anyone else who shows up in orbit that isn't an official ally.\" Commander Edwards said.\n\n\"Yes sir.\" Sarah replied, slowly turning to direct his orders to the large weapons stations.\n\n\"What the fuck are ya'll cheering about?\" Dalton yelled to the Colonial soldiers in and around Colonial Command who were celebrating the demise of the Hunter Carriers. \"They still outnumber us three to one, get your guns out of the air and point them at Legion troops and shoot!\" he added, his voice ringing through the mortar shocked streets of the city.\n\n\"Dalton, Steiner,\" Commander Edwards said, making a rare appearance outside of Colonial Command. \"Get your asses over here, double time!\" he added, surrounded by a dozen of the finest trained soldiers stationed on Glimmeria.\n\n\"Picked up Adam's beacon a few clicks from here,\" Commander Edwards said, pointing to a spot on a small map as shots rang out around them, the violence moving closer to their position by the minute. \"I'm putting Lassiter in charge of things here, you two take this Colonial strike team to them, see if Adam is still alive. If he is, you bring him back here in one piece, got it?\" Edwards asked. Dalton nodded as clouds of broken concrete mixed with sand began falling around them, Legion troops making their way to the end of the street and meeting stiff Colonial defenses in the process.\n\n\"Aight, listen up! We are gonna backtrack, walk around the gunfire instead of straight into it.\" Dalton said loudly as a much larger Steiner stood beside him, the Colonial soldiers listening to his every word.\n\n\"Sir, we are being pushed back!\" one of the Colonial grunts yelled in Lassiter's direction as a small group of Legion faithful had broken the Colonial lines.\n\n\"Hold the line at all costs!\" Lassiter responded frantically.\n\n\"Ahh hell.\" Dalton said as though he was being hindered, turning to face the Legion threat as he fired six devastating rounds from the Thumper in succession, all but leveling the entire city corner that the Legion troops had occupied just moments before.\n\n\"Keep these fuck stains in line!\" Dalton yelled in the direction of Lassiter, winking at him as he ordered his strike team to deploy in a flanking move that would lead them to the edge of the city and eventually in the direction of Adam's beacon. Lassiter simply gave a glassy eyed look, not from the combat around them or even the wake of death caused by the Glimmerian Thumper, but the term Dalton had just thrown his way. To his estimation it was a new low, even for Dalton.\n\n\"Adam are you alright?\" Sasha asked, her portrait perfect face merely inches from his as he tried to regain his senses.\n\nThe rough landing had thrown him from his seat and against a thick steel plate near the deck of the small ship's interior. He wanted to respond to her, but before he could, his attention was pulled from her angelic face to the rear of the shuttle as Roman and Oz both fired their weapons out of the ship's only exit.\n\n\"Yea, I'm alright.\" he responded slowly. Sasha crouched over him, her lips but inches from his as she smiled softly.\n\n\"Better get up then, I would hate to think your reputation was going to be affected.\" she said softly as her eyes locked with his almost as if they were destined to.\n\nA few seconds later Sasha slowly stood up, her aerodynamic curves no longer straddling him as he was slow to his feet as well. Rather than speak of the fireworks exploding inside every limb of his body which would he feared would eventually force him to deal with conflicting feelings, he instead turned to the two men at the shuttle entrance. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"We got clipped by rifle fire as we made our approach, had to bring the shuttle in hot. Before we knew it, Hunters were falling out of the sky all around us.\" Oz replied, shouting his response before turning back to fire his shotgun out of the door. Roman steadily dispersed rounds from a battle rifle, but it was obvious through his body movements that the shots were having little effect.\n\nAdam turned to Sasha, taken back for a moment by the look of true infatuation as he slowly took her rapid fire pistol and turned it onto the windshield of the shuttle, spending nearly an entire clip of shells as the thick glass began to crack. He turned to hand her the weapon back, their eyes locking onto one another once again as he found it unnervingly tough to stop himself from continuing the kiss which had played out in his mind only moments ago.\n\nTurning back swiftly, Adam began thrusting his foot forward, the thick sole of his boot cracking the glass in multiple places with each strike.\n\nFinally the entire windshield was knocked from the shuttle, Adam extending his hand to the soft grip of Sasha as he helped her up and out of the newly constructed crawl space. Adam was right behind her, crawling out onto the scorching sand as they motioned for both Roman and Oz. Oz sprinted across the small confines of the shuttle, quickly pulling himself out of the wreckage to join the others. Roman was a bit slower, firing all of the ammunition from the rifle before dropping it and pulling himself through as well.\n\nThey counted six Hunters scattered in the immediate area, even more falling slowly from the sky as the attached parachutes drifted the escape pods to the surface in a motion that resembled that of a tumbling feather. Other than the small town which lay over the horizon, there was literally no cover as the group of four sprinted for the cluster of wooden structures, rifle shots from the distant Hunters clipping the sand behind their heels all the while.\n\n\"Cyrus, we are dead in the water until we are able to repair the ship's engines.\" one of the Benzan members said grimly.\n\n\"Have someone get right,\" Cyrus replied, his words cut short by a massive explosion on the starboard side of the ship. \"Report!\" Cyrus shouted, the remaining Benzans running to both what little working equipment that remained as well as the large glass window of the warship.\n\n\"The Colonials are firing on us!\" one of the men yelled animately as he looked through the thickened glass to see a glowing shot from the surface based Mack cannons scream by them.\n\nIt was a damn tough ship, solid from the treated steel exterior to its heart and very soul. Still, Cyrus knew that it had already taken a beating and would soon succumb to the staggering shots of the Colonials.\n\n\"Give the order to abandon ship. Take any weapons and gear you have time to collect and regroup on Tirious.\" Cyrus said somberly, knowing full well that he didn't intend to make the trip with them to the small snow filled moon.\n\n\"And you sir?\" one of the Benzans asked as the rest scrambled to escape skiffs, the warship's alarm sounding loudly.\n\n\"You know the Benzan way. A commanding officer always goes down with the ship, not that I would have it any other way.\" Cyrus replied as he placed his hands on the cold steel of the guard rail that surrounded the bridge.\n\nHe thought of every single battle that the ship had pulled him through, every deep space run that he himself had made while aboard.\n\n\"As my final order, make sure our people on the ground know the rendezvous point. Adam and his friend saved my life without question, so I wish for them both to be invited into the Benzan family. Now go Helon, carry out my orders and present yourself proudly as a Benzan.\" Cyrus added. Helon nodded, accepting the job of personally delivering the final command of Cyrus.\n\nHelon turned to one of the remaining shuttles, his closely shaved hair of blonde highlights quickly grabbing another one of the scrambling Benzans, this one much taller with very dark skin and stark white dreadlocks as the two men boarded the craft, glancing a final time at Cyrus with a look of complete gratitude.\n\nAs the escape shuttles all bust into flight on their way to Tirious, a single ship broke from the pattern, diving steeply as it hit the atmosphere of Glimmeria to find Adam, Roman and the remaining two Benzans. Cyrus slowly turned his head, looking around the empty Benzan warship without regret as two shots from the surface cannons hit, ripping the large craft into several pieces, all of which burst into explosion only moments later.\n\nSeveral intense minutes of fighting filled everyone's ears with explosions, ringing lead as it zipped through the air and screams of agony as both Colonial and Legion troops died for their factions. Eventually, the shelling died down and Colonial troops outside of the Command Center relayed the message of hope.\n\n\"Legion forces are falling back.\" Commander Edwards walked within inches of the thick glass which separated Lassiter and himself, picking up a mobile com to speak directly with with the loyal soldier in command.\n\n\"Good job. Have your scouts move forward, clear the area and then advance fire teams along with Goliaths.\" the commander said.\n\n\"Yes sir.\" Lassiter responded, turning to direct the men to carry out the orders with haste.\n\n\"Alright, pony up,\" Dalton said, flexing his thin veil of command. \"Lieutenant Michaels is several clicks from here and needs our help. Instead of marching the entire group into a damn Legion ambush, I'm gonna need a scout to get ahead of us and find a clear path.\" he added as a Colonial sniper stood up holding a large bolt-action rifle in his hand.\n\nThe huge scope on the weapon immediately caught Dalton's attention, almost in a romantic sense, as he began to daydream of holding such a fine piece.\n\n\"You'll do.\" he said as Steiner tossed him a long barrel shotgun, then picking up a standard issue combat rifle for himself.\n\n\"Damn you Michaels!\" Anwick yelled loudly as he remained strapped into the wreckage of his shuttle, his escort soldier having died on impact, its head bloodied from the instrument console. Anwick slowly began to crawl from the wreckage as he was met by a small group of Hunters, his eyes fixating on the sky above as dozens more of the escape pods drifted to the surface in a poetic manner.\n\n\"Are you alright my lord?\" one of the larger Hunters asked, all of them wearing heavy black leather clothing and armed to the teeth.\n\n\"I will survive. Regroup with the others and on my command we will sweep through the surrounding area and slaughter anything with a heartbeat.\" Anwick replied, holding his shoulder which he believed had become dislocated during the crash, his two gunshot wounds nothing more than an afterthought.\n\n\"Yes my lord!\" the Hunter replied soundly as the group turned to organize the survivors. \"God damn you Adam Michaels. God damn you!\" Anwick said under his breath as his eyes sliced into the town ahead.\n\n\"Sarah, we got a problem. The numbers you gave me fall about three miles behind Legion lines. Even if we were lucky enough to get to them, there is no way in hell we could get them back. And if we picked up the ships, it's a good bet the Legion did too.\" Dalton said into his com unit, the entire strike team laying low on the top of a sand dune which overlooked the coming road.\n\n\"I'm organizing a large tactical team, just do your best to get to them and dig in until we can get the team to you.\" Sarah replied with desperation.\n\n\"Will do,\" Dalton replied, placing the com unit back on his belt. \"Well fuck. Isn't this some shit? Just a small strike team out here, dicks flappin' in the wind with who knows how many Legion troops ahead.\" Dalton said loudly to the Colonial team.\n\n\"A lot. Looks like they are staging a large ground assault up ahead.\" the Colonial scout said as he kept his eye firmly pressed to the scope of his weapon. Dalton slowly climbed to the scout's position on the sand dune, glancing through a small set of binoculars.\n\n\"Looks like we are going around. These sumbitches are setting up a permanent base!\" Dalton said as Steiner remained under a brown tarp, his eyes locked onto the horizon making sure the Legion had not found them. Minutes later, the group slowly made their way through the sandy cliffs of the area, keeping a safe distance from the Legion base as they worked their way around to get to Adam's location.\n\nShards of seasoned wood flew through the stagnant air of the room as Roman was the first person to walk inside of the abandoned building, kicking the door open as a thick coating of dust lay on top of the tables that once served a purpose for the townsfolk. As he slowly swept his gun from side to side to assure the building was safe, Adam entered followed by Sasha and finally Oz, who spent a couple of minutes trying to secure the door back that Roman had nearly jolted from its hinges.\n\n\"This is as good of a place as any, the Hunters are sure to be on top of us soon and I really hope Anwick is still alive, because I want to kill that son of a bitch.\" Adam said firmly as Oz began to make his way up a narrow ladder to the loft of the building, the creaking floorboards covered with ample dirt.\n\n\"I'll keep my eyes on the door,\" Roman said as he rested behind a stack of wooden crates at the entrance. \"If they come through, we'll be right here to back you up.\" Adam said as he and Sasha found a small stack of their own at the rear of the room, glancing up for a moment to see Oz in position at the only second story window that overlooked the rear of the building.\n\n\"Our scouts report that Legion troops have fallen back and are forming a forward operating base.\" Lassiter said through his hand held com as sporadic gunfire continued in the distance.\n\n\"Copy that. We are going to continuously air strike their position until we are able to mount a ground offensive. Your orders are to further solidify the defenses outside of the Colonial Command Center, understood?\" Commander Edwards asked from the comfort of the vault.\n\n\"Yes sir, copy that.\" Lassiter replied.\n\n\"Gonna air strike the shit out of them! In the meantime, pull your forces up and dig in solid. We are the last line of defense until further notice!\" Lassiter shouted to his troops through a thick succession of explosions. The heavily equipped Goliath units remained back in close vicinity of the command center, along with the mounted rail guns and a handful of Colonial troops as the bulk of the grunts moved forward a couple of city blocks.\n\nOz made a low sound as he held a clinched fist in the direction of the others, Roman immediately placing his back against the wall at the foot of the door with a blade in one hand and a combat pistol in the other. Holding up the number four and moving his hand in a circling motion, the others knew quickly that a group of four were patrolling the area.\n\n\"Hunters?\" Adam asked quietly as he looked to the high loft area. His question was simply answered with a nod. They were Hunters indeed.\n\nAdam buried his face into one of his hands for a mere second before lifting it and firming the grip on his standard issue rifle. Sasha watched him for a few moments to make sure he was alright, before also turning her attention as well as her rapid fire pistol into the direction of the building's entrance.\n\nRoman extended his arm slowly to the others, hand flat to let them know that someone was about to enter the door which was shut but not latched because of the blunt force trauma that his boot had been guilty of. The creaking of wood could easily be heard through the blanket of silence in the room as the door began to open slowly, the light of Glimmeria's moon saturating the otherwise pitch black surroundings of their hideout.\n\nTightening his grip on the blade's handle, Roman counted steps in his head to try and determine how many were gaining entrance, ready to blood let on as many as need be. \"Roman, wait.\" Adam shouted in a whispered voice as everyone watched a dog enter cautiously. The amber colored animal looked half starved and was mange covered, but came right to Michaels as he knelt and extended his hand, quickly grabbing a piece of stringy meat jerky from a supply bag.\n\n\"You are just full of surprises aren't you?\" Sasha asked, impressed with Adam's good hearted nature as she smiled softly. He was true to Sarah Blaine, in his heart he knew that to be a fact. Still, he found it was becoming increasingly tough to deflect the overpowering beauty and compassionate nature of Sasha.\n\nAs Roman slowly began creaking the door back to a closed position, it was thrust open abruptly by a large Hunter clad in thick black armor, knocking the Colonial sworn warrior to the floor. Sasha was the quickest to respond to the surprise guest, her pistol ringing out over a dozen shots that bit into both the armor and flesh of the beast. As it fell to the ground in tremendous pain, a second quickly followed behind, met with equal haste by the tip of Roman's blade as it plunged into the demon's ribcage.\n\nYelling with angered pain, the Hunter grabbed Roman tightly with both hands as the mechanized warrior began throwing a barrage of tightly placed elbows into the head of the beast. Although it didn't break the Hunter's hold, it did loosen it enough for Roman to see two more sprinting behind the monster right outside of the building.\n\nThe grip was let go when the demon dropped Roman to grab the back of its skull, a rifle shot finely placed by Adam which had plunged into the thin bone wall and struck its brain.\n\nThe first Hunter began to rise slowly as the second fell quickly to its death. Oz fired a loud and throaty round from his shotgun which nearly cut the beast's torso in two, dismembering the instantly dead creature as it tumbled back. Without his blade, Roman dashed outside to face the last two on his own, a brave but reckless idea for someone who at his best could only match one of the demons in battle.\n\n\"Roman!\" Adam yelled loudly as he began to dash out to the aid of his friend, very quickly grabbed by the hand of Sasha.\\\n\n\"Adam. There are too many of them! He gave us the opportunity to flee, we must go now!\" she said loudly, Oz opening the window for them to climb out of as their only exit.\n\nAdam turned to her before quickly spinning back to the direction of the front door. Several shots rang out, a few of them were from Roman's pistol while a majority were not. A good indication that their friend lay dead outside on the still hot sands of Glimmeria.\n\nBefore any of them had a chance to respond, the flimsy front door once again flew open, this time slamming against the wall behind it as two Benzans stood in the doorway, the first surveying the room with his rifle drawn as the second, dark skinned warrior drug Roman's bloodied body indoors.\n\n\"Helon, Zavious!\" Sasha shouted loudly as she sprinted to them, relieved to see friendly faces.\n\n\"Appreciate you saving my friend out there.\" Adam said appreciatively as he knelt to check on Roman Raines.\n\n\"Wasn't a problem, we only had to slay one of them. Your friend had already killed the other.\" Zavious replied. Roman slowly stood to his feet unassisted and nodded his gratitude.\n\n\"I'm fine Adam, a little blood never hurt anybody.\" Roman said, wiping his face clean of it with a dirty rag from the building's floor.\n\n\"Best be hauling ass out of here, I'm sure everyone in town heard the gunshots.\" Oz said, quickly stepping down the ladder to greet his old friends.\n\n\"I agree, but before we do, I have to carry out a final order from Cyrus.\" Helon said.\n\n\"Cyrus. How is he?\" Sasha asked impatiently. The shaking of Helon's head was all the answer she needed, the leader of their family was dead.\n\n\"Adam Michaels,\" Helon said with intention as he pulled two Benzan amulets from his light grey jacket of silk and pinstripe. \"Cyrus wanted to extend an invitation to the both of you, wanted you to become official Benzans as reward for saving his life.\" he added. Adam glanced at Roman for a few tense moments before turning back to Helon.\n\n\"I...I don't know. Of course I want to, it's just, it's just I am supposed to be married soon to one of the highest ranking Colonial officers.\" he replied.\n\n\"Yea. You are full of surprises.\" Sasha said, obviously hurt by the news of Adam's previous engagement as she walked outside quickly.\n\n\"At least think it over?\" Helon asked. \"When this is over and we are safe, I'll give you an answer.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"Good enough. And for the record, your Colonials shot down our ship and directly led to the death of Cyrus.\" Helon replied, tossing the amulets to the two men before turning to meet with Sasha outside as Adam stood in disbelief.\n\n\"Fucking politicians.\" Roman replied as the rest of the group slowly made their way outside as well, heavier now by one pitiful sight of a mutt.\n\n\"This fucking sand gets down in your boots and really pisses ya' off.\" Dalton said in a bitchy tone, slowly making his way to the top of a large sand dune to lay beside the Colonial sniper who had his rifle and scope mounted into a tripod.\n\n\"The good news is Lieutenant Michael's beacon seems to be coming from that small town in the distance.\" the sniper said as Dalton squinted his eyes before staring it down through his small set of military goggles.\n\n\"The bad news?\" he asked, almost dreading the answer.\n\n\"Pan your eyes over about fifteen degrees to the right.\" the sniper responded. Dalton slowly moved the binoculars with his eyes firmly pressed against them, stopping and squinting deeply before looking once more.\n\n\"Well I'll be goddamn.\" he said in frustration as he put his lenses down and contemplated the group's next move.\n\n\"That's not the only group of Hunters, I spotted several more throughout the town. Looks like they beat us here and are looking for Adam as well.\" the sniper said.\n\n\"I don't believe this shit.\" Dalton said in a coarse but whining voice. \"Man I hadn't had a hot shower in three days. Aint' had a fucking drink in so long that I'm an ace from putting my tongue in rehab. I Got a promotion through the ranks of a military that hadn't even cut me the first paycheck yet and now here I am, balls deep in the sand out here trying to rescue a couple of friends who are surrounded by a buncha' flesh eating bastards who want me dead.\" he added, trying in his mind to count the days since his last drink.\n\n\"Alright,\" Dalton said as he began back down the dune, pausing to turn to the sniper. \"Keep your ass locked in this spot. Guess me and the boys are going down there. Need you up here relaying the Hunter's movements and ready to bust a cap.\" Dalton added, sliding down the dune slowly before the sniper could even respond.\n\n\"What's the situation?\" Steiner asked.\n\n\"This damn sand is the situation.\" Dalton replied, dumping his boot out while holding his foot off of the ground slightly, his eyes teared with frustration.\n\n\"You alright?\" Steiner asked.\n\n\"We are out here in this shit getting ready to walk into a hornet's nest of Hunters, and Commander Edwards is back at the fort with his ass on plush!\" Dalton replied, forcing his thick brown leather boot back on in a single motion.\n\n\"Hunters? How many?\" Steiner asked. After looking in the direction of the six Colonial soldiers close by, all of them wearing the look of a rookie in combat, Dalton turned back to Steiner. \"Does it really matter how many?\" he replied.\n\n\"Listen up,\" Dalton said, walking to the group slowly, swagger filling his officer's strut with Steiner by his side. \"Any of you rooks seen combat other than boot camp?\" he asked. Two soldiers raised their hands as the other four stood there awaiting his orders.\n\n\"Well then, you two are with us,\" Dalton said. \"You two as well.\" he added pointing to the largest of the two remaining. \"If nothing else, these big sumbitches might slow the Hunters down long enough.\" Dalton said to Steiner as he quietly laughed.\n\n\"Soldier, you stay here and cover the sniper's six. Anything comes up here, you do your best to dust its jimmy off. Got it?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"Ye...Yes sir!\" the new recruit answered, fumbling with his weapon as he crawled to the sniper's position.\n\n\"What about me sir?\" the last remaining soldier asked impatiently. \"Can you run fast?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"I...I guess so, why sir?\" the soldier asked.\n\n\"When we get down there, I want you to break off from the group and scavenge for ammunition and alcohol.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Alcohol sir?\" the soldier asked.\n\n\"Yea, for the love of God, especially alcohol soldier. Peel them damn eyelids back and find what you can. Grab it, and elbow to asshole your way back to the group. Got it?\" Dalton responded.\n\n\"Yes sir.\" the soldier replied, confused more than just a little bit.\n\n\"Do you think now is really the time to be worrying about whiskey?\" Steiner asked as the men began slowly wondering into the direction of the town under the cover of night.\n\n\"Perfect time. He looks like could outrun me, and besides, we get into it with the Hunters, you really think that scrawny sumbitch is gonna make a difference?\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Hadn't thought of it like that.\" Steiner replied, a wide grin plastered onto his face.\n\n\"Of course not, that's why they left me in charge.\" Dalton responded proudly.\n\n\"Alright, best ease our way out slowly and hope we don't hit any Hunter patrols.\" Adam said to the group as they slowly moved a few feet from the building in which they had been hiding, using any form of cover they could.\n\n\"Shh.\" Roman said quietly as he clinched a fist to the others, moments later gunshots began to ring out as if they were in the center of an independence parade.\n\n\"Back inside, quick!\" Adam yelled as the entire group sprinted for the entrance once more. \"Are they fighting one another?\" Sasha asked Adam.\n\n\"Not sure.\" he replied, the door cracked as he watched and listened closely.\n\n\"Eat it you whiskey hoarding bastard!\" Dalton yelled loudly.\n\n\"Or, maybe I am,\" Adam said. \"They are with us, actually,\" he added, grinning to the group with embarrassment. \"Let me see your light.\" Adam asked of Helon, who quickly handed him a small flashlight. Adam held it in the crack of the door for a few moments, blinking it repeatedly to gain Dalton's attention, eventually successful, though the mangy looking dog with Adam had caught on much faster.\n\n\"Open it!\" Adam said firmly as Zavious pulled the door open instantly, the rest of the group with weapons drawn as Dalton, Steiner the Colonial sniper and the fleet footed scrawny solider quickly rushed in, bottles clanging inside of a sack that was draped across the shoulder of the weakling greenhorn.\n\n\"It's good to see a friendly face.\" Adam said as he smiled.\n\n\"We'll you are about to see a lot more faces, although I don't suspect they are gonna be looking too friendly.\" Dalton replied as he tried to refill his lungs with the warm Glimmerian air.\n\n\"I thought I told you to keep your ass up on the dune?\" he asked of the sniper, still struggling with exhausted lungs.\n\n\"We were flanked sir, no way I could have held them off on my own.\" the sniper replied.\n\n\"Sir?\" Adam asked as the Benzans looked on, trying to make what they could of both Dalton and the oversize Husk warrior standing at his side.\n\n\"Yea, they put him in charge.\" Steiner said sarcastically with his heavy Husk accent.\n\n\"Seriously?\" Adam asked amazed.\n\n\"Hell yea seriously, they trust me to make the smart calls out here.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Yea, like sending your boy into a saloon full of Hunters for whiskey.\" Steiner added.\n\n\"How the hell did I know them certifiably dead son of a bitches would be packed in there drinking the town dry?\" Dalton angrily asked.\n\n\"Alright,\" Sasha interjected. \"We need to worry about how we are supposed to get out of town without getting killed.\" she added.\n\n\"We ain't leaving.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"We're not?\" Adam asked, still amazed that Dalton had been placed in charge of actual human lives.\n\n\"Nope. Sarah said to hold up here. Said they are forming a large ground team to come in and get us,\" Dalton replied as he bent down with fresh air in his lungs. \"Where did ya'll pick up this cute pup at?\" he asked as everyone in the room looked at him, wondering if he had overlooked the chronic mange of the abused dog. Then it began to make sense to a few of them, viewing both Dalton and the dog as both being a little bit on the trashy side.\n\n\"Poor sumbitch looks like he 'aint ate or drank in weeks. Private, what were you able to grab before they started shooting?\" Dalton asked as the Benzans began picking their spots inside of the building, digging in for any fighting to come.\n\n\"Not much sir, I didn't have time to...\" the Colonial private replied, Dalton snatching a bottle of whiskey from the sack and cutting his explanation off in the process.\n\n\"Double brown whiskey. This shit is so strong it would cure the blind, good job private.\" Dalton said, the young soldier standing a bit taller and proudly answering. \"Yes sir!\"\n\n\"Be a damn good name for you mutt, Whiskey it is.\" Dalton said as he poured a large amount onto the floor, the dog lapping it up before it had time to spread.\n\n\"Unbelievable.\" Sasha said, pausing when she heard Dalton bless the animal with the name Whiskey.\n\n\"Wait until he has a few drinks in him. May want to keep that gun close by your side.\" Adam replied, chuckling a bit.\n\nThe layout was simple. Dalton, Whiskey and the Colonial sniper were in the loft. Meanwhile, Helon, Zavious and Oz covered one side of the room, the three of them behind what looked to be an old wooden sales desk. Adam, Sasha and the scrawny Colonial soldier remained at the rear of the room behind empty crates while Roman and Steiner covered the door.\n\n\"I'd hate to be the unlucky one who barges in first.\" Sasha said, referring to the giant like size of Steiner, who held a short barrel shotgun, and the blade skills of the partly mechanical Roman Raines.\n\n\"Yea, or the first half dozen even. Those two can fight like no other two I have ever seen.\" Adam replied softly.\n\n\"So. Not to pry or anything, but this Sarah that Dalton spoke of...\" Sasha asked as Michaels nodded before she could complete her sentence.\n\n\"Yea, that's her. When we met I was on the run, no real direction in my life. She pulled me into this war I guess, but I couldn't have walked away from her. Love her too much, I guess it was a package deal.\" he replied.\n\n\"Well I hope this isn't over the line or anything, but I just think she is a really lucky woman. I just never understood how you could love someone and try to change them at the same time,\" Sasha said. \"Of course, that's probably just an issue with me. One of the many issues.\" she added, laughing softly. Adam thought deeply about what she had just said. Sarah had changed him, be it for better or worse. Once upon a time he had no direction, lived by the seat of his pants and enjoyed true freedom. And here he was. Trapped inside of a war he truly wanted no part of, decked out in an officer's uniform and under the heel and command of a politician somewhere. All because of his love for Sarah. When, to his knowledge, she hadn't changed anything for him. \"No, you make a good point. And thanks for the compliment.\" he finally replied as he returned her smile.\n\n\"Can I ask you a question Adam?\" Sasha asked in a heartfelt tone.\n\n\"Sure you can.\" he responded.\n\n\"What do you really think will become of myself and my people if and when we do make it back? Do you think the same Colonials who blew our warship out of orbit will let us just walk away when this is over, free and clear?\" Sasha asked.\n\n\"Sure I do,\" Adam responded, although he hadn't even thought about it up until that moment and knew in his heart that she was probably right. \"I give you my word right now, that no matter what I choose to do when this is over, you will walk away free and clear.\" he said.\n\n\"Can you really make such a commitment though Lieutenant?\" Sasha asked.\n\n\"I'm not making that commitment as a Lieutenant, I am making it as Adam Michaels, and my word is good.\" he replied.\n\n\"Thank you. I believe you.\" she responded with a smile. \"The world paints our people to be criminals, but I assure you, we are not.\" she quietly added.\n\nAdam sat quietly, filled with inner emotion as his grief of the loss of Kelly battled the emotional distress he saw on Sasha's face. He had always been a great judge of character, and he knew in his heart that her words were saturated in nothing but the truth.\n\n\"Sasha, you have my word. When we make it back, you will walk out of there a free woman.\" Adam finally replied as he stood to his feet.\n\nOnce the mightiest city on Glimmeria, the Colonial spectacle of a military base looked more like an urban wasteland. Only seconds separated explosions throughout the city as rockets, grenades and anti-aircraft artillery had been going since the Legion had landed on solid ground. Their far superior numbers on the ground had managed to take out all but one of the Mack stations, the last one heavily fortified by the Colonials who still feared assisting armies coming to the aid of their counterparts. What seemed like such a great accomplishment for the Colonials as the Legion base ships in orbit were strategically destroyed by Benzan gunfire, quickly became only a side note. The Legion had already sent its entire force, intending to dig in and fight a war of attrition. The base ships were nothing more than empty warehouses in the sky operated by the smallest of skeleton crews when they exploded. That said, a majority of the Legion's supplies had been destroyed with them, meaning victory would have to come swift if it were to come at all.\n\n\"Sir, Colonial Command remains under heavy guard, and we have the streets locked down tight.\" Lassiter reported to Edwards as the Colonial leaders scrambled to update their war maps, communications coming in from all corners of the city.\n\n\"Good. We have reason to believe that the Legion is staging a very large assault force with plans to hit this area. We are trying to pull back the pockets of soldiers throughout the city and organize a defensive perimeter,\" Commander Edwards replied. \"Get your men resupplied and do your best to assign soldiers to new platoons as they make their way to Command.\" Edwards added.\n\n\"Yes sir!\" Lassiter replied swiftly as he left the vault and returned to the streets outside.\n\n\"Any word on Adam and his crew?\" Commander Edwards asked, slowly approaching Sarah Blaine, who had been organizing all of the communications for the Colonials.\n\n\"No sir. I'm sure they are alright, probably just inside of Valencia and unable to send out a transmit without having their position compromised.\" Sarah answered, trying to convince herself as she spoke the words.\n\n\"I see.\" the Commander replied.\n\n\"Sarah, I want to make sure that you are alright with what has to be done when they do make it back,\" he added. \"Leaving Glimmeria without authorization, conspiring with wanted criminals and direct insubordination.\" the Commander added as Sarah sat in her chair, numb to the fact that if her soon to be husband could beat the odds and make it back alive, she would have to stand by and watch him be discharged while his crew was arrested.\n\n\"Yes sir. I know it has to be done.\" she reluctantly replied.\n\n\"Good Sarah. You are the ideal soldier, putting your Colonial duty above personal feelings. Your father would be so proud of you. We have already been contacted by the Gali government about Roman, seems he is very high on their list of wanted fugitives. Turning him over to them would go a long way toward helping our cause.\" Edwards remarked as he placed his hand on her shoulder for a moment before walking to the rest of the stations in the Vault for updates.\n\n\"Yep, she's locked down tighter than a tick's ass.\" Dalton remarked as he looked through the town streets, the morning sun illuminating the scope of the sniper rifle.\n\n\"Nice.\" Sasha remarked, already disgusted with Dalton's demeanor.\n\n\"He's right, their defenses are solid.\" the Colonial sniper added. Adam took the lenses and looked for himself, noticing the pockets of heavily armed Hunters patrolling the streets.\n\n\"I have an idea.\" Adam said, grabbing Steiner's field pack full of supplies and sifting through until he found a blue flare.\n\n\"Sure you can make the shot?\" the Colonial sniper said after having his rifle commandeered by Dalton, who laid prone with his eye pressed to the scope.\n\n\"Don't worry son, at this distance I could split the hair on a tick's a...\" Dalton responded before being interrupted.\n\n\"What is it with you and your fixation on the ass end of a tick?\" Sasha demanded to know.\n\n\"Adam, unless you got a stout drink to offer or my first paycheck in hand, I don't gotta put up with this shit!\" Dalton responded angrily.\n\n\"Just shoot the damn flare Dalton, everybody else be ready to get down to the back of the stables if they take the bait.\" Adam said as Dalton fired the weapon, its muzzle flash hidden within the silencing tube that was attached to the barrel.\n\nWithin a second, blue smoke began filling the landscape on the opposite side of Valencia. Only moments later, several Hunters began yelling loudly as they braced for a Colonial assault. The few Fang units among them made their way to the far end of the main street, the barbarically large creatures facing the smoke and ready to let their menacing teeth slaughter any approaching Colonials.\n\nA majority of the Hunters dashed to the smoke, weapons at the ready, which was cue enough for Adam and his crew to sprint to the back of the large, wooden stables. A much larger and more strategically placed building, it had already been cleared by the Hunters which made the probability of them checking it again slim to none.\n\nRoman sunk his blade into the thick wood only feet from the ground, pulling the steel slowly across in a straight line, his bulging arms forcefully splitting wood slowly as he followed it with a solid kick that broke open a crawl space about three feet high. One by one they crawled on their stomachs across the desert floor and into the long abandoned building, the last in was Adam, who did the best job he could of putting the fallen boards back into place to appear untouched.\n\n\"Dalton, you're with our sniper up in the loft. Keep eyes on everything and let us know of any movement. Roman, you and Steiner set up near the stable doors. Good chance when they figure out the smoke was a decoy, they'll do a half-ass sweep of the town. They come in here, take care of 'em quick.\" Adam said as everyone took position throughout the large interior and Dalton bitched under his breath about loss of command. Michaels and Sasha dug in behind a stack of musty hay near the newly made entrance at the rear of the building.\n\n\"Plan is, we'll hang here to back up Roman and Steiner if need be, try to get our com system linked up in the meantime.\" Adam said as he pulled the long range com system from a small suitcase in Steiner's field pack, which was a small metal square with several knobs, and hooked it to a table top satellite dish, which he sat on the empty crate in an effort to pull signal in.\n\nThe Hunter force inside of Valencia prepared to do a sweep of the town, just as Adam had predicted, when two Swordfish screamed overhead, dropping hundreds of rounds onto the town while taking return fire from assault rifles. It quickly took the attention off of them and onto the skies as the soon to be sweep was halted. \"Well, that was a lucky break.\" Sasha said.\n\n\"It wasn't luck. My guess is the Colonials were doing a quick flyby to scout the town so they could put together the right group of soldiers to come get us.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"What's coming across the com unit?\" Dalton asked softly, laying on the loft with his head hung over the side smiling, the mange ridden whiskey laying at his side.\n\n\"We can't send anything, it'll give our position away.\" Adam said. \"But from the sound of things, we're getting beat up on the ground.\" he added. \"What about Colonial Command?\" Dalton asked, thinking of the post he held until being sent to save Adam's neck.\n\n\"It's still there, but from what I can make out there is a large Legion force trying to take the ground, sounds like that entire area has become the front.\" Adam replied.\n\nThe sniper whistled quietly, getting Dalton's instant attention. Moments later, Dalton turned back to everyone on the bottom floor of the stable and began giving hand motions to let them know what was outside of the door.\n\n\"Two Hunters coming.\" Sasha relayed to Adam, who had put a rifle to his shoulder and the sights on the door. \"Armed with standard rifles.\" she added as she continued to watch the loft. \"And I have no idea what that means?\" she said, confused of the signal. Adam broke his attention from the door momentarily to glance at Dalton, who was turning his hand upside down next to his mouth.\n\n\"That means that they have liquor.\" Adam said, turning back to the door as Sasha stood there nothing short of speechless.\n\nBoth Hunters pushed the stable doors open slowly, the wood creaking as light from the desert heat permeated the entire building and illuminated thousands of dust particles that had yet to settle. Their thunderous laughter was cut short as Roman moved with exceptional speed, the titanium plating on his elbow crushing the lower jaw of one of the demons. Before either man had a chance to respond, Steiner grabbed the second man and wasted no time snapping his neck under the pressure of his sheer strength as Roman dug the serrated edge of his blade into the intestines of the first.\n\nAs if the stables were engulfed in flames, Dalton scaled the wooden ladder and reached the ground with unmatched haste. It took only moments of searching the bodies before he found a small bottle of rock whiskey.\n\n\"Fucking cheap ass bastards. Could have at least had something decent on 'em.\" Dalton said in disgust as Roman and Steiner dragged the bodies out of sight and quickly closed the front door. \"Oh well, with the day I've had, it'll do.\" he added, climbing the ladder much slower than he had descended, almost as if he had become an instant cripple.\n\n\"Adam.\" Roman said, tossing back a small radio he had found on one of the bodies.\n\n\"Some crew you have here.\" Sasha commented.\n\n\"I know what you must be thinking, but they're loyal and get the job done when it's on the line,\" Adam replied. \"Also, I'm sorry for ever misjudging you.\" he added.\n\n\"I'm not sure what you mean?\" Sasha replied curiously. \"When we arranged to meet with the Benzans, honestly, I did think you were criminals. It's all I had ever heard, ya know? I had always been told that the Benzans were cold-blooded killers, so I guess I had just started to believe it myself.\" he answered.\n\nSasha sat there for a minute, full of emotion and empty on words. Thinking back to her family being slaughtered only a few years back when she was a teen, and how Cyrus had taken her in, trained her and most importantly, been like a father to her. \"Don't worry Adam, I understand.\" Sasha finally replied.\n\n\"No Sasha, I don't think you do,\" Adam said as she smiled slightly.\n\n\"What you said back there made a lot of sense to me. We are more like one another than you will ever know.\" he added.\n\n\"I used to fight the system too. I can remember the deep space runs, just looking across the stars and truly feeling freedom.\" Adam said.\n\n\"I know that feeling. Almost like you are witnessing something magical about the stars that you weren't intended to.\" Sasha replied.\n\n\"Exactly.\" Adam responded. \"Does she share your sense of freedom?\" Sasha asked.\n\n\"No, unfortunately not. I guess the time comes in everyone's life when they have to make the decision though, who they want to be and what they want to live for. I chose love.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"You guys want some of this to take the edge off?\" Dalton said, his head falling in front of them as he hung down from the loft with the rock whiskey bottle in his hand.\n\n\"No thanks.\" Adam replied as he began to remember what life was like only a year ago. His original crew that included Kato and Luck, both victims of the war that Adam had drug them into.\n\n\"Sure, why not.\" Sasha replied, surprising both Adam and Dalton as she turned the bottle up and took a healthy swig.\n\n\"Alright, alright...save a little for me, damn.\" Dalton said nearly prying the bottle from her hands in order to salvage what he could.\n\nAdam hadn't truly seen the kind of smile that Dalton currently had on his face since before they had gotten drug into this damn war. Their lives had consisted of card games, saloon brawls, black market jobs and a type of family atmosphere aboard the Gunship that was hard to explain, unless you were a Benzan.\n\nWhether it was the effects of whiskey or the traumatic events of the day, she spent the next hour explaining to Adam what Benzan life was like. He found himself relating it to the life he used to live when he was free. Before he was Lieutenant Michaels, he was Captain of the Gunship. It didn't have a Colonial logo painted on the side of its thick plated steel, in fact it didn't have anything more than a film of rust coating. He started to realize that even though he was indeed in love with Sarah Blaine, his life had been changed so dramatically for the worse.\n\nAs night began to fall on the town of Valencia, Adam started to do something he had not done in a while. Search his soul. Maybe convince himself that he knew the definition of true happiness, and if by some miracle they made it off of Glimmeria alive, what changes he would have to make in order to become truly happy again. When it came to love, he had followed his heart. However, when it came to being a free and happy man, he realized that he had done everything but follow his heart.\n\nSure, his heart belonged to Sarah, it had since they very first moment he had laid eyes on her. Still, he thought a lot about Sasha as he lay there during the night. Not just because she had a pure beauty about her, but because he envied the life that she had chosen to live. Missing it very much. Living for the moment was the only real definition of happiness in his opinion, and Sasha lay there doing just that, sleeping like an angel and taking life one day at a time.\n\nSuddenly, explosions rang out all around them as the Hunter controlled town had come under siege by Colonial forces. Dalton and Roman had already been wide awake, pulling watch as everyone else quickly jumped to their feet and tried to assess the situation. Realizing it was the Colonials by the sound of their weapons, Adam immediately got on the com unit and sent a communication to let them know they were hold up in the stables. Moments later, the group could hear the explosions backing off of their area a bit, the Colonial cannons redirecting their fire in order to avoid hitting them.\n\n\"I got another idea.\" Adam said, pulling Roman and Steiner to the side. A few minutes later, Adam and Sasha had taken guard at the door as both Roman and Steiner had put on the uniforms they had removed from the dead Hunters.\n\n\"This looks ridiculous!\" the hulking Steiner said, his pants legs a good foot higher than the tops of his boots and so tight you could make out the patterns of Husk hair underneath.\n\n\"A couple more drinks and you might be looking mighty fine to me,\" Dalton said jokingly as everyone took a moment to giggle about the underhanded joke. \"Or not.\" Dalton added in a serious tone as Steiner sent him a blood curdling scowl.\n\n\"The quicker we can get out there and kill some of these damn flesh eaters, the sooner the Colonials can come fetch us.\" Adam said.\n\n\"Shouldn't take us too long.\" Roman replied as he and his horribly outfitted comrade equipped themselves with Hunter rifles and waited at the door for an all clear from the loft before cracking it open and sprinting across the street.\n\n\"You two keep your eyes wide up there, any Hunters get after them, you do anything you can to clear a path.\" Adam said shouting up to the loft as the roar of explosions in the distance intensified.\n\n\"You got it Adam.\" Dalton replied, pulling the slide loader of the sniper rifle back and putting his eye to the scope.\n\n\"Hey that's my gun!\" the Colonial sniper contested loudly. \"Steiner is a big sumbitch...you 'aint. I'll listen to him, but your ass I'll whip.\" Dalton replied snidely, taking no chances in defending his two friends.\n\nIt had only been a handful of minutes when Dalton spotted a small group of Goliath soldiers at the edge of town making minced meat out of the heavily out gunned Hunter soldiers. Several tense moments later as the three mechanical masterpieces began to enter Valiance, a whole squadron of Colonial soldiers behind them, two Fangs entered the street from a Hunter choke point. They were much more intimidating than even the model two Goliath. Sure, the alloy steel and chain guns helped the mechanical backbone of the Colonial army mow through normal foes, but the Fang units were anything but.\n\nSeveral feet taller than even Steiner, they looked more like a monster than a man, the face of of demon with two arm sized fangs hanging from their top jawbone.\n\nThey spent a moment exchanging gunfire before realizing that tactic was useless, both the Goliaths and Fangs had thick enough plating, whether alloy or skin, to deflect any small arms ammunition. Instead, they began to pick up the pace as they geared up for a fist to fist showdown with one another. Passing a large metal dumpster, one of the Fangs was stunned as Roman quickly stood up and swung the stock of his rifle, smashing it to bits across the face of the biological killing machine. The second Fang stopped suddenly, turning into Roman's direction, when the three Colonial Goliaths began letting a blanket of lead unleash onto it, if nothing else to blind and confuse it. Immediately, Steiner jumped onto the face and shoulders of the much more powerful foe, doing his best to hold on long enough to put the barrel of his weapon into the neck area of the oversize flesh eating monster.\n\nHe emptied his entire clip as the Hunter's prized unit began to die slowly of internal bleeding, standing in the same spot as it screeched in agony. Meanwhile, Roman and the second Fang were engulfed in an all out brawl of clashing steel and determined flesh when Roman saw his friend fall.\n\nA Hunter sniper hit Steiner in the back with a high caliber weapon as he stood there to place a full clip into his battle rifle. Right away, Roman sensed the severity of the wound as meat and vital tissue sprung from Steiner's chest, the round making its way completely through the hulking beast as he fell to both knees. A couple more shots followed closely after, knocking Steiner face first into the sands of Glimmeria, dead.\n\nFury took control of Roman as he seized the second Fang and began tearing flesh from any seam of its skeletal frame that he could possibly put his hands on. Two of the Colonial Goliath units had fallen at the end of a hailstorm of Hunter gunfire when Roman found himself beside the remaining Goliath and a small group of Colonial soldiers who had thrown down arms in surrender. There were simply too many Hunters.\n\nAdam had seen the loyal Husk fall dead in the street and made his way up to the loft with extreme haste, grabbing an emotional Dalton and pulling the rifle from his hands before he could get a true shot.\n\n\"Dalton, there are too many!\" Adam said sternly.\n\n\"I don't give a shit anymore Adam! I've had enough of watching my fucking friends die.\" Dalton shouted back as he made his way down from the loft to the front door of the stable.\n\n\"Step back. I don't want to shoot you, but if you leave now you will sign the death warrant of every one of us.\" Sasha said as she aimed her silencer equipped machine gun pistol at the man who had nearly reached the end.\n\n\"Bitch, you better move. None of us would even be in this position if your kind could stop killing for five fucking minutes. Now get out of my way, otherwise you 'aint gonna like how this ends.\" Dalton said angrily.\n\nSasha pulled the load clasp back, assuring him that the weapon was ready to discharge at the slightest bit of pressure.\n\n\"Dalton! You need to calm down before you do something you will regret for the rest of your life.\" Adam said, grabbing the left arm of his pissed off friend.\n\n\"Nope. I aint' gonna regret this Adam.\" he said as he planted his fist firmly into the face of Michaels, knocking him back into the thick wooden wall.\n\n\"Down on your knees, hands behind your head soldier!\" Sasha demanded of Dalton as the Colonial sniper continued watching the Hunters round up any survivors outside, which included a badly outnumbered Roman Raines.\n\n\"No Sasha. If he wants a damn fight, he's gonna get one.\" Adam said boldly as he stood back to his feet and threw the large, Colonial issued pistol to the ground.\n\n\"Sounds good to me, I'm tired of watching you march my friends to the grave over a war that some whore dragged you int...\" Dalton replied as Adam landed a left jab and a harrowing right hook onto the man, stumbling him back as he remained standing.\n\nObviously reeling just a bit, Dalton placed his hand across his beard for a minute, surprised if nothing else that Adam struck him back.\n\n\"Well, you got balls after all.\" Dalton managed to spit out before Adam landed three more punches, followed by a crisp right elbow which he had angled skyward, knocking his belligerent friend onto his back. Adam immediately got on top of him and placed his forearm across the throat of Dalton, choking the life from his body.\n\n\"Yes, I know that Luck, Kato, Kelly and now Steiner have died because of decisions I'VE made. I have to live with it every fucking day, and I'll be damned if another one of my crew's names is going to be on that list. So either you help me free Roman, or you carry your ass back to Colonial Command and wait for me to bring him back,\" Adam said with grave calm before letting go of his choke hold and picking his pistol up, pointing it directly at the face of a broken down Dalton. \"Now what's it gonna be?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"Just give me a fucking gun and let's find a way outta here already.\" Dalton said somberly as if to admit defeat.\n\n\"You aren't seriously gonna give this guy a gun are you?\" the Colonial sniper said, shocked at the notion.\n\n\"This isn't the first time we've had a physical disagreement, I'm just glad I won this round,\" Adam said, smiling a bit as he extended his hand to help Dalton to his feet. \"We go way back. If I step out of line, he puts me back in it, and vice versa.\" Adam added.\n\n\"That elbow got me, you dirty fightin' fuck.\" Dalton replied, using the arm of Michaels to help himself up.\n\n\"You sure you're not Benzan? You act so much like everyone that I know, I'm not even homesick anymore.\" Sasha said to Adam.\n\n\"Our rescue party got their asses kicked, and as thin as the Colonial forces are spread, I seriously doubt they will be sending another,\" Adam said to the group. \"Means we are gonna have to go it on our own.\" he added.\n\n\"The Hunters took the survivors into a building up the street, probably not more than two hundred yards from here. Roman was with the group they took.\" the Colonial sniper said.\n\n\"I've never known Hunters to take prisoners?\" Sasha said in a puzzled tone of voice.\n\n\"They don't. Plan on getting as much information as they can from them and putting a bullet in their head would be my guess, which means we gotta work fast.\" Adam replied. They would have the perfect opportunity soon, as the sun had started to set, painting faded blue and shimmering light red across the sky. The town would soon be engulfed with complete darkness.\n\n\"Sir, reports are indicating that our lines are being pushed back.\" a Colonial officer said as he stood before Commander Edwards.\n\n\"Give a general order to fall back here to Colonial Command. If the Legion tries to take this complex, they will pay dearly in lives.\" Edwards replied.\n\n\"Yes sir!\" the officer replied as he turned to execute the order. \"What is the status of Adam's rescue?\" the Commander asked as he turned to a very distraught Sarah Blaine. With her eyes full of tears, she simply nodded no.\n\n\"Once our remaining forces fall back and we regroup, I will try to put together a second tactical team to go get them, don't worry.\" Edwards replied to calm her before walking to the other stations inside of the Vault.\n\n\"This is a general order of retreat. Repeat, fall back. Remaining Colonial forces are instructed to fall back to Colonial Command and await further orders.\" Sarah said calmly into her com unit, holding the tears back long enough to broadcast with a hope filled voice.\n\n\"In the event that the Legion would begin taking control of this complex, we have strategically placed nuclear warheads on every level of the building. Our engineers have been able to bring Colonial Star Twenty Two to flight ready status. Most of the weapons and defense systems aboard are not functional as of yet, however as a last resort, it will evacuate us and the small group of Colonial soldiers off of Glimmeria to the small moon of Thisia, where we have been assured safe harbor by the Thisian government.\" Commander Edwards reluctantly announced to everyone inside of the Vault.\n\n\"What of the rest of the Colonials?\" one of the officers asked, bringing a harsh expression to the Commander's face.\n\n\"There is simply very limited room on the Colonial Star. The remainder of our forces will be left here to stave off the Legion until we can come back for them.\" Edwards replied. He expected to have to explain the plan in great detail to the most important members of the Colonial government. However, the conversation was cut short as the soldiers outside of the Vault under the command of Lassiter, began firing their weapons in the direction of the building's main entrance. The Legion had made it to their front door and all hell had broken loose.\n\n\"Lassiter! You must hold them until the Colonial Star arrives to evacuate us!\" Commander Edwards proclaimed through the com unit in the Vault as they eyed one another through the shatterproof glass.\n\n\"Will do sir. Highly recommend pulling any available air units to the area to assist.\" Lassiter replied, his voice nearly impossible to make out over the com unit as gunshots rang out all around him.\n\n\"Negative. Remaining air units are escorting Colonial Star in behind command, you must hold the Legion troops back at all costs.\" Edwards pleaded.\n\n\"Understood sir,\" Lassiter replied into the com unit before throwing it to the ground. \"Dig in and earn your independence!\" he yelled loudly to the troops that barricaded the halls of the building, mostly flesh with a few mechanical Goliaths assisting.\n\n\"Sarah. Begin the process of packing up all vital equipment and Colonial documentation. You, remain with Sarah at all times from this point forward.\" Edwards demanded of one of the Vault's very few and heavily experienced soldiers. As Sarah began to explain to Commander Edwards that an armed escort wasn't necessary, she saw several Colonial soldiers gunned down on the other side of the glass as they were in the thickest of firefights, which prompted her to stay quiet and do as he asked.\n\nRoman sat in a small room with six Colonial soldiers, all tied to chairs with thick rope and waiting to join the last two soldiers who were taken out for questioning, along with the remaining Goliath, to the land of the dead. As the door opened up slowly, the same Hunter who had come for the others stood in deep thought, trying to decide who they would torture for information next as two very large and well armed guards stood on the inside of the door. He was dressed in battle tested black leather armor from head to toe with a slight trimming of silver, much of it saturated with dried blood and a dusting of sand.\n\n\"Him.\" he said, pointing to Roman as the two Vampiric guards walked slowly in the direction of the doomed soldier. \"Make it quick, I grow tired of dealing with these pathetic humans.\" he added as Roman suddenly noticed a strange look about his face. As his eyes drifted down from the Hunter's face to his large torso, he could see the tip of a large blade sticking out of his stomach, a waterfall of blood crashing onto the floor. Dalton stood behind him, the Hunter's body falling to the ground shortly after as Dalton reclaimed the arm length machete in Roman like fashion, throwing it end over end at one of the two remaining demons, and in non-Roman like fashion, hitting the Hunter with the handle of the knife.\n\n\"Oh shit.\" Dalton said, stunned as the knife hit the floor making a small clanking sound. Before the flesh eating guards could get the drop on him however, Sasha stepped in and fired her palm sized machine gun pistol, droplets of red mortality finding a home on the wall behind them, quickly bringing a stinging demise to one of the Hunter guards.\n\nThe remaining demon quickly aimed his rifle in Sasha's direction, firing a shot that ricocheted off of the floor, a chair smashing into the side of its head and busting into dozens of splintered pieces. Roman had not only thrown the object in which he had been tied to only moments ago, but had lunged on top of the reeling Hunter, using the thick rope which bound his hands to choke much of the life from the wounded beast.\n\nAfter collecting the large blade, Dalton caught sight of two more of the heavily armed beasts as they dashed into the small dwelling. Once again, he threw it end over end in the direction of the door with the same results as it clanged against the wall and fell pitifully to the ground.\n\n\"Fuck it.\" Dalton said, swiftly pulling his pistol and pecking away much of the flesh of the first demon inside, the screaming Hunter falling against the wall and clutching its face with his claw ridden hands. The second Hunter in was immediately dismissed by a group of shots from one of the Hunter rifles which Roman now held.\n\n\"Dead or alive, bring them to me!\" Anwick yelled, his pale white skin flush with pink tint as revenge overtook him. Several more Hunters, nearly a dozen, quickly ran out of the saloon up the street, cautiously panning their large rifles around as they tried to assess the recent screams. The horrified townsfolk continued glancing from their windows, most having never seen a Hunter in their lifetime, much less watching one fall.\n\n\"Cut their bonds and let's get the fuck out of here!\" Dalton yelled in Roman's direction, having given up hope on ever obtaining any type of skill with a blade. It only took seconds for the former Gali commando to slice his thick bonds, as well as those of the Colonial prisoners as they collected what weapons lay on the floor and hastily proceeded outside.\n\n\"There!\" one of the Hunters exclaimed, pointing to the group of escaping Colonials as they fled the building and hopefully captivity. The Hunters, however, were much quicker than normal men, steadily closing the gap between the fleeing prisoners and those who wished them dead. Anwick remained back at the edge of town as he watched his minions of murder pursue a group of people who he wanted to watch die, slowly and painfully. He had killed thousands of men, women and children during his time, but could not remember a single one that he wanted to perish more than Adam Michaels.\n\nHe would never get that chance. As he watched his men fade into the far reaches of the distance, Adam Michaels stepped from the shadows of the building which marked the beginning of town.\n\n\"Reap it you son of a bitch!\" he said as he stepped from behind two wooden barrels, pointing his standard issue Colonial combat pistol into point blank range of Anwick and firing all six shots in succession. Anwick's inhuman speed was enough to dodge a majority of the shots, although two of them hit him deep in the chest, greatly reducing the flesh demon.\n\nHaving expended his ammunition, Adam struck Anwick across the face with the heel of the pistol before throwing it to the ground. The two wounds, coupled with gunshots suffered earlier had reduced Anwick to nothing more than a normal person. Adam threw several punches into the face of the kneeling Hunter, who eventually threw a drastic backhand of his own, putting Adam onto his back.\n\n\"I will snap your neck and watch you die a slow death!\" Anwick screamed, standing to his feet only to be met by Adam's lust for the revenge of his fallen friends. A devastating uppercut, followed by a thrashing right elbow to the face of Anwick send the monster back to the ground abruptly.\n\nAdam's quest for retribution was cut short however, as he approached Anwick heavy footed and was quickly grabbed by the throat, the Hunter's spiny white fingers wrapping around quickly and their accompanying claws digging in. With maddening rage setting in, Anwick used the grip to pick Adam up off of the ground a couple of feet and hurl him into the wooden fence in front of the nearby building, smashing several feet of it into pieces.\n\n\"You have cost me time, extreme amounts of stress and many faithful lives,\" Anwick yelled loudly, starting to approach Adam before stopping abruptly. \"And now here you are,\" Anwick said, looking at Adam as he lay on splintered wood and scorching sand, broken by the injuries newly gained. \"The worst part of it is if your loyalties would have remained with me, I have no doubt that we could have worked well together. As hard as it was for me to end you, says a lot about the high level of smuggler you must have been.\" Anwick added.\n\n\"You have no idea.\" Adam said, his face bloodied as he sat there prepared to die.\n\n\"Nor will I.\" Anwick replied. \"Does such an outstanding smuggler have any last words?\" he added, slowly approaching Adam for the kill.\n\n\"Yea. I sure could use some Whiskey right about now.\" Adam replied, Anwick stopping for a moment to laugh at the beaten man.\n\n\"I am afraid the saloon is much to far to fill that request.\" Anwick answered.\n\n\"No. I said I sure could use some WHISKEY right about now.\" Adam replied, placing a great deal of emphasis on the word Whiskey as the eye sore of a mutt sprung from one of the barrels and barked wildly.\n\n\"What the?\" Anwick said in a low voice, surprised by the invasion as he turned to the sound of Whiskey's barking. Adam quickly pulled a compact pistol from behind his back, having been tucked away behind his belt throughout the entire fight. Moments later, Anwick lay dead, his blood drenching the sand as Adam continued holding the pistol which smoked from all six shots fired.\n\nThe Colonial force had nearly been caught, when they stopped suddenly and spun to begin firing on the group of Hunters. In unison, sand covered tarps flew into the air as Helon, Zavious and Oz stood entrenched in them, firing heavy weaponry at the suddenly matched foes.\n\nThe Hunters were outnumbered by a group filled with equally tactful killers, several who were pissed off to say the least. The next few minutes were engulfed in a firefight from the worst imaginable hell as lead, blades, blood and cursing all flew freely into the air and onto the sands of that small patch of Glimmerian soil. Adam and Whiskey had sprinted to help his friends after confirming the death of Aniwick, arriving when the fight had freshly come to a close.\n\nOne of the Colonial soldiers was alive, but in bad shape, the rest, including the sniper, lay slain on the sand. Helon and Oz had both fallen, each with grimacing claw marks all over them and multiple gunshots to the chest. Sasha was nearly unscathed, but was grieving loudly at the death of the two Benzans as Zavious lived, effectively making him the highest ranking member of the Benzan family. Roman stood tall, covered in blood, most of which belonged to the fallen Hunters as he did his best to survey the damage around him. Dalton lay with the dead Hunters, his shirt ripped to pieces from both claw and blade as he had tried unsuccessfully to fend off two of the near immortals himself.\n\nIt wasn't until Whiskey went to him, licking his face and leaving tongue trails of cleanliness that Dalton started slowly moving his head around, at first not understanding if he were dead or alive. A few more times of raw tongue dragging unkempt whiskers was all it took to remind him that he was still alive, and in need of a damn drink.\n\n\"Please tell me that's all of the bastards. If not, shoot my ass now and leave my belongings to Whiskey.\" he said, painfully pulling himself to a sitting position as the surviving chuckled a bit.\n\n\"That's all of them. The remaining Hunters and Fangs left a short time ago to aid the Legion's siege on Colonial Command.\" Adam said.\n\n\"And Anwick?\" Roman asked.\n\n\"He won't be waking up to the tongue of a mangy dog. I dusted that son of a bitch like crops.\" Adam replied proudly.\n\n\"He ain't mangy. He's just like me, in need of a damn good woman and a damn good drink.\" Dalton added, Whiskey sitting down right beside him and looking at the rest of the group as if to second the notion.\n\n\"They're inside the building!\" one of the soldiers yelled, relaying the message to Lassiter.\n\n\"Hold your ground!\" he replied, sending what Goliath units that remained up closer to the fight. Legion troops by the dozen had breached the entrance to the building and set up a makeshift barrier using large sandbags as even more troops piled in. The plan was to bring in the heavy Shock Troops next, however they were met with swift gunfire on the outside by several units of Colonial soldiers who had returned to command as instructed.\n\nThat's when everyone outside first saw it. The gigantic shadow cast by the last operational Colonial Star as it made its approach, carefully planning its landing behind the complex. It was met with streaming Legion gunfire, however the small arms weaponry had no more effect on the huge Colonial ship as would rain or direct sunlight. Its hardened plated steel exterior was made for deep space travel and could withstand multiple nuclear strikes, combat rifles couldn't begin to dream of doing any type of significant damage, not even in unison.\n\n\"Sir, Colonial Star Twenty Two is on approach.\" one of the officers announced as a majority of the staff continued helping Sarah prep the equipment and supplies. This was literally the last remaining group of political and military command for the Colonial government, and if they fell here in the battle of Glimmeria, the Legion would win the war and once again rule the Skyla System unopposed.\n\n\"Have them land and load the supplies and equipment, however we have not lost the battle yet. I will remain here with Sarah as long as there is hope of winning, just have the Colonial Star prepared to launch if needed. Instruct all remaining Swordfish and Spartans to do defensive flyovers until ordered otherwise.\" Commander Edwards said.\n\n\"Yes sir!\" the officer responded, quickly turning to carry out the order.\n\nLassiter's men continued the full on gunfight with the few Legion soldiers who had breached the entrance, eventually taking a majority of them out while suffering heavy losses themselves in the process. Four remaining Legion soldiers who realized they were cut off from the central attacking force and surrounded by Colonials, threw their weapons down onto the ground and placed their hands behind their necks in surrender. They were swiftly taken into custody by a returning group of Colonial soldiers who entered the Command Center to rejoin their ranks.\n\n\"Take them to the holding cell on level two.\" Lassiter said loudly as his few remaining soldiers checked the wounded before re-securing the entrance of the building.\n\n\"What's the situation out there?\" he asked.\n\n\"Sir. The streets are torn up pretty bad. Pockets of Colonials held up throughout the city, most of it controlled by Legion forces who are getting one hell of a fight from Glimmerian locals.\" one of the Colonial soldiers answered, his face blackened by the fog of war.\n\n\"Do they have air?\" Lassiter asked.\n\n\"No sir, the only air we have seen has been our own, and they were few and far between. What they do have is a lot of Shock Troops and Spiders on the ground.\" the officer answered as Lassiter forwarded the strategical information into the Vault via com unit.\n\n\"How many troops do we have outside of the building?\" Commander Edwards asked as he stood on the other side of the thick protective glass.\n\n\"Hard to say sir. I'd estimate two dozen who are battle ready. A lot of injured and dying alongside them.\" he responded.\n\n\"Legion troops?\" the Commander asked. \"A lot sir. Hundreds. We were able to get here because we hit them out of the blue and they fell back before they realized we were so few. No way we could hold off an all out assault.\" the soldier replied.\n\n\"Lassiter, post every Goliath you have left at the entrance and bring your men into the Vault. Bring as much ammunition as you can carry, I'm ordering a full evacuation.\" Commander Edwards said.\n\n\"Yes sir.\" Lassiter said hesitantly, thinking of the faithful Colonial soldiers who were holding their ground throughout the city, waiting for reinforcements that would never come.\n\n\"Command One, this is Spartan One-Five-One, your area of evacuation is clear. You have an all green.\" the voice of a pilot passing overhead announced through the com unit in the Vault. Commander Edwards stood beside Sarah Blaine, each one pressing a sequence of keys on the wall which opened a door from the Vault to the area outside the rear of the building, their entire field of vision engulfed by the sight of the massive Colonial Star. As Commander Edwards and the remainder of the soldiers and personnel exited the building to board the base ship, Sarah turned to the Vault door which led to the internal portion of the building, entering her key code and unsealing the door to allow Lassiter's team access to the ship.\n\nIt was only a matter of minutes before the Colonial Command Center would be overrun with Legion forces, the remaining Goliaths would buy them a few more minutes, but they had once again fallen in crushing defeat.\n\n\"What about Adam?\" Lassiter asked as he carried satchels full of ammunition. \"All we can do is wait for him in high orbit. The entire city is overrun, and it will only be a matter of days before the Legion has more ships here. Our window of escape is closing, but we'll give him every last second of it.\" Sarah said, obviously upset at the possibility of her soon to be husband's capture.\n\n\"Colonial Command, this is Sky Commander Tess Weston of the United Gali Army. Please identify the coordinates of your friendlies so that we may assist you.\" a female voice rang out across the Vault's com.\n\n\"What?\" Commander Edwards said under his breath as he turned back to the com system. Visible from outdoors, a huge armada of warships and troop filled landers bearing the seal of Gali had arrived, beginning to darken the sky with such heavy numbers. Without the equipment hooked up and operational, there was no way for Colonial Command to know that Roman's home planet of Gali had indeed sided with the Colonials in the struggle of the Skyla System and had sent the bulk of its armed forces.\n\n\"Commander Weston, this is Commander Edwards of Colonial Command. I will instruct all remaining forces to engage their rescue beacons, everything else is fair game. Thank you.\" he said frantically.\n\n\"You're welcome.\" her voice answered as the roar of the landing shuttles full of Gali troops could be heard throughout Colonial Command. The warships were moved low to the ground, their cannons pounding pockets of Legion troops and occasionally even Hunters as it took only hours for Legion forces to issue a formal order of surrender. It was only one battle, the war was far from over. But at least now the Legion knew it no longer had control of the entire system. Gali, Glimmeria and several other planets who would soon join the Colonial side of the war had taken control of nearly a third of the Skyla System, which would give the people of those planets hope of freedom for their children.\n\n\"Adam continued to try and reach Colonial Command with the portable com unit, his message finally picked up with heavy static by one of the several operators who was collecting and dispatching information to their troops across Glimmeria.\n\n\"Sarah!\" the operator yelled quickly. She had been talking with Commander Edwards as well as a handful of Gali top military, but all of that ceased to matter when she realized it was a message from her soon to be husband, and that he was safe.\n\n\"It's still not safe enough Sarah. Groups of Legion holdouts planet wide. I'm sending a group of Colonial Spec-Ops to bring them home.\" Commander Edwards said, Sarah disappointed but quickly agreeing to speed up the process of bringing them back safely.\n\n\"While they take care of it, you and I need to talk.\" he added, Sarah looking at him suspiciously as he pulled her off into a corner for privacy.\n\n\"Is it nearby?\" Adam asked anxiously, everyone else waiting for Dalton's verdict, a map of the surrounding area in hand as they were all cramped inside of a sand crawler and heading for the extraction point. It was nothing more than a utility vehicle the town had used for repairs, and after seeing what the group had done to the bloodthirsty Hunters, they gladly gave it away with no strings attached.\n\n\"Well fuck me raw.\" Dalton finally proclaimed with disgust, balling the map up and tossing it onto the floor of the Sand Tracker as Whiskey rode shotgun.\n\n\"Want to dumb it down for us maybe?\" Sasha asked sarcastically.\n\n\"We gotta turn this molasses moving bitch around and head the fuck back, the extraction point, I shit you not, is right outside of Valencia. The other side of Valencia. That dumb enough for you?\" Dalton replied snidely before cursing Colonial Command under his breath.\n\n\"You have got to be kidding?\" Adam said, beside himself in disbelief.\n\n\"Do I look like a stand up comedian to you?\" Dalton replied as the Sand Tracker slowly began turning to follow its own tracks back into town.\n\n\"This is ridiculous, if any of the Hunters return we all know they will pick us up the minute we show back up.\" Zavious said.\n\n\"No shit, we might as well hang streamers on this bitch and radio them ahead of time, maybe they can organize a homecoming parade in our honor.\" Dalton replied as everyone inside of the overcrowded antique of a vehicle broke out into laughter for the next few moments.\n\nA little over an hour later, the Sand Tracker had come to a complete stop, everyone huddled outside around the small crumpled map in front of them as the vehicles headlights provided enough illumination for them to see it in an otherwise completely dark environment.\n\n\"Alright, the plan is simple enough. We move everyone to the far side of town on foot with as much ammunition as we can carry, lay low in the hills and wait it out.\n\n\"What about Legion patrols? We got no cover out here.\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"All we can do is hope. \"I can handle first watch,\" Sasha said, holding her suppressed pistol machine gun up. \"Besides, I'm well rested.\" she added.\n\n\"Not by yourself you're not.\" Adam replied. \"I'll cover first watch with you. The group loaded back up, moving cautiously to an area that was perfect for digging in and holding on until the Colonials could save the day.\n\n\"I can't believe we are going to rescue them, and then watch everyone but the man I love be imprisoned by the very government that they have sworn to protect. I mean Dalton and Steiner are there on our orders!\" Sarah yelled.\n\n\"It is out of my hands I'm afraid. I will make it a priority to assure them all a fair trial as well as a very lenient sentence, but when the Colonial Parliament hears of their conspiring with the Benzans, well you have been with us long enough to know the answer to that.\" Commander Edwards replied.\n\n\"They will want them executed!\" Sarah said loudly.\n\n\"I'm afraid you are right. Your father was a lifelong friend of mine, it is that I hold your family in such high regard that I will personally see to it that their lives are spared, Dalton, Steiner and Roman at least. The Benzans will receive no special treatment.\" Edwards replied.\n\n\"Nor would I expect them to.\" she replied, considering them to be cold blooded killers.\n\n\"Sarah, I think it would be best if you were the one who orders them into custody. They will listen to your reasoning before that of an old man in an officer's uniform.\" Edwards added.\n\nSarah looked across the sand of Glimmeria with such mixed emotion. Her entire life had been dedicated to the thought of a star system without corruption. Her father had raised her to value law and righteousness above all things, but was that supposed to include compassion and love? She knew in her heart that the right thing to do would be to rescue the man she loved and bring the rest of them to justice. But she loved Adam, and she knew that in doing so, she may lose him forever. She loved him more than any man that had ever been a part of her life, short of her own father. \"I'll take care of it for you.\" she finally replied, knowing that her struggling heart was no excuse for making the wrong decision.\n\n\"Thank you Sarah. I specifically plotted the extraction point close to Valencia to give them all the best chance of survival. For your sake, I want them alive and well when we arrive.\" Commander Edwards said before slowly taking his leave to return to the bridge of the ship.\n\n\"The son of a bitch wants us dead, I know he does!\" Dalton commented loudly as he and Roman remained awake, the other survivors sleeping solidly.\n\n\"Who wants us dead?\" Roman asked.\n\n\"Commander Edwards, that's who, the cocksucker,\" Dalton replied. \"He sent us all out here while holding Sarah and Lassiter there. She's like a daughter to him and Lassiter is his idea of a perfect soldier. The rest of us he could give two shits about, knowing good and well we were out gunned. Then has us backtrack to the same place we almost died only hours ago.\" he added as everything remained silent.\n\n\"Ya hearing me man?\" Dalton asked as Roman nodded to let him know he felt the same way.\n\n\"My loyalty is to Adam to the end. As much as I like Sarah, I'm starting to realize that since the day we met her, bodies have been dropping faster than panties in my presence.\" Dalton added as the two men laughed quietly, Whiskey sticking his head up for a moment almost as if he was fluent with lingerie.\n\n\"Sounds like your friends are still awake.\" Sasha said, sitting next to Adam as they both watched the sand filled horizon.\n\n\"Yea, I doubt Roman does a lot of sleeping as of late. With his newly fitted mechanical parts, I'm not even sure he needs to sleep anymore. And Dalton, well he rarely gets a good night's sleep unless there's an empty bottle of whiskey close by. I'm sure watching Steiner fall isn't helping much either.\" Adam answered as he and Sasha both remained silent for a moment.\n\n\"So, we got a few hours. Catch me up on the Benzan lifestyle. Seems like pretty much everything that I've been told of them was untrue.\" Adam said.\n\n\"I'm afraid I am not the kind of girl who likes talking a lot about herself.\" Sasha replied. That was a first for Adam, who gave her a huge but faux smile as he couldn't make the connection between a woman and selflessness. Finally, deciding to break what had become a very awkward silence between the two, he spoke up. \"Well, I guess in that case I can ask Dalton to come out and entertain us.\"\n\n\"Where would you like me to begin?\" Sasha asked, bringing a laugh to both of them quickly.\n\n\"Yea, he has that effect on people. He's really not as bad as he comes across when you get to know him. He's loyal and a damn good friend.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"I understand.\" Sasha answered.\n\n\"What I still can't figure out, is how you and the crew ended up fighting a politician's war?\" she asked, changing the mood of the conversation to one of seriousness.\n\n\"Good question,\" Adam answered. \"It wasn't long ago that I was just like you. I thought I had everything figured out. Then, of course, I met Sarah, and it wasn't long after that everything got clouded I guess. Most of the people that the Colonials are trying to protect are honestly good people. I figured it was time to change who I was and start doing something positive.\" he added.\n\n\"If you don't mind my saying so, I don't believe you have changed. This person you seem to think you once were, that's the only person I have seen since you arrived on my ship. You seem to have things figured out to me, loyalty and friendship above all else.\" Sasha said, a very long silence falling after her last word as Adam began wondering if she was right. Had he really changed at all?\n\n\"So, what about you,\" Michaels asked. \"I'm still curious as to how you ended up with the Benzans and what day to day life is like?\" he added.\n\n\"It's a pretty simple story I'm afraid. If the person chooses to wear the amulet, they are from that point forward recognized across all Benzan families as one of their own, taken in and taught the lifestyle.\" she added.\n\n\"And what lifestyle would that be?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"Everything from how to handle a weapon and defend yourself when there is no weapon, to helping the poor and defending the otherwise defenseless,\" Sasha replied. \"In my case, a close friend of the family who was more like an uncle to me, decided after my family was slain that my only hope for survival would be with the Benzans.\" she added.\n\n\"I'm sorry to hear about your family,\" Adam replied somberly, looking at the ground for a few moments. \"So Cyrus took you in?\" Adam added.\n\n\"They all took me in as their own. Cyrus was like a father to me, but there are many other families, just as they are many other clans of Hunters,\" she replied. \"Adam, you should consider the offer to become one of us. I know it will complicate things for a bit, but personally, I would really love the opportunity to spend every day with you.\" Sasha added, taking Adam by complete surprise.\n\n\"Well, I am certainly flattered by the offer. It's only fair to tell you though, when we return, my place is by Sarah's side until death. We had planned a wedding until the Legion arrived.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"Very well, all I can do is extend the offer, but it is your choice as to where life will take you.\" Sasha replied.\n\nFor the next few hours, Adam told Sasha the stories of the first Glimmerian War, his long career as a criminal smuggler and of course, the friends who had fallen that she would never have the opportunity to meet. Sasha continued telling Adam of the Benzan lifestyle as well as of the friends she had made, and sadly lost along the way. They laughed together, showed concern and even let go of some emotional feelings, venting to one another in a strict matter of trust. Personal accounts that only good friends could possibly accomplish through the bonding of a friendship.\n\n\"Adam! Picking up all kinds of Colonial traffic over the com unit.\" Dalton yelled loudly, running out to Michaels and Sasha as the rest of the group slowly followed.\n\n\"Gear up, they're coming.\" Adam said to the group after listening to the chatter for a couple of minutes. A small group of Legion faithful, not even a click away from their position, began firing tracer rounds into the sky. It was a tearful sight for nearly everyone when they saw the tracer rounds begin to be answered by Colonial rail gun fire, which could only mean one thing, their rescue chopper had arrived!\n\nWithin the span of thirty seconds, the rail guns had not only taken out the machine gun nest on top of a large sand dune, but a majority of ground around the Legion troops as the fast moving lead continued chewing into the sand and its underlying layer of clay. The survivors began flocking to the chopper in a single group, the com units continuing to broadcasting a message of the arrival of Gali forces, but this time around it was Sarah's voice.\n\nAdam grabbed the com unit with both hands shaking, pressing the communication button and pausing for a moment to think his words carefully.\n\n\"I've waited a long time to hear that voice.\" Adam said eagerly into the transmitter, nervously awaiting a response.\n\n\"Adam! Where are you, is everyone safe?\" she asked. \"We are on our way home...Steiner didn't make it.\" Adam replied, his lips shaking from the emotion of hearing Sarah's voice again and the loss of his loyal crew member.\n\nA long silence followed before Sarah replied with a heavy heart. \"We see you on our grid now and will be eagerly awaiting your return.\"\n\nThe transmitter was flooded with com chatter as Glimmeria was now overflowing with military help from several planets who had followed Gali's lead. As the shuttle continued its path to the landlocked Colonial Star, Adam took one last look outside of the windshield, promising himself yet again that he would never return to Glimmeria as long as he lived.\n\n\"None of us would have made it out of there alive if it wasn't for everyone's hard work. Thank you.\" Adam said, nodding his appreciation to Roman, Dalton, Sasha and the rest of the exhausted survivors, including Whiskey.\n\n\"He grows on ya' don't he.\" Dalton said as everyone laughed and looked forward to the idea of living to fight another day.\n\nGlimmeria had been lost to the Legion, a crushing defeat under the heels of the far superior force that was assembled by worlds filled with people in search of freedom, though much of its largest cities lay as nothing more than a pile of rubble.\n\nWhat few soldiers remained would join the Colonial Parliament in devising a new strategy based around the newly gained support. Right now none of that mattered to any of them, especially not to Adam, who waited patiently as the shuttle docked onto the floor of the launch bay. He would finally see his future wife's face once more, which is something he had started to doubt would ever be afforded him again by the gods.\n\nAs the shuttle door opened to allow the crew's exit onto the interior of the Colonial Star, they were met by a squad of soldiers aiming combat rifles in their direction.\n\n\"Adam Michaels, step aside. Your crew is being placed under arrest for abandonment of military post as well as aiding known fugitives.\" an older gentleman with a lengthy white beard proclaimed.\n\n\"Well, it looks like Sarah has let herself go all to hell.\" Dalton said, sarcastically comparing her to the old man. The soldiers glanced at the sad excuse for a dog in Whiskey before they began placing hand restraints on the Zavious, Sasha and Dalton, while Roman resisted the attempt.\n\n\"Try putting those on me, see what happens.\"\n\nWith a bit of convincing on Adam's part, Roman soon placed a set of restraints on himself, all while continuing to dare the soldiers to lay hands on him.\n\n\"Don't worry, I'm sure it won't take long to clear up this misunderstanding. Where is Sarah Blaine?\" Adam asked the older gentleman.\n\n\"I'm right here Adam.\" she said, stepping out of the shadows of an unlit room nearby.\n\n\"Adam, I'm sorry. I'm under direct direct orders from Commander Edwards himself to take them into custody.\" she said, her heart pleading with his own.\n\n\"Sarah this is my crew. My family.\" Adam replied somberly, still in disbelief of everything that was happening.\n\n\"I have to admit Adam, she doesn't seem like your type.\" Sasha said, drawing a scowl from Sarah as she tried to figure out the relationship between the Benzan beauty and her husband to be.\n\n\"You realize they haven't built a prison cell yet that can hold us, right?\" Dalton asked Sarah, his question completely disregarded.\n\n\"We'll see.\" the Master of Arms finally responded as the group started to move slowly into the direction of the prison block.\n\n\"I have arranged for the Gunship to be fueled and waiting in hangar bay two when we get there.\" Sarah said to Adam as the group continued its slow pace to lockup.\n\nTaking several minutes, they passed groups of Colonial soldiers who stopped to watch, never questioning her actions because of their deep rooted respect for Sarah and what she had given for the cause of freedom, while at the same time dumbfounded by seeing the crew arrested.\n\nJust as promised, when they arrived, the Gunship sat in one of the launching bays, its reflective chrome exterior immediately catching the eye of a crew who had given up hope of ever seeing it again.\n\n\"It's fueled and supplied, just as you ordered my lady.\" one of the Colonial deck hands said proudly.\n\n\"Thank you.\" Sarah replied before turning to Adam. \"We need to get out of here for a couple of days, just you and I. Sort through all of this.\" she said.\n\n\"Not without my crew Sarah, you know that.\" Adam replied as everyone stopped to watch the heated discussion.\n\n\"Commander Edwards pulled a lot of strings to keep you a free man Adam, your friends chose their own paths.\" Sarah replied.\n\n\"Free? Leaving here in a ship without my crew isn't freedom?\" Adam replied angrily.\n\n\"This war is over for you and your crew, if you stay, the Colonial Parliament will see to your release from the military and not even I can stand in the way of that.\" she replied.\n\n\"Sarah, let's just go. The battle is over, your father is gone. Let's all just go right now, start a new life beyond all of this.\" Adam said, pleading with his lover.\n\n\"I wanted to go alone, just the two of us and have this conversation. But if you insist on doing it in front of everyone else, fine.\" she replied as her eyes watered with emotion. \"We can't start a life together Adam, I'm sorry. My place is here with the Colonials, with a military that longer wants you involved.\" she added.\n\n\"So this is it? Just like that we are finished?\" Adam asked. \"Maybe not forever, who knows, when the war ends you...\" Sarah replied as Michaels interjected.\n\n\"No Sarah. You once told me to make a choice, now I'm asking you to do the same. Either you leave with me and we do things the way we need to, or you stay behind and choose your war and grudge against the Legion over the love we have for each other. Period.\" Adam said sternly. \"Adam, I have to stay, you know that.\" Sarah said emotionally. \"I thought what we had together was so much stronger than all of this, at least until now. Now I don't know what to think Sarah.\" Michaels said, trying his best to hide the pain consuming his every extremity.\n\nAs the group looked on, Adam turned back to look at Lassiter. \"You with us, or staying behind to fight this pointless war to the end?\" he asked, almost already knowing the answer.\n\n\"Adam, you are a true friend to me, but my place is by Sarah's side fighting for freedom. Kelly would want it that way.\" Lassiter replied.\n\nMichaels simply answered with a head shake of pity before turning to the ship's ramp and suddenly stopping in his tracks. He glanced back at Sasha for several tense moments, remembering the promise he had made her not so long ago.\n\n\"I can't let you do this Sarah. I made her a promise.\" Adam replied, turning his attention to his former lover.\n\n\"Adam, it's going to be hard enough watching you leave like this, you know I have to keep them here.\" Sarah replied as she turned to Lassiter to give him the go ahead.\n\nLassiter readied his combat rifle, as he walked toward the prisoners with the full intention of ushering them forward.\n\n\"Belay that order Lassiter! Don't do this Sarah, don't push me into something that we will both live to regret for the rest of our lives.\" Adam said pleadingly.\n\n\"I'm sorry Adam.\" Sarah replied uninterested.\n\n\"Then so am I.\" Adam replied, pulling his pistol and aiming it directly at Sarah Blaine.\n\n\"What the hell are you doing Adam?\" Sarah asked, shocked that the man she had come so close to marrying would go so far as to threaten her life.\n\n\"You leave me no choice.\" Adam replied, holding the weapon surgically steady.\n\nLassiter turned his rifle, aiming it directly at Adam, moments later feeling cold steel held by Roman Raines, who was a master of escaping loose bonds and blade smuggling.\n\n\"Think you're quicker with a combat blade than I am with this trigger?\" Lassiter said jokingly, almost to mock the warrior.\n\n\"Wanna find out?\" Roman replied, digging the edge into Lassiter's neck just enough to draw a trace amount of blood.\n\n\"Adam, there's no going back from this.\" Sarah said sternly, realizing that he was fully prepared to die trying to keep his promise.\n\n\"We outnumber you two to one!\" a Colonial soldier said loudly, all of them taking aim on Adam and his crew.\n\n\"After watching you get your asses kicked twice by the Legion, I'd say that puts the odds in our favor.\" Dalton replied as he laughed, now holding two short barrel shotguns that he had recollected from one of the soldiers, his hands still tied with chains as Whiskey sat close to his feet.\n\n\"What's the logic Adam,\" Sarah asked. \"You have nowhere else to go, we gave you the last chance you'll ever have at a decent life?\" she added.\n\nHe seemed to mentally check out for a few moments, thinking long and hard about his decision to come because of his strong belief in staying true to his word. He looked at his crew, then directly at Zavious.\n\n\"Extend the offer to Dalton and you have yourself a deal.\" Adam said.\n\n\"Done.\" Zavious replied with truth in his voice. Adam pulled the medallion from his pocket and placed it around his neck with a single free hand, his pistol never faltering.\n\n\"Is this what it has come to Adam? You are planning to live a life committed to a family of murderers and thieves? The trash of society.\" Sarah asked.\n\n\"Did this redheaded whore just call me trash?\" Sasha asked Dalton, ready to throw fists with Sarah.\n\n\"I believe she did, and I believe Whiskey needs an official Benzan invitation as well.\" Dalton replied, glancing to Zavious who nodded simply to keep the peace.\n\n\"Relax Sasha, she's not worth the effort,\" Adam replied, holding Sasha back with his free hand, while looking straight through the woman he had once thought to be so perfect. \"Of course, it would have been nice if I would have known this the day we met.\" he added.\n\n\"Go ahead then. Adam, you do realize that once you lift off, I will order our allies to blow the Gunship into nothing more than wreckage inside of a minute?\" Sarah asked, the look on his face was a dead giveaway that he hadn't considered that angle yet.\n\nShe was right, even if he somehow managed to get away, the sky was so thick with Gali warships that they wouldn't have a chance in hell of getting out of Glimmeria's orbit.\n\n\"Give me your guns.\" Roman said, taking the shotguns from Dalton's grasp, putting them on both Sarah and Lassiter at point blank range.\n\n\"You can't be serious?\" Sarah asked, surprised.\n\n\"Dead serious you bitch. Adam may be in love with you, but after hearing you call Sasha's people trash, I got no problem putting both you and your wet nurse on ice.\" Roman replied of Lassiter.\n\n\"Our people trash, actually...now.\" Adam added, Whiskey barking loudly.\n\n\"You've seen my poker face before, if you think I'm bluffing, try me.\" he added.\n\n\"Roman, I'm not gonna leave you behind!\" Adam said loudly. \"What are they going to do? Imprison me? Kill me? I'm already fucking dead Adam, look at me,\" Roman yelled, referring to his synthetic laced body. \"What in the hell else can they do to me that hasn't already been done?\" Roman asked, not expecting an answer. \"Get everyone else the hell out of here, I'll give you the time you need for a clean getaway.\" Roman added.\n\n\"Adam looked into Roman's eyes for a moment with appreciation. \"I will be back for you my friend, and I'm saving a medallion for when the day comes.\" Adam said as he nodded one final time.\n\n\"If you come back Adam, my love for you will not play favoritism again. I will see you imprisoned.\" Sarah said.\n\n\"Hadn't heard that line before,\" Adam replied, not even glancing in her direction. \"Soon my friend.\" Adam said to Roman as he turned to enter the Gunship.\n\n\"This isn't over!\" Sarah yelled, as he turned to face her one last time.\n\n\"Yea. It truly is.\" Adam replied, holding Sasha's hand as they followed Dalton and Zavious up the ramp and into the Gunship, Whiskey stopping momentarily as he pulled a mangy leg up and let urine fly onto the deck of the Colonial Star.\n\n\"Damn I love that dog.\" Dalton said smiling as he slowly sealed the ship's door air tight.\n\nMoments later, he and Dalton made the preparations to lift off, the shiny vessel leaving the Colonial Star in full burn.\n\n\"You've started a war you can't win Roman.\" Sarah said as the heat from the Gunship's thrusters whipped across their skin.\n\n\"Says the bitch who's tucking tail and hiding behind everyone else's army on her last remaining ship.\" Roman replied stone faced.\n\nSeveral minutes later, one of the deck officers on the bridge of the Colonial Star turned from his grid screen.\n\n\"Sir, we just picked up an unidentified craft heading away from us and moving fast!\" Commander Edwards quickly walked to his station to see for himself, the Gunship almost out of striking distance.\n\n\"Set gun coordinates and get the firing solution, quickly!\" he said as he turned to face the entrance to the ship's bridge.\n\n\"Belay that order private.\" Roman said, holding Sarah, Lassiter and several other Colonials at gunpoint as they entered the bridge.\n\n\"This is outrageous!\" Edwards said, motioning for the bridge's security force to take control of the situation. They stopped abruptly as one of the shotguns swayed into the direction of Commander Edwards, the other remaining firmly on Sarah.\n\nWhen it had become clear to him that his own security detail would not be able to intervene until Roman decided he was damn good and ready to let them, Edwards ordered his soldiers to drop their weapons slowly to the ground and place their hands behind their heads.\n\nThe Gunship had gotten away, broken orbit and disappeared into the drop cloth of stars which illuminated the skies of every planet in the system.\n\n\"Officer Lassiter, escort Roman to the prison level.\" Sarah said seconds after he decided Adam was long gone and threw down his weapons.\n\n\"If he even begins to attempt escape, kill him.\" she added.\n\n\"Yes my lady!\" Lassiter agreed with unwaivering loyalty, Commander Edwards doing his best to regain the look of someone with authority.\n\n\"Mr. Raines, I hope you do realize that our willingness to hand you over to the Gali government was a key factor in them coming to our aid.\" Commander Edwards said as Roman turned to face him, his hands wrapped in chain and realizing that he would now have to pay for his role in Greyspine.\n\n\"That's right Roman, you will be on a Gali warship within the hour. May god have mercy on you.\" Commander Edwards added as Roman was led away by Lassiter and the small group of Colonial soldiers.\n\nAdam hurt deeply, trying his best not to show it as they set course for Tirious. He knew that with the companionship of Sasha and a new home among the Benzan family, that with time his heart would heal into something that was once again capable of love. Watching Dalton comb the thick and tangled hair of Whiskey down into a smooth shine, Adam knew that even the worst looking of situations could turn out fantastic in the end. And above all else, he began contemplating an escape plan for Roman as the feeling of freedom began to set in, true freedom. Plenty of time for reflections of the past to run through his mind.\n\nBook 3\n\nReflections\n\n\"I'm surprised you would have the balls to show your face again.\" Walter Jones said with sarcasm.\n\nThe small time crime boss stood in a less than fine suit, two armed men at his side. They weren't killers, that much was obvious by the deer in headlights look upon their faces. They anxiously held Dalton at gunpoint using rifles, and that always had a way of rubbing him wrong.\n\n\"Aw now, no need to be so rude about it. How about you get these boys to lay down arms so we can have ourselves some honest dealings?\" Dalton asked casually.\n\nWalter Jones laughed, knowing Dalton and crew were smugglers and that was about as far from honest as it could get. Not to mention he owed Dalton James and his friend Adam Michaels money from a job previously completed.\n\n\"Now why in the hell would I do that?\" Walter asked.\n\nA split second later, one of his armed men fell to the ground in screaming pain; victim of a sniper's shot from the far distant.\n\n\"Well sir, cause you 'aint got a choice for starters. I got a sniper up above with you all scoped at this very moment. That's the biggest reason I got the balls to show my handsome face again,\" Dalton said, smiling wide. \"Now where's the money?\" he asked.\n\nWalter Jones had planned to screw him a second time of course, but didn't want to risk the possibility of his own demise in the process. Throwing a sackful of credits to Dalton's feet, Walter scowled heavily. \"It's all there.\"\n\n\"You may think I'm somewhat of a stickler, but after you gave Adam and me a sackful of blank paper on the last go round, I think I might be counting it this time.\" Dalton said, bending down to unzip the bag.\n\nIt was filled with credits alright, and he was due two thousand for the job recently completed. \"Looks like about two thousand.\" Dalton said as his fingers quickly fanned through the money.\n\n\"I told you it was all there.\" Walter replied. \"Yea, but see,\" Dalton said walking a bit closer as he pulled a tightly rolled cigar from the pocket of his good as new brown coat, blazing up the tobacco stick and adding heavy smoke to the mix. \"You still owe me three thousand for a job already done. And I can't figure out the exact number without an adding machine, but I'm thinking you need to be handing over the rest of it if you wanna walk out of here alive.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Are you insane? You know I don't have three thousand more credits on me,\" Walter Jones said loudly. \"I'd be a fool to carry that kind of money.\" he added.\n\n\"Yes sir, I'd be inclined to agree,\" Dalton replied, stroking rough fingers through the course patch of his beard. \"Well, how about you boys empty your pockets into the bag, including your watches and such. Then we'll just call it even.\" Dalton demanded, kicking the sackful of credits a bit as it moved closer to them in the lifeless dirt.\n\n\"Are you kidding,\" Walter asked snidely. \"Why don't you get on the ground and take the man's gold tooth too for God's sake?\" he added loudly as his gun struck man still lay on the ground, a blanket of pain and agony doing little to quiet his screeching.\n\nSeveral minutes later Dalton stood there with a smile painted to his face and a loaded bag in his hand. \"God damn you Dalton James, you'll pay for this!\" Walter yelled, his man now one tooth shy and rolling on the ground in pure oral pain.\n\nNever one to pass up a suggestion to make money, Dalton had pulled a pocket knife from his brown coat; using its small set of pliers to jerk the golden tooth from the man's skull. It would only fetch thirty or so more credits, but that was money owed to him by Walter Jones and he wasn't about to leave it laying. Of course the man would have to do without tough meat in his diet for the next few days, but that was of no concern to Dalton.\n\n\"Well boys, it's been a blast. I guess this is it until next time.\" Dalton said in his usual wise ass tone, turning to walk away from the deal gone sour.\n\n\"Dalton, if you ever show your face here again I swear I'll cut that damn smile from your skull,\" Walter yelled. \"You tell Adam Michaels I said the same!\" he added.\n\n\"That 'aint gonna happen.\" Dalton replied, his cigar burned down to nothing more than a saliva ridden stub.\n\nShortly after, Dalton boarded the ship, walking up the steel grating of the ramp as he was greeted by Whiskey. His pooch had been with him for a while now, a loyal friend who even sported his own custom made brown leather coat. It wasn't as thick as the one Dalton wore on his back of course, but the couturier had thrown it in for free. Together they looked almost like twins, the fur on Whiskey's face just a tad thicker of course.\n\n\"Where's the Capt'n?\" Dalton asked, petting Whiskey for a moment before standing with the bag of credits, jewelry and that single loose tooth.\n\n\"Right here.\" Cambria said, slowly moving down the spiral stairs that led from the cargo hold to the crew's quarters. She was perfect in every sense of the word, her lush curves tightly wrapped in form fitting cargo pants and tight t-shirt that did wonders in showing off her upper body. The upper body that interested men, of course. Her skin had a glow of white satin about it, which only brought more attention to her vibrant blue hair.\n\nShe was from the Drifts, a series of smaller planets on the fringes of charted space. Some of the planets lacked modern technology, while others simply shunned it altogether. Everyone from the Drifts had a unique look about them, and hers just happened to be a look of insatiable sex and electric innocence.\n\nCambria Sims was still fairly new to smuggling, which was the biggest reason she laid down the kind of money she did for Dalton; which amounted to nothing more than drinking money. He had experience, was wise to the way things worked in this type of life and when things went wrong he was plenty capable of taking care of things with his own two hands.\n\n\"Damn you are a welcome sight for sore eyes.\" Dalton said, watching such a beautiful woman head into his direction.\n\nKneeling down to retrieve the bag full of credits while looking up at him with a smile, her pouty lips only inches away from the most vital area of Dalton's body, the part wrapped in a zipper; Cambria smiled slightly.\n\n\"I still say we should take this to the next level. I could make an honest woman out of you.\" Dalton said as Cambria slowly stood to her feet, purposely keeping herself only inches from his body so their lips could be nearly touching when finished.\n\n\"Maybe one day cowboy. For now though, good job on today's catch.\" she replied softly as though she was ready to kiss him, instead turning to head back to the crew's quarters.\n\n\"One day you are gonna be courtin' me exclusive. You watch and see baby, I'm gonna break you down.\" Dalton said, grinning ear to ear as Cambria walked away slowly, her ass moving with only the slightest of bounces; a perfect testament to her capable curves. Rather than answer, she turned slightly and smiled at the experienced smuggler.\n\n\"Now Whiskey, there goes a real damn woman. I know my away around the bedroom as good as any man, but my gut tells me she'd be able to show me a thing or two,\" Dalton said under his breath with his trusted pooch by his side. \"I'd almost give up drinking for fifteen minutes with...\" Dalton added, interrupted by the shuttle pulling from the planet's surface.\n\nHe quickly made his way to the ship's entrance, spinning the wheel which served as a handle, the metal door sliding shut as he bolted it into place with three locks.\n\n\"Goddamn steam engine, I still hadn't got used to it.\" Dalton said with ill intent.\n\nCambria was Captain of the Outer Heaven. It could house only a small crew but was proudly made in the Drifts, needing nothing more than constant steam to operate. It had its advantages and disadvantages of course, but made almost no sound which was ideal for smuggling. It was a deep space capable ship, though it looked more like an airship or elongated balloon. A mixture of solid steel and thickened glass, the Outer Heaven was a marvel of Victorian technology.\n\n\"Good shootin,\" Dalton said as he turned to nod his appreciation to Skulls. His God given name wasn't Skulls of course, it was Trevor Lagrange. But he had a very odd hobby. He enjoyed collecting skin, bones, teeth and even the occasional shrunken head. A hobby that quickly led to his nickname. \"This is for you pal.\" Dalton said, pulling the still bloody golden tooth from his pocket and flicking it to the strange man.\n\nSkulls was a very tall human, nearly seven feet. He was far from large though, a majority of his frame nothing more than pale white skin and sturdy bones. He wore black leather from his boots to collar, though it was very loose hanging. A black top hat sat firmly on his head as the stringy haired man simply nodded his appreciation.\n\nHis Salvation model sniper rifle hung by a nylon strap down the middle of his back. The Salvation rifle was a much older model and being bolt action made it less popular because of the accuracy needed to make a kill. Skulls loved the weapon because he was accurate. Damn accurate. Anytime he pressed his eye to the telescopic lens mounted onto the rifle, death would surely ensue.\n\n\"Best head up and get your cut.\" Dalton said, turning to make his way up the spiral stairs. They were narrow, made of all steel and noisy as hell; having taken a verbal lashing by Dalton more than once during the routine hangover.\n\nCambria stood near the crew's table with Tank as they emptied the contents of Dalton's bag, credits piling high. Tank also answered to his real name, Greg Shelling, but Tank fit more appropriately. The dark skinned man was huge, at least six and a half feet tall with a muscular frame to go along with it. He stood there in a sleeveless white t-shirt, green pants and boots of black leather. His usual attire, day in and day out.\n\n\"I'm keeping this watch if that's cool?\" Tank asked.\n\n\"Be my guest, too much flash for me anyhow.\" Dalton replied as Tank held up a watch of rock solid silver.\n\n\"Here's your cut, plus a bonus for job well done.\" Cambria said, laying a stack of credits out in front of Dalton, accompanied by a wind resistant lighter that had been salvaged from the pocket of Walter Jones himself.\n\n\"May want to quit giving me gifts like this, people are gonna start talking.\" Dalton replied, winking at the flirtatious Cambria Sims.\n\n\"I'll leave Trevor's cut on the table.\" Cambria said.\n\n\"'Aight. Me and Whiskey are beat, I'm dragging my sorry ass to my rack. Room for two if you change your mind.\" Dalton said, looking heavily at Cambria with a smile.\n\n\"Never know, tonight might be the night.\" she replied with a smile. Of course in the back of his mind he knew it wasn't going to happen, but flirting with a girl who was so perfectly sculpted with genetics seemed to make the trips through space more manageable.\n\nWhiskey was the first one in, immediately jumping onto the foot of the military style bunk.\n\nDalton sat down several moments later, handing Whiskey a long string of jerky before leaning over to take his boots off. \"I'm getting too old for this shit.\" he said under his breath, unlacing his boots a bit before forcing them off. Leaning over to a night table, Dalton picked up a photo taken with Adam Michaels during their first war on Glimmeria.\n\nDalton was decked out in an old brown duster with shotgun in hand, his arm wrapped around the man who had been like a little brother to him. He smiled a bit, remembering the day it was taken and the great night of drinking that followed. \"I miss you old buddy.\" Dalton said in a low voice, finally placing the photo back onto the bedside table as he turned the lamp out and tucked in for bed.\n\nNine months earlier.\n\n\"Next.\" the prison cook said solemnly as a single line of the most incarcerated men in the Skyla System waited patiently.\n\nRoman stood there, gazing out of the small window behind the buffet line that wasn't suited for an animal to enjoy, much less a human being. The stars looked as beautiful as ever, even if only from a window that was less than ten inches wide.\n\n\"Prisoner Raines,\" a heavily armed guard shouted loudly, using the wooden stock of his shotgun to push Roman forward forcefully. \"He said next!\" the guard added as Roman turned to face him for only a moment.\n\nThere was a time when pushing Roman Raines in such a way would have been considered suicide, however this was no such time. His hands and feet were both tightly bound in heavy chain as deep scarring was visible all across his body; a place that once was home to nearly indestructible Goliath shielding. Less than a month after he had been aboard, the warden thought it best that Roman's metal exterior be removed with surgery in order to better protect his guards.\n\nIt was a procedure that had been given only a slight chance of success, and if Roman would have died on the operating table then life aboard the prison ship would have continued without him. And die he did, for nearly two minutes he had escaped this life of caged horror only to be brought back with electrified paddles. The next few months were spent under heavy guard in the infirmary, his gaping wounds healing slowly on their own without the assistance of pain killing treatment. He wished that he would have been left dead, rather than being brought back to this nightmare of bad food and torture.\n\n\"Still looking for your friends I see,\" Zane said, almost in a joking fashion as the badly scarred body and fully bearded face of Roman Raines slowly sat down in front of him in the prison mess hall. \"It's been nine months now. They 'aint comin'.\" Zane added.\n\n\"You let me worry about that.\" Roman said with stern intent, his eyes reflecting a hollow rage.\n\n\"All I'm saying is we need to start working on our own exit strategy. Just in case.\" Zane replied. He was a large man, there was no doubt about that. A bit over seven feet tall, the former soldier had a rock like complexion across his face with a roughly shaven head which left a thick patch of brown hair in mowhawk fashion. Roman took a few moments to let Zane's words set in as he glanced around.\n\nA single file line of once mighty warriors now left humbled, begging for a spoonful of slop as though they were less than human. Then there was the window. That damn window. Every single meal since Roman had been locked up he glanced out of that ten inch window into the cluster of thick stars hoping to see the Gunship arriving to save the day. Adam Michaels had given him his word that he would return, and Roman knew Adam was a man of his word. That said, the possibility that Adam had tried and failed started to become the only good explanation.\n\n\"You're right. We need to get to work on something of our own. I'd rather die trying to get the fuck off of this ship than live like this.\" Roman said, glancing up at the gun rack.\n\nIt was the name of the cage that overlooked the prisoner's mess area and standing inside was a prison guard with a high caliber rifle and the authority to shoot to kill.\n\n\"It's about time my brother. It's about time.\" Zane replied, smiling slightly before once again becoming stone faced as a patrolling guard walked by their table.\n\nIt was Corporal Raykes, a guard that Roman knew all too well.\n\n\"What the fuck are you staring at?\" Raykes asked, walking by the table slowly.\n\nRather than respond, Roman continued his stare, eyes cutting through the man who hid behind the authority of a badge. \"That will be one motherfucker I'll enjoy killing. Just hope I get the chance.\" Roman said in a low voice as Raykes had moved down a few tables.\n\n\"Not your favorite huh?\" Zane asked.\n\nRoman remembered his arrival to the prison ship. How Raykes had spit in his face and dared him to retaliate. How he had heard the faint laughter of Raykes during his forced surgery, steel being pulled from flesh without remorse.\n\n\"Son of a bitches like that put on a good front, but when it's killing time they cower down. I'll either kill the bastard or bring him to the point that he wishes for death.\" Roman replied as the guards began ordering them to stand and return to their cells.\n\n\"They are waiting for you my lady,\" Lieutenant Lassiter said calmly as he approached Sarah Blaine. \"Sarah. Are you alright?\" he asked as she burst into tears.\n\n\"I can't do this anymore,\" she said crying heavily. \"I can't go on without Adam next to me. It's killing me inside.\" she added.\n\n\"My lady, everyone is outside waiting for you to deliver your acceptance speech.\" Lassiter said with panic.\n\n\"Tell them to find someone else. How can I possibly lead the Colonial Army if I can't even sleep at night? I miss him!\" Sarah replied as she continued to cry heavily.\n\nOnce lovers on the verge of marriage, Sarah had chosen her Colonial duty over the man she loved. Truly loved. He was a man of virtue and truth, something she hadn't seen a lot of in the military. She had regretted her decision only minutes after watching him fly away, their storybook love shattered because of a mistake that had haunted her every since.\n\n\"Sarah. Just go out there and tell these people what they need to hear. Let it come from your heart. As soon as you are finished we will get to work on finding Adam.\" Lassiter replied.\n\n\"Really?\" Sarah asked, calming just a bit.\n\n\"Yes my lady, I will personally see to it. Now please, take a moment and then lead these people to the freedom they so desperately need.\" Lassister replied. Sarah simply responded with a nod of gratitude as she began to wipe away the aftermath of tears and poised herself to deliver a speech.\n\nSeveral moments after Lassiter had left, Sarah reached into a drawer on her thick wooden desk. She took several pills, chasing them with a glass of pure water as her eyes fixated onto a photo of Adam Michaels which had remained on her desk. She had no intentions of taking her own life, but rather medicating herself to the point of making life bearable. A habit that had become increasingly dangerous, but made her numb to the pain.\n\nSarah sat for a moment, overwhelmed by the loss of her true love as the medication began to mask the hurt inside of her. She had all but stopped crying, looking out of a small window behind her desk. Hundreds of Colonial brass were outside waiting, each of them sure that Sarah Blaine was excited about taking over the military side of their government.\n\nOf course she would show them the mask of happiness, though she was slowly dying inside. After convincing herself to push through this technicality of taking command; looking forward only to the possibility of once again seeing the man who held both her heart and soul captive, Sarah left to deliver her speech.\n\n\"What's on your mind?\" Dalton asked, a look of whiskey laden concern on his face. His smile was covered in the usual scruff, unkempt hairs flaring wildly.\n\n\"Just thinking that maybe it's time to move on. Starting to give up the idea of somehow finding a way to work things out with Sarah.\" Adam replied as he took a drink from the frothy mug of ale before looking around the lodge. It was one large room built of shaven tree trunks and mortar. The perfect combination for a dwelling that was torch lit and heated by two gigantic fireplaces. It was filled with Benzans, all of which had come in to escape the unrelenting snowfall while grabbing some brew.\n\nWhile they were highly trained killers, the Benzan Mafia did its best to stay out of sight and out of mind. The small moon of Tirious provided perfect cover for them, a refuge of thick trees and constant snowfall. Bitter conditions that kept even the toughest law officers far away. In fact, aside from the Benzan settlement there was no other life on Tirious. Giving them a huge area to train, live and feel the embrace of true freedom.\n\n\"About damn time, we should have been trying to rescue Roman a week after we left.\" Dalton replied, lighting a hand rolled cigar and biting the end off, spitting it onto the floor.\n\n\"I couldn't agree more,\" Adam replied. \"What were we supposed to do though? It's pretty obvious that the Benzans have their own pecking order and we are at the very bottom of it.\" Adam added.\n\n\"They are a strange group, I'll give you that much. But the 'sumbitches treat Whiskey like he's royalty so I can live with strange.\" Dalton said before taking a lung jarring puff from his cigar and turning up a bottle of rough scotch.\n\n\"Yea, Whiskey is a hit. That much is a fact.\" Adam replied, turning to look at their four legged pet for a moment. The once mangy dog was doing a lot better now, his thick fur gleaming as he was outfitted with a small leather saddle which held several bottles of rock whiskey.\n\nHe would move from table to table, a Benzan calling for him and then trading a nice leg of meat or savory cut of bread for some of the hard alcohol. He was considered to be the one waiter that everyone loved and tipped with perfectly cooked beef.\n\n\"Little 'sumbitch eats better than I do.\" Dalton said with near envy.\n\n\"If you want I can saddle you up and let you move from table to table.\" Adam said, smiling wide.\n\n\"I hear ya. Hell, a few more stiff drinks and I might just take you up on that.\" Dalton replied as he noticed Adam deep in thought.\n\n\"My advice is just to forget about Sarah. I mean, hell, you have any idea how many women I've bed down and left sleeping? The number is staggering.\" Dalton said.\n\n\"Yes, sadly I do, we've been running together for many years. And I wasn't bedding Sarah down. Well I was, but it was because I love her.\" Adam replied.\n\nNearly a decade. That's the amount of time since Adam and Dalton first met, fighting side by side against the Legion. Although the first Glimmerian War was lost, they bonded well under fire and had been smuggling together every since. Brothers in every sense of the word outside of birth. Just as Dalton had a passion for booze, Adam had a passion for women.\n\nHe was no Romeo, though he could have easily been. Adam was a man too true to his values for that kind of lifestyle, instead having the habit of throwing his heart out there far too often. He was quick to fall in love.\n\nSarah was different though, and Adam knew it the moment they first locked eyes. He saw through her high profile, lavish clothes and impeccable vocabulary. He saw the true Sarah Blaine, the goodhearted woman beneath that had so long needed someone to see the true her. She had fallen for him because of that very reason. Although he was on the wrong side of things when they met, running from the law and God only knows what else, he looked at her the way she had only wished everyone saw her. They had fallen so madly, deeply in love.\n\n\"Love. Now there's a four letter word for you right there,\" Dalton said, sharply swigging several ounces of scotch. \"Love is an unnecessary emotion. It's for the weak minded. Do you have any idea how many women have gotten the boot because they fell in love with ole' Dalton James?\" he asked, drinking a second helping of the not so smooth scotch.\n\n\"I'm thinking none?\" Adam replied with humor, holding his hand up as if a contestant on some sad excuse for a game show.\n\n\"Shit son, you must not know me well. There have been plenty,\" Dalton replied brashly, puffing deeply on his ill constructed cigar. \"But I live by the creed.\" he added.\n\n\"The creed?\" Adam asked, scared by the notion of his friend standing for anything.\n\n\"The creed. You can give a woman your liquor but you don't ever give her your heart. Ever. That's where you messed up with Sarah.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"I didn't give her anything, she took it,\" Adam responded. \"That's what love is. You meet someone and they unexpectedly change your life. I loved her, hell I still love her with everything I have.\" he added with conviction.\n\n\"I agree, this scotch is easy to fall in love with.\" Dalton said, drawing a strange look from Adam. Less than a second later Sasha approached their table. Her perfectly rounded hips and fur sheathed breasts were the immediate attention magnets of several men in the room, including Adam.\n\n\"What are you guys deep in discussion about over here?\" Sasha asked, smiling a bit as she sat down with the two men; her slightly curled brunette hair bouncing a bit.\n\n\"I was just telling Adam that he needs to love. Find a good looking woman like yourself and give her his heart.\" Dalton said flirtatiously as he grinned wide.\n\n\"Your friend is right Adam, you should consider his advice.\" Sasha replied. Adam continued to stare at Dalton with a ghostly look unbelief, wanting so badly to reach across the table and smack the hell out of his so called friend.\n\n\"I mean, take Sasha for instance. She is the definition of what a woman should look like. Plus she's impressive with a weapon and mighty good to you. Better scoop her up and make her an honest woman before someone else does.\" Dalton said.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Sasha said with true gratitude before turning to Dalton and noticing scotch born lust painted all over his face.\n\n\"Well then.\" she said, turning back to Adam who was still burning a hole through Dalton with a wide eyed stare.\n\n\"Hey.\" Sasha said, waiving her hands a bit to gain his attention. Adam turned to her, and though Dalton had said what he did out of lust, he was right. Sasha was woman perfected. She was not only beautiful, but treated Adam with such a level of respect. Plus the thought of her and Dalton ending up together was almost unbearable.\n\n\"Well I need a couple more stiff drinks,\" Dalton said, rising to his feet slowly. \"How about you Sasha, need a couple of stiff ones?\" Dalton asked, smiling wide as Adam immediately cast a warning stare to his friend.\n\n\"No thanks, I'm fine.\" Sasha said to Dalton as she slowly pulled her chair closer to Adam, her backside gracefully becoming one with the wooden seating beneath her.\n\n\"I'd be inclined to agree.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Barkeep is liable to send you packing if you ask for any more drinks. Says he has never seen someone down so much in a single sitting.\" Sasha added with a smile.\n\n\"Is that so?\" Dalton asked, turning his attention to the clean shaven bartender. \"Well in that case I'm gonna go order a few more just to piss him off,\" he added with a smile of his own, the large cigar saturated with both ash and saliva as Dalton chewed it slightly. \"Ya'll be good.\" he added, starting for the bar and turning for a moment, hidden behind Sasha's back as he did his best to mimic the two of them making love. Adam tried hard not to smile back, knowing it would give his friend's plot away.\n\n\"So.\" Sasha said, her face glowing behind a perfect smile.\n\n\"So.\" Adam replied playfully.\n\n\"We haven't really talked about us since arriving.\" Sasha said.\n\n\"Us?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"Yea, as in you and I together in more than just a friendship fashion.\" Sasha replied, still glowing but with a look of seriousness in her eyes.\n\n\"I'm not trying to avoid the whole conversation. It's just that I don't know if I'm ready to be in another relationship. It's only been...\" Adam replied before being cut off.\n\n\"It's been nine months. Nine months Adam. At some point you have to let Sarah go,\" Sasha said. \"She's gone. You have a different life now and chances are you will never even see her again.\" Sasha added, trying to talk some sense into Adam's reasoning.\n\n\"Hey Adam, come check this shit out!\" Dalton yelled from the bar, both of his hands holding large mugs fulled with ale.\n\n\"I'll be back in a minute.\" Adam said, eager to join Dalton and dodge the current conversation at any cost.\n\n\"Oh you have got to be kidding me.\" Sasha said under her breath as she glanced at the bar to find out why Dalton had stolen Adam.\n\n\"Still a looker, even if she did try to lock me up.\" Dalton said as Adam sat beside him and noticed Sarah Blaine on the large television behind the bar. Dalton had started to explain that she was being promoted to Colonial Commander, but his words were simply mumbled as Adam blocked everything else out and focused his attention onto the woman he had so passionately loved. The more she spoke, the more Adam was reminded of his strong love for her to this very day. Even if it was a one sided feeling, it was a feeling that he couldn't control and his heart pushed his hands to begin trembling slightly.\n\nAdam broke his attention from the television for a moment to casually glance across his shoulder at Sasha. His intentions were to see if he felt the same when looking at her, but his eyes were met with her own as she stared at him with discouragement. Adam of course smiled and tried to act as though his very pulse wasn't directly connected to Sarah's speech, however his head quickly turned back to watch it.\n\nEverything about her was as beautiful as he had remembered. Her hair sparkled with red purity and her eyes told the truth about the beauty of her very soul. It was a forbidden love now, but for Adam it was a love that he continued to find himself lost in.\n\n\"I'm telling you man, between you and me, she was a catch.\" Dalton said in a hushed voice.\n\n\"A catch,\" Adam replied sharply. \"You think I don't know that man? I would do anything to go back to life with her, even if it did mean the Hunters on our asses,\" Adam added, looking back at the television for a moment. \"Besides, what happened to not ever falling in love?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"Yea, well yea,\" Dalton replied, firming up on the bar stool a bit. \"I'm just saying if someone was stupid enough to fall in love, which we both know they shouldn't, it should happen with a woman like that.\" he added.\n\n\"Yea, tell me something I don't know.\" Adam said, once again turning to the television and watching Sarah Blaine's every movement.\n\nHer features were so perfect, her movements soft and her intentions true.\n\n\"Sasha.\" Dalton said a bit under his breath.\n\n\"No, I said tell me something I...\" Adam said, cutting his words short as Sasha took a seat right beside him. Adam glanced over at his sorry excuse of a wingman for a moment, nodding his head as if to ask Dalton to leave them be.\n\n\"Well, I best be going to check on Whiskey.\" Dalton said standing up and tipping his head slightly to the Benzan beauty, only to moments later mock a session of intimacy behind her back. Again Adam gazed at him, stone faced and tight lipped, turning his attention to Sasha.\n\nShe sat there, smiling back although it was obvious that she was truly worlds away in thought.\n\n\"Listen. I don't want you to think I'm avoiding the conversation that we both know needs to happen. It's just that I feel something very strong for you and it scares the hell out of me.\" Adam said.\n\n\"You do? So just to clarify, this feeling isn't one sided?\" Sasha asked.\n\n\"Of course not,\" Adam said, smiling. \"For God's sake I pulled a gun on my wife to be just to get you to safety.\" he added.\n\nIt was the truth. Adam did in fact have feelings for Sasha. Strong feelings. But they were cloudy at best, and he was doing everything he could to figure them out; in need of more time to do so.\n\n\"So where do we go from here Adam Michaels?\" Sasha asked.\n\n\"That's the big question,\" he replied. \"I just need some time to think things over and clear my head. Ya know? Spend time getting to know you without bullets flying at me.\" he added, bringing instant giggles to Sasha's face.\n\n\"You truly are amazing Adam. Take all of the time you need then and just know that as a Benzan I can't guarantee it will be done without bullets flying at you.\" she replied, causing Adam to ease up and laugh a bit.\n\n\"Things will work out for us in the end. Right now I just want to live free and do it with you in my life.\" Adam said, smiling at her as he held her hand a bit.\n\nWas he starting to fall for Sasha? The thought had entered his mind more than once. He knew without a doubt that she truly was in love with him and he didn't have to become someone else to earn it. But what about Sarah Blaine? He simply couldn't ignore the feeling he had been instantly overcome with as he watched her on television only moments before. He couldn't breathe, it felt as though he would die if he couldn't hold her in his arms once again and that wasn't fair to Sasha. She deserved the best man he could be, and that wouldn't be something he could offer until his heart was completely free.\n\n\"Well, looks like we're needed.\" Dalton said, regretful that he would have to leave perfectly good drink behind and turning up his mug to finish as much as possible before approaching their table once again.\n\nAdam turned to see Kraid enter the building, he was the man in charge and it showed. Every single Benzan falling silent as he entered under the guard of two heavily armed warriors, not that he needed it. His legend of ending lives was one of great lore, the very broadsword sheathed to his back had sent a hundred or more Hunters back to the hell that they had been spawned from. He casually glanced across at Sasha, nodding slightly as his curly black hair shifted with ease. As he turned to exit back into the unforgiving peace of the falling snow, he pointed to a table near the entrance and motioned them along as well. Both men stood up slowly, their posture firm as fur covered their otherwise striped dress suits of black silk.\n\n\"Time to put together a rescue plan.\" Adam said under his breath as they all stood to their feet slowly before following Kraid.\n\n\"About fucking time.\" Dalton replied with the smell of must tainted whiskey on his breath as both men waited for Sasha to lead the way.\n\n\"Let's go meet the man.\" she said with a calm resolve as the three walked out into the serene blanket of white. They had been among the Benzans nearly nine months now, and although Adam and Dalton had both caught sight of Kraid in the past, neither man had actually spoken to him.\n\nDalton stopped for a moment, slapping his leg and giving a curl of the lip with a whistle quickly following. Seconds later the clanging of bottles could be heard as Whiskey sprinted out into the snow, running just a bit to the side as the weight of empty bottles in the saddle pushed onto him.\n\n\"Poor 'sumbitch done got vertigo from carrying all this alcohol,\" Dalton said jokingly as he laughed alone and knelt down to pet his most loyal of friends. \"Oh hell no, is this mustard?\" he added, rubbing his fingers harshly across the mutt's back to remove a small mustard stain. \"Oh hell fucking no.\" Dalton added, glancing gratingly back into the door of the lodge and secretly wishing he knew the identity of the condiment perpetrator.\n\n\"Come forth!\" Victoria shouted as she sat in the large throne chair sculpted of rock and gold.\n\nThe Hunter Queen had been awakened following the killing of so many of her species at the hands of the Benzan Mafia. Garrison, the highest ranking of the surviving Hunters from the second battle of Glimmeria approached nervously, kneeling as low as his trembling body would allow.\n\n\"RISE! Tell me of your failures!\" Victoria shouted, standing quickly to walk down and face the unfortunate survivor.\n\n\"My...my Queen,\" the Hunter said shakily. \"The Benzans ambushed our ships and hunted us on the surface...\" he added before his words were cut short.\n\n\"You survive to tell of this story while Anwick lays on a stone slab in the next room,\" Victoria said angrily. \"We are the most feared race in the Skyla System. Do you know why that is?\" she asked with focus.\n\n\"No my lady.\" the Hunter replied out of necessity.\n\n\"Because we always get retribution against those who have betrayed us. Always. You and the other survivors have betrayed me by not fighting to the death to save the life of Anwick.\" Victoria said before turning to walk back to her throne chair and once again be seated.\n\n\"Take him!\" Victoria commanded as two Hunter Elites walked into the throne room. They were a rare sight, even for the fearless members of the Hunter race. The Elites were more like Knights, outfitted with thick black armor and the pupil free eyes of a demon.\n\nThey were a rare sight because there were so few of them, only the finest mortal warriors earning the right to immortality. It didn't take many. One Hunter Elite had the abilities of an entire room full of his standard kin, and they were heartless. Much more heartless. They would slaughter an entire room full of their own kind in order to kill someone who posed a threat to their queen. It was their sole purpose to protect the Queen, a job they did well. And at this very moment they followed a direct order from the one who commanded them, dragging the doomed Hunter into a room filled with the rest of what few survivors had returned from Glimmeria.\n\n\"Please my Queen, I beg of you!\" Garrison yelled as he tried unsuccessfully to escape the grasp of an Elite before resorting to grasping for what little texture the stone wall provided. His large vampiric fingernails dug into the wall, but the sheer strength of the Elites continued forward; splintering the doomed Hunter's nails as one of the Elites pulled a longsword of grey and black. As the door of thick rock and worthy steel shut tightly, screams of her own race began to filter throughout the throne room, a slaughter of cowards the source.\n\nNot so long from now, his flesh along with the flesh of others slain would become feast for the Queen and her most loyal. Tissue tasted the same once applied to the burning of flame, no matter human or otherwise. Cindered meat was the preferred dish of Hunters, and if their hunger grew enough, the source of meat was of no concern. They had their fair share of enslaved humans for the very reason of food, though the occasional failures of a Hunter would bring the Queen to the point of no mercy. They indeed feasted on their own kind.\n\nAfter only a couple of minutes the screams halted, the sound of razor edged blades chopping flesh were all that remained. The door opened once more, creaking heavily as the two Hunter Elites emerged to bow before their queen; covered in both blood and loyalty.\n\n\"Rise my warriors. It is retribution against the Benzans that I now seek. Gather our most battle tested soldiers and see to it personally that not a single Benzan heartbeat sees another sunrise.\" Victoria said confidently.\n\n\"Yes my Queen.\" one of the Elites responded, his voice deep and mighty as if he were a God of battle.\n\nBoth Knights stood firmly and walked away, blood dripping from their armor and forming the path taken on the harsh stone floor of the Hunter fortress.\n\nAs the large monsters of flesh walked slowly through the halls of the Hunter compound, the Elites soon slowed their pace as they approached a large metal door. It was thick steel, both gothic designs and Hunter text forged into the face of it. As the door made a low grinding noise against the rock mounting, both Elites approached their military leader. Vladris. He was one of the few Hunters to claim stake on a hell hound, a dog born again into the ranks of the undead.\n\nThey mutated a bit differently during the turning process, of course, and their skin became thick. Almost leather-like with rising patched across their backs. It gave the look of thorns for eyes that knew no better. The hell hound slowly turned as the Hunters approached, recognizing them a bit while showing his teeth in protection of his master. Its teeth were thick, although needle-like and nearly alive with hunger. Its eyes subtly glowing of crimson red as it made a strange noise of warning. Hell hounds were not to be trifled with. An ability to end lives with ease behind their shard filled smile and eyes of fury.\n\nThousands would be the best estimate when it came to lives ended by the blade of Vladris, the same blade that was tightly strapped to his back as he looked across the bannister of the balcony. Built into the side of a stone mountain, the Hunters had fortified their base to protect and serve their Queen. Though they never slept, each Hunter had a period of downtime in which it would rejuvinate itself.\n\nVladris had been turned by Hunter Elites many years ago, giving such a valiant fight in protecting his King. He had been a Ronical Knight, at least throughout his human life and up until the Hunters felt the need to turn him into an undead warrior. The Ronical Kingdom fell shortly after, succumbing to the rule of Hunters. However, the fact that Vladris in human form had slain two of the mighty Hunter Elites earned him a bridge to immortality when he finally was killed in battle. The hand of a surviving Elite turning him in only minutes. His former kingdom was one of nearly endless rainfall, and the sight of it brought a calm to his soul. At least what remained of it, as Vladris looked across the bannister and into the thick jungle as rain poured heavily, leaving with it a serene melody.\n\n\"Our Queen has commanded us to assemble a group of warriors. One that will prove the demise of the Benzans.\" one of the Elites said as Vladris continued to stand, his hands wrapped around the steel bannister as he looked into the heavy downpour.\n\nFor him it was soothing, and many nights he would spend his downtime simply gazing into the rainfall and enjoying the gift of immortality.\n\n\"Then it shall be so,\" Vladris replied, slowly turning to face the others, reaching down for a moment to calm his hound. \"Handpick our finest and outfit them with the basic tools of slaying. I will personally see to it that our Queen's wishes are carried out.\" he added in a rough but dedicated voice as both Elites nodded and turned to execute his order.\n\nWhile they were all Elite Knights for the Queen, the rest knew Vladris was by far the strongest. A few even suspected the Queen had secretly feared him, something Vladris had also picked up on. His loyalty ran deep, but the fact that he was unstoppable led to a bit of envy by the Queen. The Hunter race followed Victoria out of fear, but on the battlefield they followed Vladris out of respect.\n\n\"You shall soon feast on an endless buffet of man flesh.\" Vladris said, his muscular build kneeling to show affection to the most loyal of pets.\n\nThe hell hound, which stood nearly three feet high, seemed soothed by the voice of his master, turning his head slightly as if to show off his pale white hide.\n\n\"The speech was great my lady. Exactly what our people needed to hear.\" Lieutenant Lassiter said calmly as Sarah sat in a chair of velvety red plush.\n\n\"Thank you. I'm not sure how I got through it, Adam is the only thing on my mind,\" Sarah replied. \"I should be focused on the upcoming confrontation with the Legion, but I just can't. I feel so helpless.\" she added, turning her head a bit to avoid tears.\n\n\"About Adam my lady, I have a plan,\" Lassiter said as he approached Sarah to sit in a chair beside her. \"We have solid information on the Benzan's favorite hideout.\" Lassiter said as Sarah looked at him with unconvinced eyes.\n\n\"They are not a group to be negotiated with, so the hard part will be trying to convince the Benzans to allow us to speak with him,\" Lassiter added. \"I will assemble a strike team, and then plead with Adam to at least return here to meet with you,\" Lassiter said.\n\n\"I have known Adam for some time now. I feel confident he will at least meet with you Sarah, as long as I promise him he's not walking into a trap.\" Lassiter added.\n\n\"No. I will plead my own heart, it's the only way he will listen. I'm coming with you.\" Sarah said.\n\n\"Sarah, listen. We are to begin a major assault on the Legion in less than one day, not to mention the Benzans are not to be taken lightly. There is no guarantee that I will even walk out of there unscathed, the last thing our people need right now is to have its leader in harm's way. I would advise you to stay here and...\" Lassiter replied, sharply cut off.\n\n\"I'm coming Lieutenant Lassiter, that's an order. I ruined a good thing with Adam. It's my fault and now I have to try and make things right and hope he can forgive me. Just make sure the crew we take with us is loyal and capable. I will not let fear of the Benzan people stop me from seeing the man I love again. I'll make sure our war effort is in strong enough hands.\" Sarah said.\n\n\"At once.\" Lassiter replied, turning to leave the room and assemble the best he could. He still wasn't sold on the idea of Sarah coming, but he was the ideal soldier.\n\nShe had given him a direct order and he wasn't the kind to disobey them. All he could do now is place as much of a safety net around her as he could, and give his life for her if needed be. Especially with his growing feelings for her, though they remained hidden. Sarah continued to stand there, looking across the stars through a huge window of reinforced glass and Colonial writing.\n\nShe wondered if Adam ever thought about their near marriage, or if he even bothered himself with thoughts of her. These past nine months had seemed like decades to her. Things were different now, and that was something that scared the hell out of her.\n\nTameca City was once considered one of the best locations to live and prosper. Of course that was before war had torn throughout the Skyla System and pushed the reeling Legion into Tameca City seeking refuge. They were all but beaten, having lost the second war of Glimmeria, but more importantly the support of several planets following the loss. Planets who had shifted to the Colonial side, and now what remained of the Legion consisted of worn down troops, mercenaries and forced volunteers from planets once controlled by the ailing military.\n\n\"They will be on us within days! Our own scouts have confirmed it!\" Lieutenant Rommel shouted across the crude steel table as three more Legion officers remained seated.\n\n\"It takes only one victory, one show of force to turn the tables in any fight.\" a highly decorated officer replied calmly as he remained sitting.\n\n\"My Lord, there can be no victory here! We must issue a formal order of surrender!\" Lieutenant Rommel answered, shouting his reply furiously.\n\nLord Riven stood to his feet slowly, as the highest remaining officer left among Legion forces, he embraced the fight to come and expected no less from those who served beneath him. Standing to his feet, dark red uniform of cotton stitch and black trim; a look of disappointment pasted onto his face as he held a Legion sidearm out and blistered a shot into the forehead of Lieutenant Rommel. Standing for a moment, Lord Riven casually wiped spotted blood from his officer's jacket as the lifeless shell of a body that had been Rommel abruptly fell to the floor.\n\n\"Sometimes, it's simply a matter of rebroadcasting fear into those who look upon us,\" Lord Riven said, slowly sitting back down and laying the glock style pistol onto the cold steel table in front of him. \"There will indeed be victory here, and I will not tolerate anything less. Are you with me?\" Riven asked sternly as both remaining men looked on.\n\n\"Yes my Lord, to the end!\" one of the men said loudly, reaffirming his position in the regime.\n\n\"We'll see.\" Lord Riven replied, standing slowly to walk out of the room and deliver his next order.\n\nIt would be an order that would change the complexion of the war forever. Every epic tale of war had to include a good guy and a bad guy, it was a story as old as time. Lord Riven didn't just accept the role of bad guy, he embraced it. In order to be bad, truly bad, one had to be feared.\n\nFear was earned through acts of violence so savage that onlookers dared not question. Only fear would turn the tide of this war now, and Lord Riven was the perfect man for the job. As he slowly picked up a com unit that would relay his orders throughout every Legion post on Tameca, he smiled a bit. Almost as if pleasure would be forthcoming.\n\n\"I will be away briefly as the rescue mission begins.\" Sarah said as a filled room of both Colonial brass and high ranking soldiers listened.\n\n\"Rescue mission?\" one of the soldiers sitting near the front of the room asked. Sarah looked across to the man who would be handling the Colonial side of the upcoming battle, General Ortega.\n\n\"Yes,\" she replied, turning to answer the soldier directly. \"We received word only minutes ago that Legion forces in Tameca City have started opening fire on civilians. Women, children,\" Sarah said, taken back by the freshly received report. \"Anyone who is refusing to join their war effort is being executed on the spot,\" she added. \"General Ortega will lead our troops into battle, and it appears that we will be doing a bulk of fighting on foot. The Legion appears to have little to no air support left, which means more casualties on our end as well. We will have to meet them on their turf.\" Sarah said.\n\n\"I have asked General Ortega to begin the strike sooner than expected in order to save as many civilian lives as we possibly can. However, your lives will be on the line as well, so I thought it only appropriate to ask all of you face to face.\" Sarah added. One of the Colonial Spec Ops soldiers near the back of the room stood to his feet, looking around for a moment before refocusing his attention onto Sarah Blaine.\n\n\"We'll go. And when we arrive, the Legion will fall.\" the soldier stated proudly as the room began to cheer.\n\n\"Good. That means you are all out of gear, get your asses in check and double time it to the launch bay!\" General Ortega shouted as the room of cheers turned to a full eruption of motivated yelling.\n\nAs the group of soldiers began to file out of the room with courage and conviction, they immediately halted and joined the crowded lobby who stood quietly, stunned by the video footage being broadcast across the mounted video monitors on the adjacent wall. News coverage sending both still images and video feeds out of Tameca City, which was mostly engulfed in flames as explosions rocked throughout the city at random. Legion firing squads lining up and gunning down helpless civilians as they attempted to flee their homes. Sarah began to tear as did many of the Colonial soldiers, still images of bodies piled several feet high being shown, filled with both women and children who were still cindering from a fiery death.\n\nThey watched as Lord Riven gave an interview to the news team, bragging of the Legion's hold on Tameca as he promised to continue the killing while daring the Colonials to intervene. General Ortega looked onto the gutless murderer as he continued his interview for the news crew, smiling as though he were proud of killing so many innocent.\n\n\"The Colonials would be wise to stay clear of Tameca or any other Legion controlled ground.\" Lord Riven stated in a threatening manner as the Colonial soldiers stood silent, watching in horror.\n\n\"Let's go goddammit, these people need us!\" General Ortega shouted, doing his best to break the shocking quiet of his best soldiers while showing them such threats did nothing to intimidate him. And they didn't, in fact General Ortega now thought of the upcoming battle as personal and would have gladly fought it for free.\n\nOther planets were sure to send help as well, but most were days out even by full burn. The Colonials were the closest force, stationed in Glimmeria and stocked with enough firepower to possibly put an end to the massacre at hand.\n\n\"General Ortega, I am more than willing to come...\" Sarah said as the stocky man turned for a moment to cut her short, scars across his face from past battle experience.\n\n\"Thank you for the offer my lady, but that is not necessary. I will not stand for war crimes such as these and give you my solemn promise that when the black of our boots hit Temecan soil, the only massacre will be against those who have committed such butchering. You just work on bringing Adam back to us.\" he said, smiling a bit before turning steadfast and following his soldiers to the three Colonial Star battleships which would be under heavy escort by several well armed ships filled with battle hungry troops.\n\nThe city of Rockheed began to tremble as though a minor earthquake had set in, moments later the large outlines of Colonial ships both massive and commanding respect made their way into the pale green sky of Glimmeria.\n\nCitizens stopped to witness such a fantastic force of freedom seekers heading for war, and leaving behind just enough soldiers to hold the fort down. Ninety percent of Colonial forces were propelling into the sky, their ships in full burn and plotting course for Tameca City, and as the fully equipped soldiers glanced out of the windows lining each ship, the onlooking citizens quickly vanished and were replaced by scattered stars as they hit deep space in full burn.\n\n\"So Adam, Sasha tells me that rescuing this prisoner Roman Raines is a priority for you?\" Kraid asked as he sat calmly in his thick leather chair, a long desk of polished wood separating them.\n\n\"That's right. He stayed behind and gave us an out, otherwise we'd all be locked up.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"You've been with us now, what six months?\" Kraid asked. \"Nine months actually.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"You could say six though because I've been drunk for at least three of 'em.\" Dalton added as both Adam and Sasha turned to stare a hole through him as Whiskey barked loudly to testify to the truth of it.\n\nIt was the moment Adam began to turn his attention back to Kraid that he first noticed it. A photo behind the desk on a small bookcase, Kraid holding Sasha with sheer love on the faces of both. They were ex-lovers, and that complicated things even more for an already overwhelmed heart that slowly beat inside the chest of such an honest man.\n\n\"It's very important we get our friend back,\" Adam said to Kraid, before slowly turning to Sasha. \"He's always been honest with me and that means everything.\" he added, letting Sasha know right away that he had become wise to her past relationship with Kraid.\n\nAfter listening to Adam and staring at Dalton for a moment, wondering what kind of first impression to make, Kraid reached into a door on his desk and pulled out a handgun of gold. Fully functional, it was an semi-automatic pistol although a bit larger than the standard. The bright light from the snowy day outside gleamed into the room and refracted off of the gold plating of the piece as Kraid laid it onto the desk, pushing it into Adam's direction.\n\n\"Every ship's Captain carries one of these, about time you did the same.\" Kraid said with a slight smile, glancing at Sasha for a moment himself.\n\nIt was Sasha who had ended things between them after life became too complicated. Kraid had never gotten over her smile, the touch of her hand. He still held very strong feelings for her even though he dared not show it. As he and Sasha exchanged glances, Adam felt that there was a bunch of history between them, history that couldn't have blindsided him at a worse time.\n\n\"The intel I have on the Gali ship is that it is maximum security, which is why I'm sending two of my very best along with you,\" Kraid said as the two men from the lodge slowly entered. \"Captain Michaels, meet Primal and Stage.\" Kraid added.\n\nIt was easy to see where Primal got his nickname. He looked more beast than man as both Adam and Dalton stared at him to determine if he was actually human or another race entirely. Indeed human, he was badly scarred with bushy brown hair on both his scalp and face. A very tall and stocky man, Dalton found himself instantly becoming more attractive standing beside Primal.\n\nStage seemed to be the opposite. Well dressed with a finely trimmed pinstripe beard of black that perfectly meshed with his crop cut hair. He wore a set of reflective sunglasses and carried a very large pistol on his side that the Benzans referred to as a hammer. It was the most common firearm among their people, its deep and throaty firing sound resembling the strike of a hammer. \"If your friend is still aboard that ship, we'll get him.\" Stage said with calculation.\n\nAdam sat there in deep thought, he didn't like the idea of two men who he knew nothing about coming along for the ride. Especially having just pieced together a past relationship between Kraid and Sasha. He wanted to believe if it came down to it, they would put their lives on the line to save his, but he just wasn't convinced. In fact, he wasn't even sure he knew Sasha at this point.\n\nIt's not the the fact that she had a past, everyone has a history. It was that he had to find out about it by surprise when he had already started to favor her. This whole rescue plan was starting to worry Adam, but it was his only option at this point, and Roman had been locked up far too long. Adam owed his own freedom to the man and the least he could do was return the favor.\n\n\"I appreciate the help.\" Adam said, standing slowly to his feet and extending his hand. Kraid, who wanted to hate Adam so badly for capturing the affections of Sasha, extended his arm to shake hands. It nearly killed him, shaking hands with a man who would be walking back outside with the woman he loved so much. But she had made it clear that her love life wouldn't include Kraid, leaving him helpless to do anything more.\n\n\"I'll have my men fuel a ship for you.\" Kraid said, smiling a bit. Is this son of a bitch planning on killing me? Adam thought as he nodded while broadcasting a fake smile. He didn't want any trouble, but just like his life up until now, doing the right thing always seemed to surround him with it.\n\nBoth Roman and Zane stood there with a small group of prisoners, watching the new arrivals slowly exit the Gali shuttle which brought them in once a week. While the rest of the group meticulously watched fresh meat exit onto the steel deck of the prison grinder, wondering who they could intimidate and control; Roman and Zane continued to look the shuttle over.\n\n\"It's a Zion 400. Gonna take at least three men to pilot it out of here, and no less.\" Roman said as he studied the ship from its rounded silver nose to the dual thrusters which were mounted onto the rear.\n\n\"Going to have to try it with two, I don't know anyone else we can trust enough to include.\" Zane said under his breath.\n\n\"I do.\" Roman replied with confidence as he watched a large man exit the shuttle under heavy guard. Slightly larger than Roman, the man's physique looked as though it had been etched with the sharpest of knives as his closely cropped black hair seemed as confident as his strut.\n\n\"Yea, and who's that?\" Zane asked with interest.\n\n\"My brother.\" Roman added as he continued to stare at a man whom he had close ties with. Quinton.\n\n\"So that's when they caught me,\" Quinton said as he sat at the steel table, its legs bolted to the floor of the recreational area as both Roman and Zane listened. \"I had an entire shipment of weapons, warrants for my arrest on a dozen or so planets and the blood of a Hunter on my hands.\" Quinton added.\n\n\"A Hunter? Can't honestly say I have ever met someone who has fought one and lived to tell about it.\" Zane replied.\n\n\"Really,\" Quinton asked, turning to look Roman in the eyes. \"I take it he doesn't know?\" Quinton said.\n\n\"Know what?\" Zane asked as Roman began to reflect on a past that he had so long tried to leave behind.\n\n\"I'd say you have met someone that has fought a Hunter and lived to tell about it,\" Quinton said with a bit of laughter. \"Roman here has killed hundreds of the bastards, including one of their Queens.\" he added.\n\n\"Bullshit.\" Zane said sharply.\n\n\"No, it's true. I can't believe you've been locked up with him for this long and it hasn't come up yet,\" Quinton replied, gaining a stern look from Roman. \"Ah hell, I'd say it's alright to talk about it now. You've been caught. We both have. Might as well lay it all out there for him.\" Quinton added.\n\nAfter a few moments of looking at Quinton, Roman turned to Zane, ready to reveal at least part of his past.\n\n\"Several years back, my unit was dispatched to work security for the signing of a treaty,\" Roman said reluctantly. \"Seemed like just another security detail, I figured I would be back out drinking a few hours after the politicians did their thing,\" he added as his eyes began to tear just slightly. \"When I was eight I watched both of my parents get murdered in cold blood. Goddamn Hunters cut them down in the middle of the street like they were garbage. I tried to fight them off but I wasn't anything more than a boney ass runt.\" Roman added before taking a long pause.\n\n\"When I walked in to secure the conference room for the treaty signing and found out my own government was signing a treaty with the Hunters, I lost it,\" he added. \"I waited for their Queen to arrive, and even with a large security detail of her own I struck. I buried a blade flush into that bitch's skull and twisted it hard enough to know for a fact she wasn't walking back out of there.\" Roman added.\n\n\"I remember hearing about that. The shit was all over the news. The Greyspine Massacre.\" Zane said.\n\n\"Yea. When I struck Queen Lethra, I guess the Hunters thought it was a coordinated assassination and all hell broke loose in that fucking room. We were the absolute best our government had to offer,\" Roman said, pausing for a moment to glance at Quinton. \"But they had their Elites and eventually I realized there was no winning the fight, it became a matter of survival. Two of my own damn men held me at gunpoint when I tried to take a shuttle. Those are the only two men I have ever killed that I regret day and night.\" Roman replied.\n\n\"No wonder the Gali paid such a high price to lock your ass up.\" Zane said.\n\n\"They have been tracking me down every since, trying to bury me under a prison. The Hunters have been tracking me to cut me into small pieces and I knew deep down that eventually one of them would catch up to me. Can't run forever.\" Roman said.\n\n\"Don't have to run anymore little brother, I got your back.\" Quinton said.\n\n\"After my parents were struck down for nothing more than sport by the Hunters, Quinton and his family took me in. Raised me the best they could,\" Roman said. \"I've dedicated my life from that point on considering them my family and trying to kill as many of the Hunters as I fucking can.\" Roman added.\n\n\"So we can trust him as our third man?\" Zane asked, already knowing the answer.\n\n\"You can trust him with your life, Quinton hasn't ever let me down.\" Roman replied.\n\n\"And I'm not about to start now.\" Quinton added, turning to Zane as a prison guard slowly walked behind them. \"Good. Very good.\" Zane said in a low voice.\n\nNormally dressed for only the most glamorous of events, Sarah was outfitted in a snug fitting pair of blue military pants and a long sleeve shirt which was stitched from thermal material.\n\n\"And you trust everyone coming along?\" Sarah asked with hope filled intent.\n\n\"Yes my lady, they are absolutely your most loyal followers.\" Lassiter said as they boarded through the small entrance which was reinforced with thick bolts and blast shielding.\n\nSarah stopped, glancing across the crew area of the cabin into the faces of the men in which she placed her life into the hands of. There were three of the very large Husk race, barbaric as well as beast like, they bore a heavy resemblance to the mythical minotaurs of old. Two Goliath V2 soldiers were seated at the rear of the shuttle, both programed to use their robotic frames and small mini-guns to defend Sarah at all costs. Finally, Lassiter had hand picked three Colonial soldiers. Human, as well as the most able and trusted he knew. Each had lost so much throughout the war and looked to Sarah with the utmost respect for leading them into the direction of freedom.\n\n\"Umm, Lassiter. Maybe we should discuss the group you have selected.\" Sarah said, unconvinced of this being a group she could trust. One of the large Husk warriors stood to his feet, his near eight foot frame only inches from touching the ceiling of the shuttle. Walking into the direction of Sarah, the thick hair which covered his bulging arms gave them a grizzly appearance as he stood before her. Kneeling down to the floor, the Husk stared low with loyalty.\n\n\"My lady, it is truly an honor to be standing before you this very moment. Please know that I will use every fiber of my being to defend you to my very own death.\" Sarah looked taken back by such loyalty coming from the heart of a warrior who could easily have broken her into pieces.\n\n\"Never mind, they'll do.\" Sarah said calmly as she took a seat with Lassiter near the front of the shuttle.\n\n\"Tigon Twelve to tower. Requesting permission to launch.\" the shuttle's pilot said into his helmet mounted com unit.\n\n\"Affirmative Tigon twelve, safe voyage.\" a voice replied loudly over the console mounted speakers which surrounded the pilot. \"Only the brass know you are onboard, I told everyone else that I was taking out a strike team to bring in a Colonial fugitive,\" Lassiter said. \"I figured the less people in the loop, the better.\" he added.\n\n\"Good thinking.\" Sarah said, continuing to stare out of the window and hoping with every piece of her soul that Adam Michaels would forgive her.\n\nAs the shuttle pulled slowly from the deck of the ship and made its way into the void black of space, Sarah continued looking through the small window positioned near her seat. How could the survival of my heart depend on a single man when all of this exists? Sarah thought as she imagined so many planets around them filled with a variety of people. She started to think about the times shared with Adam.\n\nHow, only minutes after meeting, Adam had risked his life for hers and that of a young boy; going toe to toe with the Hunters in the process. In fact, he had went to bat for her so many times, only to have it thrown back into his face when she asked him to leave.\n\n\"Are you alright my lady?\" Lassiter asked quietly, the shuttle traveling quickly through the curtain of twilight.\n\n\"Yes,\" Sarah replied, her stare into space never faltering. \"Just thinking about everything Adam did for me. I was such a fool.\" she added with truth.\n\n\"Adam is a smart man when it comes to the character of a person. I know you are sincere, and I'm sure he'll see it too.\" Lassiter said.\n\n\"I truly hope so,\" Sarah replied, turning to Lassiter with trembling eyes. \"I miss him so much.\" she added.\n\n\"Attention,\" Kraid yelled, instantly silencing the crowd of Benzans who had been drinking and socializing in the lodge. \"I have just been informed by some very credible sources that the Hunters are assembling soldiers to invade us. They would come to our lands in an effort to spill our blood,\" Kraid added, many loud shouts following his words from Benzans who were ready for a fight. \"I say let them come! For they will not find trembling women and children here, they will not find the usual intimidated cowards they face; only battle tested slayers of the undead!\" Kraid yelled holding his broadsword high into the air, its handle wrapped in leather bonding as the entire room filled with nearly two hundred warriors shouted uncontrollably. The noise pierced not only the smoke filled lodge, but the valley behind the Benzan settlement, crisping the leaves and snow with echos of madness.\n\nThe loud shouting of insanity fueled by rage continued, as did the billowy grey stacks of smoke which climbed from their fires and into the heavens. And the snow continued to fall relentlessly. This was their home, their fields of killing and though the Hunters were damn formidable in combat, the Benzans welcomed the challenge with open arms.\n\nFrom the time a Benzan child learned to walk, they began training. For years they would learn hand to hand combat, everything from breaking bones to the finer points of strangulation. When they reached their teenage years, only the best of Benzan women continued training with men. Wielding anything from a long blade to a compact firearm, they were taught everything about killing. How each of their more notorious foes were slain easily and how the Benzan code demanded of them that no fight should ever be avoided. While the lesser Benzan women began learning survival tactics, the men and stronger women simply learned how to slay without regard.\n\nThey knew all too well that the Hunters were damn hard to kill, almost monster-like in their way of reaving humans. They did not care. When it came to battle, no man, human or otherwise, would ever witness a Benzan back down. Ever. They would fight to the death for the most simple of reasons, and when it came to defending their homes and protecting their families, they would slay any man or beast who stood in front of them.\n\n\"I say come God damn you! Come!\" Kraid yelled loudly, once again holding his sword into the air, its pale blue complexion in need of salty warm blood.\n\nThe sword had been with the Benzan people for centuries, passed down from leader to leader as a token of authority. It had slain so many. As the gigantic arms of Kraid held the blade high into the infusion of smoke and snow, the Benzans yelled wildly. Waiting for the arrival of the immortals so they could be immortal no longer.\n\n\"Adam,\" Sasha said, quickly following him out of the lodge and into the heavy fall of cloud born snow. \"Adam wait, we need to talk about this.\" she added, stopping him in his tracks.\n\n\"No Sasha, we don't.\" he said, turning slowly to face her with the serenity of nature flooding around them.\n\n\"I'm sorry Adam, I didn't think it would matter. It was a long time ago.\" Sasha said, visibly upset.\n\n\"It doesn't. The fact that he obviously still has feelings for you combined with the fact that I was starting to fall for you myself. That matters.\" Adam replied sharply.\n\n\"What are you saying?\" Sasha asked, moving in a bit closer as the snow fell poetically around them.\n\n\"I don't know Sasha, every single time my life begins to make sense it gets turned upside down. I never thought I would say this, but I need calm. I need something solid that I can count on for the rest of my life. Lately I haven't been able to find that.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"I can be that Adam Michaels.\" Sasha said softly, gently putting her arms around him and kissing his lips slowly as luster filled flakes fell from the sky around them.\n\n\"My Lord, do you wish us to stay and fight?\" Stage asked nearly in a yell to be heard over the chants of a war to come.\n\nKraid had seen the kiss between Adam and Sasha, his stare fixated onto them through a small window in the lodge was crushing to say the least.\n\n\"No. I promised Adam we would help free his friend and I am a man of my word. Go, and when you return you can help us count the slaughtered beasts,\" Kraid said confidently. The group of Benzans yelled with hellbent fury as Dalton found himself yelling if for no other reason than to give himself an excuse to raise a little hell without recourse, Whiskey even joining along with vicious barking. \"And when the job is complete, Adam and his friends are not to return. Am I clear?\" Kraid asked in a whisper.\n\n\"Yes my Lord. Crystal.\" Stage replied.\n\nThe Hunters sat in war equipped shuttles inside the face of a large mountain as gripping rainfall moistened the surrounding area. Five shuttles, each holding nearly twenty of the most battle tested Hunters, along with two of the Elite variety. While they would all carry the standard Hunter designed rifle, which was a semi-automatic weapon capable of punching holes through the thickest of men, they were on a different mission. One fueled on revenge and retribution, and for those very reasons it was their intention to cut their foes into pieces. Slicing flesh from bone with perfectly edged swords which they each carried, harnessed onto their backs and nearly alive with the hunger for blood.\n\nAs the five shuttles slowly began to pull from the rocky terrain, many of the undead warriors gazed through the small windows into a curtain of rain and wondered if it would be the last time their eyes would see the gothic beauty of the Queen's cavern. A series of several large doors cut into the face of a mountain with outlines of tribal style writing surrounding them. As feared as the Hunters were, they knew well the ferocity of Benzans in battle. In fact, the Benzans were famous for it. That said, Hunters still considered themselves at the top of the food chain and this was a perfect example of an unstoppable force clashing with an immovable object. Many of each species would perish in the battle to come, if not all of them, which made the presence of Hunter Elites among them bring comfort.\n\nLegend tells of the rise of Hunter Elites. A time when scattered nations of vampiric beasts clashed with one another, the Elites were born to defend their Queen. They were the epitome of horror, easily slaying the most dominant foes in battle, and that was reason enough for the Hunters heading to the upcoming slaughter between nations to feel a bit more confident as they set course for the well known location of the Benzan hideout.\n\n\"The plan is pretty damn simple,\" Zane said as both Roman and Quinton looked on. \"When the next transport shuttle arrives in a week to deliver new prisoners, we take the ship.\" he added.\n\n\"How the hell do you plan on doing that? We were under heavy guard the entire time, at least six riot ready soldiers aboard the shuttle.\" Quinton said.\n\n\"Our ship only places two guards in the landing bay. We take them out and meet the shuttle as normal. Wait for the guards aboard to exit with the prisoners and then use the element of surprise to our advantage,\" Zane replied. \"Third person waits up on the steel catwalk near the entrance of the landing bay. They'll be responsible for keeping everyone on this orbiting hell out of the landing bay until the other two take the shuttle and are ready to make an exit.\" he added.\n\n\"Who's responsible for what?\" Roman asked with concentration. \"Look, I trust you, but I'm not stupid enough to hang out up on the catwalk. I got no intentions of you two taking the shuttle and leaving my ass high and dry.\" Zane said.\n\n\"I'll take the catwalk,\" Quinton said. \"I will only have been here for a week anyway, so there would be a good chance one of the guards aboard the shuttle would recognize me.\" he added.\n\n\"Then it's settled.\" Zane said.\n\n\"One thing,\" Roman responded, looking abruptly into the dead gaze of Zane. \"We will not leave without Quinton.\" he added.\n\n\"Agreed my friend.\" Zane said with a touch of nervousness in his tone.\n\n\"Only question now is how to get to the landing bay?\" Quinton asked.\n\n\"You will ask to be treated in the infirmary,\" Zane responded, his stare directly on Quinton. \"Roman and I will stage a fight. We have to make sure it's severe enough to get thrown into the hole, and we have to time it just right. Otherwise we will miss the chance to jump that shuttle,\" he added. \"When we pass in the hall under guard, they will force you to face the wall,\" Zane said to Quinton. \"The very moment we pass by, Roman and I will both spring on the guards and do our best to overtake them. As we do, you will turn and help us. Grab as many loose weapons as you can, going to need them in order to hold that catwalk.\" Zane added.\n\n\"I like it, it's a good plan.\" Quinton replied as Roman continued his stare on Zane, wondering if he could be trusted. Not that it would matter. He was easily willing to kill Zane if need be in order to make sure he and his terrorist brother Quinton left safely.\n\nPrimal pressed a sequence of several buttons in front of them as Stage turned from the cockpit area of the shuttle to face the rest of the group.\n\n\"Gonna be about a six hour flight to Arch City. Try and get some rest.\" Stage said loudly as the ship's thrusters began to do a slow burn as the shuttle remained grounded in the knee deep snow. He turned to face the instrument panel and assist Primal as both men pressed several buttons and logged their course.\n\n\"Arch City?\" Adam asked, bending over into Sasha's direction slightly while doing so.\n\n\"One of Gali's larger cities. Plan is to overtake the crew of the shuttle that transports prisoners to the ship that houses Roman. Land as though it's a normal drop off, then grab him and get out of there before the guards aboard realize what is going on.\" Sasha replied.\n\n\"Arch City, random moon, I don't really give a damn. Anywhere but here. I'm freezing my ass off.\" Dalton said loudly as his lower jawbone trembled. He sat in the rear of the shuttle huddled into a chair with his thin brown coat pulled around him as though it were a straightjacket; Whiskey sitting pitifully by his side.\n\n\"You know, if you would just have replaced that raggedy ass brown piece of cloth with an actual climate jacket when they offered, you'd be nice and toasty right about now.\" Adam said smiling, his thick green coat with fur lined hood a perfect escape from the cold conditions.\n\n\"Fuck you buddy, the brown coat stays!\" Dalton said with pride filled anger.\n\n\"Mmm...toasty.\" Adam replied in mocking fashion, unzipping his thick coat a bit as if to purposely let cold air in.\n\n\"Everybody wants to be a comedian all of the sudden.\" Dalton said bitterly as he took a quick shot of rock whiskey from a small metal flask, petting Whiskey who gazed at the rest of the crew with the saddest of looks in his eyes.\n\nAlthough Adam continued to chuckle a bit, deep down he knew the humor was a mere cover for the strangling emotions inside of him. His heart, his very soul missed Sarah Blaine so badly. The same heart and soul that knew deep down Sarah was gone, and had started to fall for Sasha. As the Benzan shuttle slowly began to lift from the ground and climb into the heavens, Adam's eyes remained locked onto the cloud of snow that the thrusters had formed below them. He wondered if Sarah ever bothered her own thoughts with him, or had she moved on, making Adam nothing more than a disposable afterthought?\n\nSpace travel had a way of forcing you to think about things that otherwise stayed buried deep inside. It was for this very reason that Adam dreaded their upcoming journey to Arch City, though it was long overdue. Roman had stayed behind so that Adam, Sasha and Dalton could escape. Adam Michaels was a man of his word, and now it was time to make good on a promise to free his good friend. Adam tried to focus his attention to that, although the memory of Sarah remained in the shadows of his every waking moment.\n\n\"What's on your mind?\" Sasha asked nearly an hour after their shuttle hit orbit.\n\n\"Nothing much,\" Adam replied, breaking from his concentrated thought for a moment. \"Just thinking about everything, it's been a crazy year for me.\" he added.\n\n\"Believe it or not, I understand. There was a point in time in my own life when I had given up on the idea of true happiness.\" Sasha said.\n\n\"Really? What happened?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"You came along.\" Sasha replied. Though it would have sounded like the perfect line coming from a smooth talker, Adam knew she was sincere. He could see it all over her face.\n\n\"Does he always do that?\" Sasha asked, breaking the awkward silence between them.\n\n\"Always do what? Snore?\" Adam asked, turning to Dalton.\n\n\"No, I've heard people snore before. That's not what he's doing. In fact, I'm not sure what he's doing.\" Sasha replied as they watched the scruff painted Dalton sleep at the rear of the shuttle. It was a mixture of snoring and mumbling, a bit of laughing thrown in as well.\n\n\"Wondering what he's dreaming about?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"Oh my God!\" Sasha said loudly, but in a whispered voice as Dalton reached down to adjust his man tool while still sleeping, grabbing his crotch area roughly.\n\n\"Congrats.\" Adam said, patting Sasha on the back softly.\n\n\"Congrats for what?\" she replied.\n\n\"You are pretty much the only attractive woman he has seen for some time, so my guess is he's dreaming about you.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"Oh my God!\" Sasha said again as Dalton mumbled in his sleep and readjusted his crotch a second time.\n\n\"Wait. So you're saying I'm attractive?\" Sasha asked with a smile on her face.\n\n\"I'm sure you know the answer to that. Must have hundreds of guys telling you that you're attractive each day.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"I'm not worry about hundreds of other guys, just Adam Michaels,\" Sasha said playfully. \"What do you think?\" she asked.\n\n\"Well ma'am, I think you are very attractive,\" Adam said. \"In fact, I can't see a single feature on you that I would even think of changing.\" he added.\n\n\"Oh really?\" Sasha replied.\n\n\"Yes really,\" Adam said. \"In fact, I would lay you down right now and make passionate love to you if Dalton wasn't awake and smiling at us.\" Adam whispered into her ear. Sasha, who longed for Adam's touch, quickly turned to see Dalton sitting upright and smiling back at her.\n\n\"Oh my God!\" she said as Adam began to laugh.\n\n\"Well a damn fine hello to you too.\" Dalton said snidely.\n\nThey were heading for Arch City, and that was a good thing. It meant they were heading away from the Hunters who were arriving to their own destination with a single purpose.\n\nEliminate the Benzan race once and for all. As the five Hunter shuttles broke from deep space and into low orbit, the Vampiric beasts prepared themselves, double checking both weapon loadouts and armor fittings. Normally, the Hunters feared no man. However, the battle to come was different. Meeting the Benzans on their own home soil meant fighting a race of men who would defend their families with barbaric passion.\n\nTheir assurance of victory was the accompanying Hunter Elite soldiers. The Knights in solid black armor calmly sat at the rear of each spacecraft, almost as if the flight itself were the only burden to them. In just a very short time they would be involved in a small scale battle of flesh shedding and soul reaping. Still they sat there. So calm that they almost looked lethargic. But when the dying began, every Hunter knew the Elites would in fact move and cleave with unnatural speed.\n\nThey had expected to hold the element of surprise, however, as the Hunters descended from the clouds they began to make out figures in the thick of the falling snow. The Benzans were waiting, poised by the heat of large bonfires as they waited in a spread open field that was flat and ripe for the planting of severed limbs.\n\n\"Land there,\" Vladris said to his shuttle's pilot, pointing to a large area less than a half mile from the Benzan's current position. \"We will meet them on their own fields and soak them with the blood of cowards.\" the Elite added, his strangely deep, almost demonic voice enough to rattle any normal man.\n\n\"Yes Vladris, at once.\" the pilot replied as the convoy of Hunter shuttles diverted its path into the direction of its new destination.\n\n\"Prepare yourselves, for tonight we feast of the blood of beasts!\" Kraid yelled as nearly two hundred Benzans began to shout loudly, every single on of them well armed. With the blistering cold of snow consuming most of their vision, the Benzans remained near the bonfires for warmth and in close quarter as they awaited their adversaries.\n\nAs they looked through the thick snowfall at one another, it was a very sobering moment for most. Many would fall in the battle soon to be, and every man knew it to be the truth deep down. Though they believed they were more skilled with both gun and blade, the Hunters were not to be taken lightly. Many of the men had wives, children even. Kraid had sent them into the deep terrain of the mountains, their chosen fall back spot in the event of a battle so dangerous. Nearly fourty wives and children under the escort of only five Benzan warriors, it was simply all Kraid could spare. The women possessed every needed survival skill and the five warriors sent as escort were his absolute finest. While it pained him to not include the five skilled warriors in the battle to come, he knew the others would fight harder knowing their families were well protected. Kraid was a reaver of both man and demon, having sent more Hunters to the grave than any other Benzan still breathing. Even so, his heart thumped with both adrenaline and nerves, knowing damn good and well the vampiric bastards would sent their best, and that was sure to include Elites.\n\nThe first sign of the fight to come was the glimpse of what appeared to be two hell hounds that could be seen through the curtain of white snow. Moments later, the Benzans realized the Hunters were in full charge as they rapidly approached, swords drawn and eyes locked in.\n\n\"They come!\" one of the Benzans yelled frantically as they all prepared for the stinging of steel, cold and yells of death. The exceptional speed of the Hunters allowed them to match the hell hounds in full sprint, stride for stride.\n\n\"Wait. Wait,\" Kraid yelled to calm his men, assuring they remained close together. \"We must fight as one group. Do not let them intimidate you, for today they face the most skilled killers in the Skyla System!\" Kraid added, pulling his broadsword, its edge gleaming a bit from the reflection of the diamond like snow that consumed them.\n\nThe thunder of feet and yells of barbaric and demonic fashion seemed to quiet for a moment, at least in the mind of Kraid who held his broadsword as he drew his gold plated pistol, firing a single shot which hit a Hunter directly between the eyes; his horned helmet had been split in two as blood poured from the skull of the filthy beast, quickly saturating the spongy white snow that would soon become a crimson river.\n\nUsing his free hand, the Benzan leader immediately thrust his sword down, striking one of the hell hounds at the top of its skull and driving the instantly dead beast into the frozen tundra. The second hell hound stopped in mid stride, realizing the Benzans were not the usual buffet of ease.\n\n\"Fight!\" Kraid yelled as within a single instant, the field was filled with hundreds of Benzans and nearly a hundred Hunters, blades exchanging viciousness as the screams and gunshots could be heard for miles in the otherwise calm of falling snow.\n\n\"You alright?\" Lassiter asked as Tigon Twelve continued its full burn, the twin thrusters providing a trailing path of flame.\n\n\"I wouldn't wish this on anyone,\" Sarah said, sitting in her seat and looking out across the landscape of stars. \"The worst part of feeling this way is knowing that I did it to myself. I just want to go back and leave with him, do things right.\" she added.\n\n\"You can't go back,\" Lassiter said, slowly taking a seat beside her. \"So many times I think the same way, wishing I could go back to the day Kelly was murdered, go with her and perhaps prevent it all from happening. Deep down I know it wouldn't matter. It was her time to go.\" Lassiter said.\n\n\"Strangely, this isn't helping much.\" Sarah said, laughing a bit. \"Oh, I'm not saying anything has happened to Adam. My gut tells me otherwise. If there is anything we know about him, it's that he's a survivor. I'm sure he's fine.\" Lassier replied.\n\n\"I hope so,\" Sarah replied in a much more serious tone. \"If anything has happened to him...anything.\" she added, turning to look out of the window of the shuttle once more. \"I wouldn't be able to live with myself.\" Sarah added. Lassiter was at a loss for words, instead placing his hand on Sarah's shoulder for a moment before standing to his feet and checking on the Colonial soldiers who had made the trip with them.\n\nThey were a grit filled bunch to say the least. The much larger Husk sitting to the front of the group, outfitted in thick armor plating they remained solemn.\n\n\"Everyone alright?\" Lassiter asked as he made his way slowly by each seat to the rear of the shuttle. The Husk simply answered with slight nods, quickly returning their attention to the windows which overlooked the stars.\n\n\"Hoping the Benzans are reasonable so we may return to the fight quickly.\" one of the Colonial outfitted soldiers remarked.\n\n\"I understand, but the Legion will fall in due time. As for the Benzans, I wouldn't expect too much reasoning from them.\" Lassiter replied softly, Sarah overhearing his words.\n\n\"And if you're right sir? If the Benzans are not willing to allow us an audience with Adam?\" the soldier replied.\n\n\"We're not going for the opportunity to speak with him. We're going to get him. Sarah has suffered enough, and we will either be allowed to speak with Adam or we will use force to complete the mission.\" Lassiter said, leaning in a bit toward his men. \"When we arrive, you men will remain with Sarah while the Husk and Goliath units accompany me. I will state our demands and be reasonable in doing so. If they are unwilling, we will use force until they become willing.\" Lassiter added, turning to Sarah who was staring out of the window.\n\nI care too much for her to see her suffer like this. Lassiter thought as he watched Sarah for several long moments. His heart still longed for the soothing touch of Kelly, and having held her lifeless body in his arms had been devastating.\n\nThrough his own suffering, Sarah had been there. She saw to it that his heart healed enough to move forward. Now it was time to return the favor. She was a good woman, amazing actually. Everyone made mistakes, Lassiter knew that. It was Sarah's open admission of guilt for letting Adam walk away that made Lassiter understand how amazing she truly was.\n\nSeveral times Lassiter had avoided her because he felt something more, feelings he shouldn't have. They scared the hell out of him, and rather than put Sarah through even more, he wanted to remain her friend. At least for now. Sarah turned to see her best friend watching her as she smiled softly back to him for caring.\n\n\"Face the wall prisoner Raines!\" one of the two prison guards said sternly as Roman slowly stood and faced the wall of his cell.\n\nHe was the only resident, his former cellmate having been put into protective lockup following their one sided melee. Roman was new to the prison life, at least aboard this ship, and his cellmate saw that as an opportunity to prey on the former terrorist. Simple plans of taking Roman's share of food, but stupid plans nonetheless. His cellmate quickly discovered that Roman Raines is intimidated by no man, nearly crippling him before the guards could rush in and stop the carnage. Roman was slapped an even tougher sentence after beating two of the rescuing guards profusely as well, prompting them to treat him with extreme caution from that day forward.\n\nIt was also the first day Zane began to notice him, his effectiveness during the scuffle was exactly what was needed to put together a decent plan of escape. While every prisoner respected Zane and answered to him in some fashion, none could be trusted enough to maim and possibly even kill interfering guards when the time came. Zane saw it in Roman's eyes the day of the melee, and knew from that moment forward that not only was he capable of killing if needed, but there was a good possibility he had done so in his past.\n\n\"You move an inch and I'll paint this fucking wall with your brain matter!\" one of the guards said loudly, holding a riot style shotgun directly to the back of Roman's skull.\n\nMeanwhile, two more guards tossed his cell, throwing what little possessions were inside onto the steel deck of the ship and kicking them out of the eight foot by six foot space. The cell was down to nothing more than the steel sleeping rack which was tightly bolted to the wall. They were given no mattress, and there was no toilet to speak of. They were led down the hall at gunpoint for five minutes every day to the latrine, and that was their one and only time to dispose of human waste outside of their cell floor.\n\n\"Still hadn't figured out what you guys look for?\" Roman said laughingly, his face nearly touching the wall as the guards continued their toss of the cell.\n\n\"What the fuck do you think we're looking for? Weapons and contraband.\" the guard holding him at gunpoint replied.\n\n\"Come on, you've read my rap sheet, do you think I need a weapon?\" Roman said. \"You can read, right?\" he added. \"Shut up!\" the guard yelled.\n\n\"Yea, I can read. Got to be honest, for such a high profile catch you sure don't look like much to me!\" the guard added loudly as his friends finished tossing the cell, laughing at the guard's remark.\n\n\"Don't let the bad shave and dirty clothes fool you. If I wanted you guys dead you'd be dead already,\" Roman replied with a grin. \"Don't worry though. I like you. You remind me of someone I once knew.\" he added before feeling the barrel of a weapon pressing hard against his neck.\n\n\"I told you to shut up.\" the guard replied sternly, reminding Roman of the pecking order while opening a small flask of rock whiskey with his free hand and sneaking a small swig. Roman continued to face the wall, although the smell of the rock whiskey soon brought a smile to his face. It was almost like being back home with the Gunship crew.\n\n\"Alright move!\" the guard said firmly, holding his gun on Roman as the three guards led him down the hall slowly, making their way into the mess hall to join a handful of previously escorted prisoners.\n\nIt had been one of the most violent battles in recent history for both races as body upon body fell lifelessly to the blood drenched ground, a crimson river making its way through the deep drifts of snow as if to become a permanent fixture. The Benzans had all but fallen, only a handful remaining and retreating back into the direction of the lodge, trying to move defensively while avoiding the tripping hazard of dead flesh. Two dozen Hunters remained, including three of the mighty Elites. Their accompanying hell hound feasted on severed flesh, still warm as the snow fell while the remaining Hunters collected themselves. The rest had fallen in battle as a result of the Benzan's concentration of force onto them, taking heavy losses from the standard Hunters in doing so.\n\nKraid, who now stood covered in a mixture of blood, both freshly wet and dried, ordered the remaining warriors to seal the doors of the lodge if only to give them a moment to breathe.\n\nThe Benzans had been defeated, over confidence their achilles heel as they each prepared to die with honor while taking as many of the cannibalistic Hunters down with them as possible. Rather than rush in to slaughter the remaining five Benzans, the Hunters backed away a bit, giving Vladris a moment. The mighty Hunter Elite stood tall, red plasma dripping heavily from his blade as he ran his fingers across the bitter cold steel, placing them into his mouth to taste the spoils of victory.\n\nBending down onto a knee, Vladris ran his hand calmly across the back of his hell hound, which had taken the lives of a couple of Benzans on its own. He slowly rolled his neck, the sound of moving tendons and small bones popping as he prepared for the final showdown.\n\n\"My brothers. If we fall today, know that your families are safely hidden in the mountains and that you died as heroes.\" Kraid said, doing his best to catch a deep breath as the chilled air worked against him. The remaining Benzans were covered in shades of blood and exhausted from swinging iron to flesh, yet they dug deep for the final fight to come. Thousands of wooden splinters filled the air of the room as the Hunters finally burst the lodge door open by force, knocking one side from its hinges.\n\nHolding his mythical sword of silver and severed flesh out in front of him, Vladris pointed it into the direction of Kraid, blood oozing down the blade and dripping steadily onto the grain finish of the wooden floor. Though he realized he was going to die, win or lose, Kraid stepped forward with his broadsword tightly clasped into one hand and his gold plated pistol gripped and positioned near his side. They exchanged a deep stare, the fluid red pupils of Vladris locking with the determined brown eyes of Kraid. Though they fought under different banners, they were both warriors and each knew that one of them would fall today. They were prepared to go with honor and this was their way of once and for all proving which bloodline was the more dominant.\n\nVladris thrust his hulking sword down with thunderous power, Kraid barely quick enough to evade the attack as a foot or more of the sword buried into the thick wooden slats beneath them. Kraid immediately swung his sword with a sweeping motion in an attempt to decapitate the Hunter Elite. Vladris ducked with intent, swiftly pulling himself back upright; grasping the gun hand of Kraid and squeezing until the Benzan dropped the golden piece. Powerfully uprooting his sword, Vladris arched it into a swing which ricocheted off of the Benzan's broadsword.\n\nStaggered for a moment, Kraid quickly thrust his sword forward, clipping the solid black armor of Vladris as thick leather and trace amounts of blood dispersed onto the polished wooden wall behind him.\n\nGlancing at his minor wound for a moment, Vladris was overcome with a beast like rage as he refocused his attention onto Kraid. Inhumanly fast and without warning, Vladris struck the Benzan across the face with a thunderous backhand, sending him reeling. The staggered Benzan leader was merely able to lift his sword just in time to block the downswing of the Hunter Elite's sword, though it did him little good. The trunk of Kraid's sword clanged as the powerful swing knocked it from his hand, the Elite's blade biting deeply into the flesh of his shoulder. It was at that moment the remaining Benzans knew defeat was at hand and quickly lashed out at the Hunters with swords arcing wildly. Moments later, each Benzan had fallen lifelessly to the floor leaving only Kraid.\n\n\"Do you intend to turn him my Lord?\" one of the Hunters asked as Vladris stared at his beaten opponent for several long and silent minutes. Kraid would either be sent into the afterlife for eternity or he would join the ranks with the Hunters. A choice that was now in the hands of Vladris. Hunter Elites possessed the unique ability to turn their defeated foes into Hunters, but reserved the privilege to only a select few.\n\n\"Our work here is done then my Lord?\" one of the Hunters asked of Vladris as the Elite soldier skimmed the area through a large window of the lodge. The sight of butchered bodies lay on the ground around them, slowly becoming hidden by the ongoing fall of heavy snow mixed with the pasty grey smoke of the bonfire. Several Benzan buildings stood in the distance, catching the Elite's attention. \"No. Check the rest of the buildings for any survivors. Anything that may speak of stray cowards away from the nest.\" Vladris commanded.\n\n\"At once!\" the Hunter replied with obedience before turning to lead a small group of the undead warriors into the direction of the buildings as Vladris slowly stepped back outside, focusing his attention into the sky and its blanketing flakes of snow that fell directly down.\n\n\"My Lord, the Colonials are approaching Tameca.\" one of the Legion soldiers said loudly as he entered Lord Riven's quarters. It was a reinforced room, snugly fit into an underground bunker and equipped with everything needed to operate in the worst of conditions.\n\n\"As expected,\" Riven said. \"Wait for them to hit atmosphere and fire all of our ballistics at them.\" he added.\n\n\"All of them my Lord? Every missile?\" the soldier asked. \"Yes.\" Lord Riven said sharply, turning his eyes to the questioning soldier.\n\n\"Right away my Lord!\" the soldier replied loudly with obedience, turning to execute Riven's order.\n\nTameca City was once a proud place, flourishing with opportunity and the citizens who lived there in chase of it. As the soldier exited the bunker to execute Lord Riven's order, the sight of present day Tameca City was gut wrenching. A majority of it on fire, intentionally set by Legion forces as both retaliation against those who opposed Legion rule and a warning to anyone who may approach to give aid. Many of the same citizens who once shared laughter and memories on its streets, now lay dead on the very same paths of asphalt, bodies piled high as they burned without mercy.\n\nIt had become a large scale holocaust, what little remained of the city now part of a Legion controlled warzone. They had been bested during the battle for Glimmeria, losing a majority of their high end weaponry in the process. What remained was a stockpile of surface to air missiles, armored assault vehicles, plenty of small arms weaponry and soldiers who had been intimidated into seeing the war to its end. They had no help coming, no reinforcements. Just a severely outnumbered force that was entrenched into the city and slaying at will.\n\n\"Alright. You've been trained for this and have the superior firepower and numbers. These civilians are being murdered because they want a Colonial government, so as Colonial soldiers it's our job to protect our soon to be people at all costs.\" General Ortega said, scanning the launch bay of a Colonial Star, which was filled with thousands of battle ready troops. \"Most of our convoy is staying in orbit around Tameca, cutting off all escape routes for the Legion in hopes of the war ending here. It's our job to end it, and by God we will end it!\" he added, thrusting the crowd of warriors into a loud cheer. Moments after, the synchronized cheering turned to panic as the Colonial Star began getting pummeled by an array of Legion fired missiles.\n\nIt was a tough ship, built with the very purpose of taking blunt force trauma for extended periods of time. Hundreds of potent warheads gleamed into the sky however, most of them hitting the ship's hull and rocking the already battle weary frame and engulfing it into a curtain of flame.\n\nWhen the general order to abandon ship rang out across the com system of the ship, soldiers began sprinting frantically throughout the halls, trying to make their way into the launch bay where General Ortega had already set up an evacuation detail. \"We stay until the ship loses power!\" Ortega shouted, explosions ringing in all corners of the flying fortress.\n\n\"Make sure everyone is armed to the teeth and well supplied, when the power fails we have to go, at that point it's only a matter of time.\" General Ortega added loudly, the troops near him handing both weapons and survival packs to the evacuating personnel.\n\n\"Mayday, Mayday, this is the Colonial Star Thirty-Seven. We are going down, repeat we are going down. Ship is evacuating to the surface of Tameca. Repeat, ship is...ohh God, ohh God!\" the ship's pilot could be heard yelling up until the second that the Colonial Star was no more, the tomb of steel and circuitry exploding, leaving behind only faint screams and fiery particles of debris as the night sky of Tameca illuminated as though an eclipse were taking form.\n\n\"We barely made it sir.\" one of the Colonial soldiers said frantically as General Ortega looked through the plated glass window of the military shuttle, watching the ripples of destruction where the Colonial Star had been only moments before. Listening to the unorganized chatter being broadcast over the shuttle's com, Ortega finally punched in a security code before picking up the com.\n\n\"This is General Ortega. We have lost our ride but not our resolve. Sky Command, please organize a rally point on Tameca's surface based on my location beacon, we will regroup and complete the mission as planned.\" he said calmly into the hand held com before placing it firmly back onto the communication board near the shuttle's pilot. \"One way or the other this battle will prove the end of the Legion's reign of terror.\" he added, speaking the words to the armed soldiers of his shuttle.\n\nMinutes later, their military issued shuttle began hitting waves of turbulence, a direct effect of the fighting that was taking place below them. The ship's diamond shaped legs slowly bit into the hard crust that covered Tamera's ground, frozen dirt which was typical of the coldest season of the year. A massive Legion force was pushing to their direction, a well organized attempt to end the Colonial force before it could regroup.\n\n\"Laze their positions!\" General Ortega shouted as he exited the shuttle steadfast. One of the Colonial snipers quickly shouldered a large device, similar to a weapon, but with no firepower of its own. \"Keep it locked in!\" Ortega ordered loudly as he contacted the remaining Colonial Star ships with a mobile com. There is a vast quietness of space that is nearly indescribable, the luminous littering of stars everywhere as pure silence engulfs them. This very silence was broken abruptly as ten thunderous booms broke out, all high potent missile strikes firing from the launch tubes of an orbiting Colonial Star and directed to the location of the laze.\n\nThe Colonial outpost, while under a heavy bombardment of Legion fire, had already started to take in Tameca's citizens. Refugees on their own planet, all of them shell-shocked and grieving for those lost as they staggered into the grasp of armed Colonial soldiers. There was a cluster of zinging sounds, followed by rocking explosions throughout the Legion camp nearby. The Colonial warheads struck earth with such velocity, such authority, that only craters remained that filled with ash and flesh. \"General, do we attack?\" one of the soldiers asked as the silence of missile strikes no longer floated through the sky. \"Just wait, hold the line and wait until I give the order.\" General Ortega demanded.\n\n\"Yes sir.\" the soldier responded. Less than a full minute after the missile strikes, one of the remaining Colonial Star ships hovered down slowly from orbit, moving over what remained of the Legion encampment as its deck cannons began chewing into anything that moved. Dispatching dozens of the Glimmerian designed Swordfish fighters, the Colonial Star began a slow ascent back into the heavens and the quiet space which orbited above.\n\n\"Now you may go.\" General Ortega said proudly, a majority of his soldiers running to the sad remains of the large Legion camp as they shouted loudly with pride. \"Lieutenant!\" Ortega shouted. \"Yes sir!\" the man replied with discipline. \"Continue finding our new citizens food and make them as comfortable as possible. I'm taking a strike team in.\" Ortega commanded. \"Yes sir!\" the Lieutenant said loudly, saluting for a moment before turning to continue organizing relief to the citizens lucky enough to have made it to them.\n\n\"Be landing in less than ten minutes, time to wake up.\" Stage said loudly as Dalton slowly left his dreamworld of fast guns and even faster women and began to get his bearings in order. Primal and Stage were both at the controls of the shuttle, gliding it to the planet's surface for the rescue plan ahead. Meanwhile Adam and Sasha sat closely together on a cushioned bench seat a few feet away. Dalton's first thought was that of Sasha's perfect body as he tried his best to convince himself that she hadn't followed him back from the world of dreams. He realized Adam was no longer wearing a climate jacket about the same time he glanced down to see himself snugly underneath it.\n\n\"Man, get this fuckin' shit off of me!\" Dalton said, throwing the Benzan jacket several feet as both Adam and Sasha began to laugh loudly.\n\n\"Aww, but you looked so cute laying there huddled up underneath it.\" Sasha said as Dalton stared her down will ill intent.\n\n\"I 'aint going for cute. I'm going for casual.\" Dalton replied sternly, proudly pulling his faded brown coat together in the middle as if it were a tuxedo. Several small rips littered the jacket, which reeked of cigar smoke, whiskey and God only knows what else; accented by a few stains of dirt and lipstick. Still, Dalton smiled with pride. It was his resume of sorts, a visual reference to his experienced past.\n\n\"There it is.\" Primal said as everyone took a moment to look out of the shuttle's windshield. The entire planet of Gali looked as if it were swampland, thick green brush covering nearly every portion of it. Arch City, however, was a different story entirely. It wasn't the largest city Adam or Dalton had ever seen, but it was large enough. Two huge silver arches cascaded over the city, while several thousand buildings were positioned below, a few skyscrapers and the rest mid sized buildings or less.\n\n\"How are the watering holes here?\" Dalton asked, his tongue growing weak of alcohol starvation. \"They got anything you want here. Drink, women and weapons. You name it, they got it. As long as you got the credits to pay for it that is.\" Primal replied, turning for a moment as he answered.\n\n\"Shit boys, Dalton James hadn't ever had to pay for a woman. I pride myself on that.\" he proudly replied as Whiskey was quick to second the notion with a loud bark.\n\n\"Must be the coat.\" Sasha replied as Adam broke out into an uncontrollable laugh.\n\n\"I hear 'ya. I'm surprised you 'aint sittin' back here with a real man now that you know what one looks like.\" Dalton replied\n\n\"You tell her brother.\" Primal said, chuckling just a bit. \"Alright already, we need to get focused on getting Roman out of lockup.\" Adam said.\n\n\"Agreed,\" Stage said. \"We're going to have to be on top of our game to pull this rescue off.\" he added.\n\n\"Oh, I'll be on my game alright. Hell, Whiskey and me are both liable to walk out of the nearest bar with a nice piece of strange. Shit I'll be on top of something for sure.\" Dalton said, licking his lips a bit as Whiskey began barking loudly.\n\n\"I think I'm going to be sick.\" Sasha said in a low voice as she watched Dalton practice his best pickup lines on Whiskey at the rear of the shuttle while it docked onto the landing port of the city.\n\nWhile the Legion was fiercely outnumbered, they had dug themselves in deep, pockets of soldiers doing what would have been a valiant job if not for the worst of reasons. Equally as resilient, Colonial soldiers fought back. Holding their ground while slowly gaining more. Surviving citizens began to pour in, staggered and starving as the Colonials soon found their outposts overwhelmed. Not with attacking soldiers clad in red and black trim, but common folk, mostly women and children clad in dehydration and the blood stains of their loved ones.\n\n\"Keep them away from windows and potential entry points.\" Lieutenant Scott said, holding a large metal door open as citizens poured in, many falling from gunfire close by as Legion troops ended as many lives as possible.\n\nWhen the senseless murdering first began, over half of the Legion ranks surrendered, their core values not involving the slaughter of unarmed people. However, those who remained were with skill and without soul, gunning down even toddlers as if they were armed soldiers.\n\n\"Seal the door and get me a link to the sky!\" Lieutenant Scott yelled, doing his best to get the survivors into the large rooms of the vacant factory.\n\n\"Here you go sir.\" one of the Colonial soldiers said, handing Scott a wired com unit. \"This is Bravo Forty Two Blue, repeat, this is Bravo Forty Two Blue. Requesting evacuation of Tamecan citizens as well as reinforcements on ground. Repeat...\" Lieutenant Scott said, his plea abruptly cut short.\n\n\"Negative Bravo Forty Two Blue. Be advised we are under fire from hostile forces. I say again, the Republic of Theron has joined the battle and its army has engaged us in war. Advise hold ground and make due until Colonial allies arrive.\" a voice responded, cracking heavily due to the distance between coms.\n\n\"Estimated time of arrival?\" Lieutenant Scott asked, his hopes of a swift victory crushed.\n\n\"Reinforcements are approximately two days out. I say again, two days out.\" the voice replied, distinct sounds of pounding cannons in the background. \"Copy.\" Scott replied.\n\n\"Actual, this is Bravo Forty Two Blue. Did you copy the last?\" Scott asked, his battle ripened hand holding the com only inches away from the smooth shave of his face.\n\n\"Copy that. Do your best to secure our location. I'm ordering several platoons back to your area to assist.\" General Ortega replied.\n\n\"Copy that sir, Bravo Forty Two Blue out.\" Lieutenant Scott replied, handing the com back to the soldiers with him, which were less than fifty and new to the acts of war.\n\n\"Listen up,\" Lieutenant Scott said loudly, gaining the attention of each soldier. \"It is imperative that we fortify our location until help arrives. I want four men at each entrance and heavily armed. As the refugees come to us, two soldiers exit to assist while the other two cover. Every remaining soldier, including myself, will set up a staggered perimeter in the hallways. Protect the rooms of refugees at all costs. Understood?\" he asked loudly.\n\n\"Yes sir!\" they replied, checking their ammunition levels. \"Sergeant Ramon, assign the soldiers to their posts.\" Scott ordered. \"Yes sir.\" the Sergeant replied.\n\nThe Republic of Theron. Bastards. Lieutenant Scott thought as Colonial troops ran around him to secure the building as quickly as possible. Nobody saw it coming, although they should have. The Republic of Theron has been murdering its own citizens for decades now, so why would the Tamecan people be any different. Hindsight is twenty-twenty they say, but the fact that Theron was a major trading partner with the Legion, equipped its army with Legion weaponry and had so much to lose if their trading partners fell made sense. Someone missed the signs and because of the oversight, Colonial ships and Theron cruisers were engulfed in one hell of a fight as they drifted in orbit.\n\nTwo Colonial Star ships remained, their escort cruisers having been sent down to Tameca filled with troops and supplies. Both ships had taken a hell of a beating, but remained intact as they orbited side by side and were exchanging cannon shots with six Theron cruisers. The Theron ships were much smaller than the mighty Colonial Stars, but were designed by Legion engineers and bred for one purpose. War. They were heavily armed with deck cannons, motorized chain guns and only the thickest of steel plating.\n\nStill, the Colonial battleships held their own. Much like two larger and more capable animals defending themselves against a pack of hungry wolves, they continued exchanging shots of bone shaking lead. One of them began to falter, its hull damaged beyond repair and quickly splitting, eventually leading to the order of abandon ship. The Colonials were swarmed, and though they had done significant damage themselves, it was endgame. The soon to be demolished Colonial Star redirected its fire strictly to the surface of Tameca, striking all known Legion locations as its crew abandoned ship in route for the surface.\n\nMeanwhile, the only Colonial Star still intact pulled out of the fighting, setting course for deep space in wait for reinforcements that would arrive from all over the Skyla System. The Theron cruisers didn't attempt chase, knowing full well the injured Colonial ship could still deal extraordinary amounts of damage. The truth was, as the chatter hit the waves of Colonial coms on the surface of Tameca, its soldiers shared one feeling. They were alone. There was no guarantee that help was on the way, and if indeed it was, there was no exact time table for its arrival. They simply had to dig in and do their best not only to survive, but protect the citizens of this once great planet while doing so.\n\n\"My Lord,\" a Hunter said as he approached Vladris, who remained standing in the fields of gore and wrapped in his own blood covered armor of thick leather. \"We went through the personal affections of their leader,\" the Hunter said. \"It seems there are a few Benzans living abroad, as well as a shuttle with five passengers which left only hours ago.\" the Hunter added, handing the flight log to Vladris.\n\nThe demon in charge of the group of Hunters assigned to eliminating the Benzans stood there. Silent, the tribal markings on his smooth scalp visible as the wind blew roughly, hell hound by his side.\n\n\"The remaining Elites will accompany me to Arch City, I will personally see to their executions myself. You are to return to our Queen with the list of Benzans living throughout the Skyla System. Tell her of our great victory here and inform her that as soon as my task in Arch City is finished I will return to resupply and hunt the remaining.\" Vladris said with authority.\n\n\"Yes my Lord, at once.\" the Hunter replied, turning to quickly execute the wishes of the Elite.\n\nAs the other two surviving Elites joined Vladris in standing and looking into the falling snow which surrounded them, he finally pulled his attention away from the sky.\n\n\"Now it is certain that we are the most dominant race in this galaxy. Our brothers fought with bravery against mortal men who fought in fear, which is why their people lay slain on the ground today and we leave to tell of the battle,\" Vladris said in his deep and demonic tone. \"Now we go to Arch City in order to finish our task.\" he added as the three Elites walked to a nearby Hunter shuttle in order to begin their journey.\n\nQuinton sat down at the cafeteria table next to Zane and Roman as all three men began to eat whatever it was scooped onto their tray. \"Not gonna miss this food, that's for damn sure.\" Zane said as he dissected it with his plastic fork.\n\nIt was nothing more than mush formed by a large spoon and stood on its own once it hit the plate. The most common prison feast was algae, although that was a bit too luxurious for men of their standing. They usually got more along the lines of the algae leftovers mixed with thistle weed, which was the fancy name for the stringy weed that excavators removed to get to algae deposits.\n\n\"They treat us like fucking animals.\" Roman replied, eating his food without reserve which included a brown water. It was dubbed \"meat juice\" by the prisoners simply because it gained its brown color from softening good meat before the guards ate it.\n\n\"They've got their shots in on me since I've been here. Slapped me around a bit, spit on me and talked down to me. When the time comes, I plan on gutting as many of these low down bastards as I can.\" Roman added.\n\n\"I don't have much of a story to tell yet, but I do know that last week I was eating buttery Tamecan crab and now this is staring me in the face.\" Quinton said, pushing his plate to the side.\n\n\"Eat my brother, we're going to need every bit of strength we can get.\" Roman said, pushing the plate back in front of Quinton.\n\n\"You got a point.\" Quinton said as he slowly began to choke down each bite of the pathetic bliss of chow.\n\n\"So, when we do get out I guess your first order of business will be with your friends and their broken promise huh?\" Zane asked. Roman sat there for a few moments, his body overtaken by the numb feeling as he thought about the Gunship crew who had been saved because of his staying behind.\n\n\"No. If Adam could have gotten me out of here he would have. It was my choice to stay behind, not his. I don't hold him at fault for this.\" Roman finally replied.\n\n\"Hell, for the right price I'll take care of him for you.\" Zane said jokingly. Quickly grasping the table's edge and slinging it to the floor, Roman grabbed Zane by the front of his shirt and began pummeling him in the face with a closed fist.\n\n\"If you ever threaten another friend of mine motherfucker I'll kill you!\" Roman yelled as the prisoners began to shout in riot fashion.\n\nThe ship's alert siren sounded loudly as shuffling feet thundered their way into the cafeteria. Meanwhile the guard in the gun cage above fired a warning shot, a stern reminder to each prisoner that any man standing when the second shot rang out would be punching his ticket to the grave. Every prisoner, including Quinton, hit the floor with their hands behind their heads as Roman and Zane continued to go at one another.\n\n\"You're a dead man!\" Zane yelled with maddened rage as he threw a hooking punch which found its mark on Roman's chin.\n\nRather than stagger and fall however, Roman turned his head back to Zane and landed a rising elbow under chin and into the throat of his adversary, causing Zane to flip over a nearby table.\n\nBy this time the ship's guards had arrived, six total were first on the scene. Closing in on Roman first, he quickly fed a back fist as he spun around, following it by a numbing elbow that nearly knocked the first guard out of his boots. Jumping onto the second guard that entered, Roman began beating the life out of the man clad in riot gear. Noticing the guard who stood in the gun cage taking aim on Roman, Quinton quickly reached for the first fallen guard's rifle, aiming with precision and hitting the chest of the cage guard which put him down abruptly.\n\nAs the other four guards rushed into the crowded eating hall, the remainder of the prisoners quickly stood and began to overpower the seriously outnumbered officers, besting them within a few seconds. Taking both the baton and rifle of the guard he had beaten to death, Roman quickly glanced at his brother before sprinting out of the room, Quinton following with rifle in hand.\n\n\"You're fucking dead Roman Raines, do you hear me,\" Zane yelled through the crowd. \"Somebody climb up and take the gun cage. You three take a rifle and secure this room, the rest of you follow me. We're taking the ship.\" Zane announced while pointing his finger, the rest of the prisoners following out of his much earned respect.\n\nIt took the Gali prison guards several minutes to truly assess what was really unfolding. A full scale riot. When they finally came to terms with prisoners running loose, well armed and programmed to kill, they sealed off as many doors as possible. Solid steel blast doors closed, their latching mechanisms locking remotely as the guards still had control of the security station.\n\nHow long that control would last, however, remained to be seen. The security station was housed in a circular room, only accessible by a narrow catwalk, and currently it was filled with armed prisoners who were engaging the guards in a gunfight. During which, the large antenna used to communicate both throughout the ship as well as to approaching ships was destroyed. Deliberately, of course, the prisoners hoping they had done so before a distress signal could be sent.\n\nAs she heard the news come across the com, Sarah sat in her seat, stunned just as the rest of the shuttle's crew was. \"Reports indicate several thousand Colonial soldiers perished in the explosion. General Ortega has formed an operating base on Tameca's surface and is asking any civilian nearby in need of rescue, to please relocate to the large set of warehouses near the Tameca City bridge. Again, all civilians and crash survivors are being asked to make their way to the industrial section of Tameca City, the Colonials have a secure forward operating base in the warehouse section of the district. More news as we receive it.\" the man's voice broadcast in a looped message across the Colonial com.\n\n\"Oh God, I should have stayed behind.\" Sarah said, her words filled with regret.\n\n\"Sarah, there is nothing you could have done to help. You may have even been on the ship when it exploded, or fallen into the hands of Legion soldiers. General Ortega is very capable, you need to focus on the idea of possibly seeing Adam again.\" Lassiter replied.\n\nSarah nodded, leaning back in the plush of her chair a bit and turning her attention to the window on her left, casting stares out onto the landscape of what would soon become Arch City.\n\n\"Don't concern yourself with the ongoing war Sarah, just focus on Adam. I want to see you happy again.\" Lassier said, placing his hand on her own for a moment as she looked at him with appreciation.\n\n\"I just hope he hasn't completely forgotten me.\" she admitted, her stare never breaking from the window.\n\nLassiter quickly removed his hand from Sarah's, careful not to show his growing feelings for her.\n\n\"That's very unlikely to ever happen my lady.\" he replied, at a loss as to what else he could possibly say or do to comfort her.\n\nSarah knew Adam wasn't likely to forget her anytime soon, instead, she feared he had possibly grown fond of Sasha's company. She couldn't blame Sasha for wanting to be with Adam if it were the case, but that didn't make it any easier for her to think about. The fact that he was an amazing man was one thing. The fact that she may have lost the affections of such an amazing man forever was something else altogether, and the mere thought of it made her feel helpless.\n\nMeanwhile, the quiet continued at the rear of the shuttle, although everyone checked their weapons for readiness. Arriving at the hideout of Benzans unannounced was not wise for anyone, especially anyone bearing Colonial markings on the side of their ship. They had sought Benzans as criminals, jailed them and fired weapons on them at pretty much every opportunity. All of the soldiers aboard Tigon Twelve knew they wouldn't arrive to open arms, and killing would quite possibly ensue. They had to be prepared for anything.\n\n\"Sir, our allies have arrived and driven the Colonial armada from our skies,\" a Legion soldier said, walking quietly into the room that Lord Riven had declared his. \"However, reports indicate they have help from both Gali and Sion coming.\" the Legion soldier said somberly as Lord Riven stood in his chambers, staring at a battle map posted on the thick walls of the fallout shelter.\n\n\"Good. We must welcome our allies to the fight and coordinate a strike against the Colonials who were left behind to die like the worthless cowards that they are,\" Lord Riven replied. \"We must do this quickly and then ready ourselves for the arrival of more invading armies. In time, enough slaying of heroes will serve as warning to anyone else that dares invade.\" he added.\n\n\"Yes sir. I will ask the Theron armada to land at once.\" the soldier replied with respect.\n\n\"Thank you my loyal friend.\" Lord Riven replied.\n\nThe bunker protecting Riven was still in good shape, repelling the attack from a dying Colonial Star less than an hour before. Other Legion strong points had not been so lucky, many of them laying in shambles, still smoking from the display of desperate measures by Colonial forces. Only a few hundred Legion soldiers remained, at least functional soldiers. Acting on Riven's orders, they began to execute their own, doing away with the injured by way of bullet rather than care for them. It was a sickening display of barbarism, but one Lord Riven felt was necessary in order to continue at full speed.\n\nAs the Theron armada began to land its warships, flooding thousands of fresh bodies to the fight, Admiral Sweed remained on his ship under heavy escort as he awaited a meeting with Lord Riven. His warriors, with skin of deep tan and eyes of greyish tint, were human in every other sense of the word. A heart beat inside of their chest, and they walked upright on two legs with two arms holding weaponry. Still, the eerie sight of their gaze and complexion was not a welcome sight for most. Lord Riven and his Legion faithful were the exception, greeting their longtime allies as if they were brothers.\n\n\"My lady, we are only a few minutes out.\" the Colonial pilot said said as Tigon Twelve began to descend from the stars into the thick snow clouds of the Benzan's last known hideout.\n\n\"Would be best if you stay aboard until we meet the Benzans face to face in order to be sure of peaceful talks,\" Lassister said. \"Sarah, I insist.\" he added, cutting her off before she could even respond.\n\nSarah simply agreed with a nod of the head as the Colonial soldiers and Husk all double checked their weapons and inspected every inch of body armor.\n\n\"Sir, something's not right!\" the shuttle's captain shouted back into the passenger area as the loud thrusters of the ship nearly overwhelmed his words.\n\nSarah's heart began to plunge as she saw huge stacks of smoke rising from what remained of the hideout, most of the buildings burned to the ground with only the lodge remaining. Moments later, mountains of slain bodies became visible to the crew. The crisp from cold corpses left laying in the snow, immediately bringing Sarah to tears. Her sudden burst of emotion became a heavy cry as the shuttle touched down onto the blanket of while, Husks exiting first with large rifles at the ready.\n\nEven for the Husk, the sight was grim. Severed limbs, mortal wounds of gunshot entry points and burning flesh stood visible to them, a small river of blood flowing through the snow beyond their ship a bit. The Hunters had been here, that much was evident by their fallen warriors laying in the deepening drifts of snow. The surviving vampires had taken their time before leaving, that much was also evident by the gruesome cutting and maiming of the already fallen Benzans. They had taken their time with them, filleting the flesh from bone whenever possible. After looking around the immediate area thoroughly, the Husk warriors motioned the rest of the Colonials outside.\n\nThe remainder of the crew exited slowly, Sarah under the protection and escort of the Goliath V2 units.\n\n\"You men search the lodge, find any records or information that may lead to Adam.\" Lassiter said.\n\n\"Yes sir!\" the Colonial soldiers replied, quickly turning to execute his order. Meanwhile the Husk soldiers searched the dead, at least what was left of them, in hopes of some indication of Adam's whereabouts.\n\n\"Don't worry Sarah, if Adam is here we will find him.\" Lassiter said, attempting to comfort the hysterical woman who was deeply in love.\n\n\"The battle is still fresh, not more than a day ago.\" one of the Husk announced, walking toward Sarah and Lassiter. \"No Hunter ships remain, which would lead us to believe that they walked away when the battle was over.\" he added.\n\n\"I can't live without him Eric...I just can't.\" Sarah said to Lieutenant Lassiter as the small Colonial crew continued searching for clues of both battle, and the whereabouts of Adam Michaels.\n\n\"I understand Sarah, believe me, not a day goes by that I wonder what a life with Kelly would be like.\" Lassiter replied.\n\nRather than respond, Sarah stood silently in shock, the heavy snowfall bringing large flakes quietly to the ground. Lassiter took her with his free arm, holding her close to comfort her while his remaining hand gripped a black combat pistol. As the frozen water constructed with such beauty fell onto her, covering her hair and shoulders a bit, Sarah prayed. She simply couldn't survive without the one man who would have loved her unconditionally. Thinking of him made her breathe heavily, thinking of his demise made her not want to breathe at all.\n\nHer life had been mounted onto the wrong beliefs for so long now, she wanted to change, wanted so badly to be truly happy. And that simply wasn't possible without Adam. So she prayed as hard as she could ever remember praying.\n\n\"Sir,\" one of the Colonial soldiers yelled, sprinting over to Lassiter's location. \"It looks like a Benzan shuttle was logged as leaving shortly before the battle. Heading for Arch City.\" the soldier added. Lassiter turned to face Sarah, who was sobbing uncontrollably.\n\n\"My lady, Arch City is where the Gali prison transports are based. Could very well be Adam attempting to rescue Roman.\" Lassiter said, loosening his grip of her, though he didn't want to.\n\nStopping in mid sob out of shock, Sarah continued to look at Lassiter as she began to wonder if it was a possibility. If maybe God had answered her prayers in only a matter of seconds.\n\nWas there a single moment waiting, a moment that she would be held by Adam Michaels once more? Sarah would have gladly traded the remainder of her life for one such moment.\n\n\"If we are going, we need to go now,\" one of the Husk said, holding up a gothic style medallion. \"Hunter Elites fought in this battle, meaning they were here to wipe the Benzans out. Good bet they know about Adam's shuttle and are tracking it as well.\" he added.\n\n\"Hunter Elites?\" one of the Coloniel soldiers asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" the Husk warrior replied. \"Not something we want to run into. Trust me. And if we do, best be damn good and prepared for one hell of a fight. A fight like you've never seen before.\" the Husk replied.\n\nHe went on to explain the superior skills of a Hunter Elite, how they were born to end lives, direct offspring of the Queen as well as only the most tenacious fighters turned undead.\n\n\"It has to be Adam's shuttle, he's nowhere to be found here.\" a second Husk said.\n\n\"My lady, we need to go now if there is any chance of saving him,\" Lassiter said. Sarah agreed with a shaking of her head as Lassiter began to recall everyone back to the ship. \"Don't worry Sarah, we have enough muscle here to take out a Hunter group, Elites or otherwise.\" Lassiter said as they boarded, although the Husk soldiers knew better.\n\n\"Well, that went well.\" Quinton said as both he and Roman took a moment to rest behind a large system of piping.\n\n\"I can do complicated as long as we get the fuck off of this ship.\" Roman replied.\n\n\"Good. From the sound of things it's going to be real complicated,\" Quinton said as heavy gunfire was being exchanged throughout the ship. \"Think he is really capable of taking the ship?\" Quinton asked.\n\n\"Not sure and don't care. As long as we can take the landing bay when the time comes, he can have the ship and all of the bad memories that go along with it.\" Roman replied.\n\n\"How are you on ammo brother?\" Quinton asked.\n\n\"About three fourths full.\" Roman replied after glancing down at the neon green charge count on the rifle's side.\n\n\"A little under halfway for me.\" Quinton said.\n\n\"As long as we do things smart and conserve what we can we should be fine,\" Roman replied, tucking the officer's baton into the back of his prison issued pants. \"We'll lay low and let Zane fight it out with the guards. All we need to do is worry about whoever is left standing when the transport ship arrives.\" Roman added.\n\nAfter nearly an hour of gunfire being exchanged, the armed prisoners finally took the Security room, allowing them to unseal the ship's locked down hatches and move around at will. The Gali prison guards were highly trained, most of them former commandos themselves. However, they were outnumbered, if not overwhelmed by the volume of prisoners on the overpopulated ship. Before they were given warning, a third or more of the ship had already been lost to them.\n\nFor hours the sound of heavy gunfire throughout the ship continued, Gali trained guards fighting the massive riot of former Gali soldiers turned prisoner. Both Quinton and Roman waited patiently as they remained out of sight, positioned behind a large set of steam filled pipes. For the first time in many years Roman began thinking about his past, something he usually avoided. Looking down to his scarred body, he remembered the Goliath parts that had been forcefully removed and events that led him to having them in the first place.\n\nHe thought about everything, even the lies both he and Quinton had told Zane. Glancing at Zane for a moment, he nodded his appreciation. They were indeed like brothers, but for very different reasons than those Zane had been given. Greyspine. Yea, Roman had been there, and he had indeed killed the Queen of Hunters on that very day. But he was not a Gali commando, not even a soldier in the least. He wasn't even supposed to be there. He was a terrorist, at least he had been for the majority of his life. His family had been murdered at the hands of Hunters, that much was true. Quinton and family had taken him in, though the family was a terrorist group named Black Cell.\n\nWatching his family cut down in cold blood had done something to Roman. Opened his eyes, if nothing else, to the reality of how the world worked. The strong survived. And he had promised himself he would survive at any cost while slaying as many Hunters as he possibly could. After Black Cell fell to the Hunters, Roman and a handful of its members went on the run.\n\nKilling the Hunter Queen, Black Cell had been dressed as though they were Gali soldiers. Rather than watching his government sign a treaty of peace with the murdering bastards who had slain his family, he watched the Hunters blame Gali. They called it a setup, and soon that led to war. The war between Gali and the Hunter tribes lasted nearly two years with neither side declaring victory. The Hunters had been killed to the point of near extinction, while Gali fell from a major power throughout the Skyla System to merely an afterthought. Their ranks had depleted to crisis levels.\n\nThey never signed a treaty of peace. Instead, there was a unspoken understanding between the Gali and Hunter tribes. They kept their distance. Live and let live. So many had died on both sides, all because of Black Cell. If they were found in Hunter occupied space, the members of the former terrorist group were painfully executed. As they were rounded up in Gali occupied space, they weren't given the pleasure of death, instead sent to live out a life unfit for a dog aboard this prison ship of horrors. As Roman looked himself from toe to hand slowly, he knew it in his heart. He would never stop killing. Hunters and sympathisers of Hunters. They were and would always be his targets.\n\nMeeting Adam and his crew, Roman's agenda had first been to kill the crew and take the ship. Planning to find as many members of Black Cell as he possibly could and continue the fight. What he quickly discovered, however, was the feeling of family aboard the Gunship. He began to like Adam and crew, feeling accepted among them. They treated him with respect, he felt as though they were what his brothers and sisters would have been like if not slain by the Hunters.\n\nSoon Roman's motives changed and he just wanted to remain with the Gunship crew, hoping to outrun his past forever. As he stared across to Quinton, Roman began to wonder who he was. Was he still the terrorist linked to Black Cell, the killer who had sworn his life to ending the Hunter race? Or had his time with Adam and crew changed him? He knew that in not so many days he would be faced with the very decision, and he wasn't sure where his heart would lead him.\n\n\"There you are, we have been wondering where you took off to.\" Adam said as he slowly approached Sasha. She had made her way back to the shuttle, sitting on its steel ramp and watching the night life of Arch City unfold.\n\n\"I'm fine. Just spend so much time in space anymore that when I get a chance to sit and watch the world in motion, I like to take it.\" Sasha replied.\n\n\"Mind if I sit with you?\" Adam asked, his curious affections for her growing stronger by the minute.\n\n\"As long as you don't pull out any of those horrible pickup lines.\" she replied, both of them laughing as they thought of Dalton's poorly choreographed one liners, many of which had already been used tonight.\n\nThough he had seen no payoff on the empty compliments as of the moment, Dalton began to see a trend. His furry friend Whiskey attracted women, a lot of them, which made him man's best friend indeed.\n\n\"Listen,\" Sasha said, continuing to stare across the highway to the hotel where they would all spend the night, though Dalton's would more than likely be spent in the lobby bar. \"I hope I haven't put any pressure on you. It wasn't my intention at all.\" Sasha said softly, turning to Adam as they continued to sit on the shuttle's ramp, their arms wrapped around peaking knees in front of them.\n\n\"You haven't,\" Adam said, pulling his left arm up and placing it around the shoulders of Sasha to pull her close. \"Besides, I'm the great Captain Adam Michaels. I am wired to deal with pressure.\" he said mockingly as they both laughed softly.\n\n\"Yea, you are quite the living legend.\" Sasha replied, smacking him on the arm playfully. Moments later, they had engulfed one another with a shared kiss, a deep linking of lips which drown in life altering passion.\n\nThe kiss was fantastic, and they both silently agreed on the fact. Looking into each others' eyes afterward and sharing a moment that no amount of time could ever take away.\n\n\"So, I'm not completely over her. Just so you know.\" Adam said, continuing to hold Sasha with his left arm as they turned their attention back to the hotel.\n\nFinally he felt comfortable enough to admit his lingering feelings for Sarah Blaine.\n\n\"I know. I'm alright with that as long as what we do have is something real.\" Sasha replied.\n\n\"It's real,\" Adam said. \"Just wanted to be up front about my feelings is all. Us smugglers and our damn passion for telling the truth.\" he added as Sasha turned to look at him with sarcasm.\n\n\"What about Kraid, are you over him?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"Um, yea. Only about five years ago.\" Sasha replied, huffing a bit.\n\n\"Relax, I was just asking.\" Adam replied in his own defense.\n\n\"In the spirit of honesty though, I don't think he's over me.\" Sasha said.\n\n\"In the spirit of honesty,\" Adam agreed, both of them giggling once more. \"Means he either plans to kill me or sent his boys to make sure I stay away from you.\" Adam said.\n\n\"Why do you say that?\" Sasha asked.\n\n\"Call it a smuggler's intuition. That and the fact that they are heading this way.\" Adam replied, Sasha quickly turning to see both Primal and Stage making their way across the busy street.\n\n\"Damn.\" Sasha said out of frustration.\n\n\"It's alright. That kiss will be lasting me several hours yet.\" Adam replied, smiling as he turned to his sparking love interest.\n\n\"We were able to knock down the transmission tower. Looks like we control the mess hall, security room, cell blocks one through seven and about a third of the administrative wing. The man still controls the rest.\" one of the prisoners said as he stood holding a riot style shotgun.\n\n\"Concentrate as much manpower as you can on the administrative wing. We take that, we take the ship's armory.\" Zane replied. He was certainly in command, several loyal friends at his side as they worked on a strategy to take the remainder of the ship.\n\n\"We outnumber them by a long shot, but they're well trained,\" Zane said as the group looked on. \"We need to take the armory and keep the landing bay. If we lose the landing bay then we lose our ticket off of this ship.\" he added.\n\n\"What about Roman?\" one of the prisoners asked.\n\n\"You let me worry about Roman Raines. You just keep that landing bay secure and we'll leave his ass here high and dry to sort it all out after the fact, and that's only if I don't find him first,\" Zane replied as he shouldered a shotgun and motioned two of his loyal friends to accompany him. \"Time to go hunting boys. Time to go hunting.\" he added.\n\n\"Look, all I'm saying is that I should be getting paid fifteen percent from you, combat pay from the Colonials and 'aint seen a damn dime of nothing,\" Dalton said as he sat with Adam at the long bar of wood and silver polish. \"Which is why drinks should be on you.\" he added.\n\n\"I'd be glad to pay for drinks if you didn't bang 'em down like you had one day left to live. Not to mention you've bought every woman in here a drink, and most of them more than one.\" Adam said, a wide smile on his face.\n\n\"I may only have a day left, hell, with some of the shit you drag us into it's anybody's guess.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Tell you what. I'll pay up if you get rid of that raggedy brown coat once and for all.\" Adam said, stoking the already emotionally intoxicated Dalton James.\n\n\"Fuck you and the horse you rode in on buddy,\" Dalton said loudly, drawing unwanted attention from several of the patrons. \"The brown coat stays!\" he added.\n\n\"Here,\" Sasha said, slapping enough credits onto the bar to pay for Dalton's venture. \"Now shut up and quick bringing stares our way, we're here to pull off a heist for God's sake.\" she added sternly.\n\n\"What about Whiskey?\" Dalton demanded to know, his trusted pooch to be treated like royalty now that he understood a woman's attraction to such a cute dog.\n\n\"Sure, order any drink you want.\" Sasha quickly responded, staring at Adam for a moment in disbelief.\n\n\"I meant the dog.\" Dalton said loudly, his demands ignored. \"Damn she's got an ass on her.\" he mumbled, watching the Benzan beauty walk away, her heart shaped backside bouncing inside form fitting pants.\n\nOne of the bar's video feeds switched to the news coming out of Tameca, causing the entire crew to once again join Dalton at the bar in silence as they watched on. It was one of those sobering moments in life, an event takes place and you know that it will remain written in history forever. You never forget where you are when the news arrives, and for everyone here, they remember the bartender turning the volume up loud enough for everyone to hear clearly.\n\nThe hardest hitting of the video segment was a montage of photos showing the level of savagery in which civilians were being murdered. It was the news of a downed Colonial Star, however, that hit Adam hardest as he tried to catch his breath; feeling as though he had been kicked directly in the stomach. He waited, hanging his hopes on every word of the news journalist as he awaited the fate of Sarah Blaine. Instead, they didn't mention her name a single time. She is the elected Colonial leader for God's sake! Adam thought, stunned of no news on the woman his heart still hurt for.\n\n\"Bet them 'sumbitches are getting' paid,\" Dalton said loudly, several patrons of the bar, including his own crew, turning to look in disbelief. \"That's right folks, my name is Dalton James and I work for a deadbeat employer.\" he added, bringing chuckling in the rear of the gathered group.\n\n\"Dalton, people are dying.\" Sasha said snidely.\n\n\"People are always dying. That's politics for you. That's why, unlike pretty women and whiskey, I just can't do 'em,\" he replied, changing his facial expression a bit. \"I mean whiskey as in the drink.\" he added.\n\nSasha, who began to reflect on her own family being murdered as she watched the events unfold on the video feed, grew angry and wanted to lash out at the drunken man.\n\n\"Hey, just let it go,\" Adam said, grabbing her softly and immediately noticing the hurt in her eyes. \"Want to walk outside for a few minutes, just the two of us?\" Adam asked, turning to gaze at Stage and Primal as if to dare them to join.\n\nRather than respond, Sasha got up slowly to accompany him and stared through Dalton with anger as she walked away.\n\n\"Guess she's a voter.\" Dalton remarked as Primal began to explain the fate of her family.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Adam asked with sincerity as both he and Sasha walked away from the hotel a bit, approaching a metal bench located nearby as the hustle and bustle of citizens continued walking around them.\n\n\"I don't know. Seeing those video feeds just made me think about my family I guess. It's tough to walk through the day as though nothing is bothering me.\" Sasha replied.\n\nHer words struck home with Adam, who found himself pushing through each day as though it were an uphill battle as well, wanting to hold Sarah Blaine one last time.\n\n\"Try to focus on the positive things. We're together, we're out in space enjoying a freedom which many will never know. The past can't be changed, no matter how hard we wish it,\" Adam said. \"What you need to understand is, my heart still isn't completely free. Soon, there will come a time when it is and when that happens I'll be knocking down your door begging for a chance to be with you. Hell, any sane guy would. You're beautiful, intelligent and I gotta admit you have a knack with handguns.\" he added, bringing a brilliantly sweet smile to her face as he placed a finger on her cheek to wipe away the most visible tear.\n\n\"And Dalton...\" Adam began to say.\n\n\"Ohh GOD, Dalton James.\" Sasha replied with exhausted patience. \"I know. Believe me, I know. Please understand though, he's a good friend and I would do anything for him. Just like I would you.\" Adam replied, slowly placing his arm around Sasha to hug her a bit in the chilled night.\n\n\"Adam Michaels, you are a good man.\" Sasha said, enjoying the moment as she sat there, held by a man who had her heart and genuinely cared for her.\n\n\"Yea, well there are at least a dozen outstanding warrants that say otherwise.\" Adam replied, both of them starting to laugh quietly as a light rain began to fall.\n\nFirst as nothing more than a mist, the water quickly became heavier. Rather than run for the hotel, Adam pulled his climate jacket up, placing it above both of their heads as Sasha's face remained pinned to his chest.\n\nAs the thick cold of rain fell, Adam protected Sasha with his jacket, using his other arm to hold her tightly as they kissed. Their bodies, even souls, connected at that very moment. Lips passionately feeling each other out as Adam's hand moved up, his fingers quickly flowing through her satin black hair. The rain fell so hard that it was almost impossible to see ahead. Almost. Unfortunately for them both, Stage saw the blossoming love unfolding as he stood at the front entrance of the hotel, watching his leader's love falling for another.\n\n\"They're hitting us with everything they have sir.\" Lieutenant Scott said loudly, the pounding of lead hitting weakening concrete. He stood in one of the building's interior hallways with several Colonial soldiers, including General Ortega.\n\n\"I don't care how much they hit us with Lieutenant, these civilians are to be protected at all costs. Is that understood.\" Ortega asked.\n\n\"Yes sir. I only fear that soon we will have no walls protecting them.\" Lieutenant Scott said.\n\n\"Then we will throw our own bodies in front of bullets to protect them until help arrives. Is that understood?\" General Ortega said sternly.\n\n\"Yes sir, of course.\" Scott replied.\n\nOutside the warehouse, dozens of armored Theron vehicles continued their barrage of gunfire onto the crumbling outer walls. Grey slate turning to rubble and sliding down, both Theron and Legion soldiers by the hundreds waiting a safe distance back, ready to enter and kill everyone when the time was right.\n\nAs General Ortega entered one of the larger rooms on the hall, his two posted Colonial soldiers moved aside to allow his entrance. Nearly fifty refugees, most of them women and children, sat in the floor.\n\nThey had been battered by the stench of war, most of them bloodied and holding their children's ears as the building rocked from intense gunfire.\n\n\"Excuse me. Sir. Can you please talk to my son, explain to him we will be alright.\" a woman said, slowly approaching Ortega.\n\nShe wore what once was a very upscale business outfit, dress pants and button up shirt; covered in the fog of war of course. Dirt and blood was all over the woman who was obviously someone of importance, at least before Tameca City had been destroyed. The General skimmed the room and saw it on all of their faces, even in the eyes of his posted soldiers. They saw no hope. They needed reassurance that victory was still possible.\n\nGeneral Ortega approached the young boy as the entire room fell silent, eyes fixed onto the fearless leader of the Colonial effort.\n\n\"Have you ever seen a Husk son?\" General Ortega asked, kneeling down to the young boy of no more than six years of age.\n\n\"No sir.\" the boy replied timidly.\n\n\"Husk are some of the most battle-tested warriors the Skyla System has to offer. They are strong, savage and much more capable than the cowards who are outside right now firing their weapons at us,\" Ortega said, standing a bit so he may address the rest of the people in the room as well. \"All we have to do is hold out. Gali has sent a large force of soldiers to help all of us, and with them, thousands of Husk will also arrive. All we need to do is hold on until they get here,\" General Ortega said. \"And son, I promise you this,\" he added, bending over once more to place his right hand onto the shoulder of the young boy. \"My soldiers will hold this factory and keep you safe until that time comes.\" General Ortega said, bringing a huge smile to the face of the young man and reassurance to the rest of the refugees who looked on.\n\nThe fire that burned to help these people strengthened inside of the posted Colonial soldiers as well, their demeanor once again becoming that of an unstoppable force.\n\nRoman held his hand out, silently warning his Black Cell brother of footsteps approaching. Quinton was a bit larger than Roman, though both were built sturdily. Quinton gripped the stock of his rifle tight as Roman held both firearm and riot stick, the blunt weapon down at his side as they listened. There were three Gali guards approaching, all slowly and as quietly as possible, weapons in front of them and at the ready.\n\nRoman glanced back to his brother for a moment, his back firmly against the steel of an interior wall just inside the doorway. Outside, the guards approached with caution in the narrow confines of the hallway. Roman held up three fingers, passing the information along to Quinton. Next, he held a clinched fist to let his brother know a fight was unavoidable and without pause he swung the clinched fist around, hitting the guard in front and jarring several teeth loose from the man's skull.\n\nImmediately pulling the helpless guard back to his feet, Roman used the flesh of his unconscious victim to absorb several gunshots sent his way by the remaining two lawmen. Roman then threw the dead flesh to the flooring below, jumping onto the second guard with no remorse. They had beaten him, spit through the bars of his holding cell on many occasions and now that the tables were turned, Roman saw no reason to be gentle. The last guard quickly took aim at the former Black Cell terrorist, but was nearly cut in half with a string of shots fired from the weapon shouldered by Quinton.\n\nKnowing well that more would come to the shots, be they guards of prisoners in hunt of the two men, Quinton did his best to pull Roman from the second guard. It took a few moments, Roman resisting as he continued to punch heavily on the guard he had already beaten to death and beyond.\n\n\"We have to go now! Won't be long before we hear the shuffling of feet. Zane's or more of the man's.\" Quinton said, finally able to pull Roman from the beaten guard.\n\nRoman stood on his own, spitting onto the lifeless body as Quinton let go of his bear hugging grip. \"They got what was coming to them my brother, now we gotta move! Got to get to that landing bay and find a place to hold up.\" Quinton added.\n\n\"Yea they got what was coming to 'em, and I got a lot more to give.\" Roman said abruptly, having found the hate he harbored against the people who had treated him less than human. Checking the guards for weapons, they found a Gali prison radio that would come in handy for the rest of their escape. Quinton placed it into the back of his pants, the two men quickly leaving the scene and heading into the direction of the landing bay.\n\n\"Hit me.\" Dalton said, a stringy brown cigar hanging from his lips. He was the only man in the hotel bar enjoying a cigar that had the undeniable look of poverty.\n\nEveryone else dressed with class and smoked only the finest of rolled pleasure. Not Dalton. Never the type to care about anyone's impression of him, he smiled wide, a bottle of rock whiskey and shot glass in front of of him.\n\n\"He wins again!\" the dealer exclaimed as the small crowd that had gathered at the card table cheered on. Dalton was on a winning streak, and though two beautiful woman had found their way to him primarily because of the credits he had laying on the table, Dalton was convinced his charm was the hook.\n\nRock whiskey was by far the cheapest alcohol in the entire Skyla System, aside from home brew of course. In fact, the only reason the hotel kept it in stock was for the occasional homeless citizen that collected enough money to enjoy a drink of the stagnant brew. For Dalton, it didn't matter. He could be rolling in money and never forget the rough patches he'd been through. For nearly eleven days during the first war of Glimmeria, he and Adam survived on nothing but rust water and vermin. Left behind by their own soldiers, abandoned and given up for dead. What the rest of the hotel lobby didn't understand was compared to rust water, rock whiskey was fine wine. Dalton understood this, and was a survivor because of it.\n\n\"Does he know what inconspicuous even means?\" Stage asked, puzzled with the thought of Dalton drawing so much attention his way before such an illegal heist.\n\n\"I don't think his mind is on the heist.\" Sasha replied as they all watched Dalton slide a free hand down onto the ass of each of the two women.\n\nBoth had bleach blonde hair to go with the look of well used, to say the least. Well used was an afrodisiac to Dalton, however. To him a woman who had been around was a woman worth chasing. She knew the score, understood the game and was less likely to fall in love with the brown coat booty chaser.\n\nHis four legged friend of thick fur was present as well, gaining just as much attention from the women who rubbed on him as though he were their own. Yep, Dalton was hot. Winning hands and hearts, even if the hearts chased his money.\n\n\"Come on, we gotta get going.\" Primal said, tapping Dalton on the shoulder.\n\n\"I'll be up in a few.\" Dalton replied, a handful of cards in his left hand, while his right maintained a firm grip on the heart shaped ass of one of the women.\n\n\"I said now.\" Primal demanded sternly, hushing the crowd. Dalton gained a strange look on his face, one that normally wasn't attached to cheap women and equally as cheap whiskey.\n\n\"Be right back.\" he said, kissing one of the woman deeply and petting Whiskey slightly.\n\n\"What the fuck did you just say,\" Dalton yelled, standing to his feet swiftly and pushing Primal back several feet in the same motion. \"Don't nobody tell me what the fuck to do primate.\" Dalton added loudly, enraging Primal, who dashed at him with ill intent.\n\nA drunk is pretty easy to take out, but unfortunately for Primal, Dalton could hold rock whiskey like a camel of sort. Easily evading his charge, Dalton pushed Primal as he passed, using the Benzan's own momentum to send him crashing into the table and smashing the fine wooden grain into shards on the floor.\n\n\"I was knocking boots when you was wearing diapers you big hairy 'sumbitch.\" Dalton said loudly, jumping on top of Primal and throwing fists into his direction. The Benzan blocked most of the punches, which turned to slaps, letting Primal know he'd been bested.\n\n\"Enough!\" Stage said, starting for the men and his weapon.\n\n\"It's a fair fight,\" Adam said, pulling his sidearm with surgical haste and holding it on Stage who turned back to look at him with bitterness. \"Let them decide when it's enough.\" Adam added.\n\n\"You dare pull a gun on me?\" Stage asked.\n\n\"I've dared to do a lot of things, and you are pretty low down on that list friend.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"Sasha.\" Stage said, waiting for the Benzan beauty to intervene.\n\n\"It is a fair fight Stage.\" she replied, making the man furious. \"First you betray Kraid for this common thief, and now you insult me!\" Stage said, pissed to the highest point that fury could take him.\n\nSasha pulled her automatic pistol out, pointing it at Stage for a moment as she leaned in to kiss Adam deeply. \"Kraid doesn't own me and neither do you.\" Sasha replied, letting the man know right away that she was her own woman.\n\n\"You will be dealt with in due time,\" Stage said to her, glancing at Adam and Dalton for a moment. \"And you two, you're both dead men!\" he added.\n\n\"Now there's a line that's been used more than my damn pickup lines,\" Dalton said, turning to Sasha as if to convince her that his pickup lines were still semi-fresh. \"Plus, if you two clowns really are the best Kraid has to offer then you might want to consider another line of work. Something like ranch work or waiting tables. Hell, apply here, they may hire you on. Cause you sure in the hell 'aint no killers.\" Dalton said, letting Primal back to his feet slowly. Dalton grabbed a fistful of credits from the pile of rubble near the spot that used to be home to a table, pulling one of the women close to him.\n\nA mixture of kissing and talking to the woman as he groped her heavily, Dalton told her to split the remainder of the credits with the other woman. Their company tonight had been well worth the money, which was several thousand credits. Both women hugged Whiskey, a perfect nightcap to their ass kissing of the man with the winning hand. Meanwhile, Primal walked away slowly, his stare never breaking from Dalton while doing so.\n\n\"I guess this means the rescue is off.\" Stage said sarcastically.\n\n\"Nope. Just means you two outlaw wannabees are finding your own ride home,\" Dalton replied. \"Now go on, get!\" he added, shooing them away like unwanted strays. Stage looked at him strangely, quickly realizing the shuttle they had actually arrived in was now Adam's property.\n\n\"Best if you both hit the road.\" Adam said, at gunpoint of course. Sasha wasn't crazy about the idea of turning her back on the two Benzans, but now that she knew what Kraid thought of her; she wasn't crazy about returning to the Benzans either. She had just needed someone to love her, since her parents were executed it had been the Benzans. Now, she had started to look to Adam for that sense of love, and she trusted him with everything inside of her.\n\n\"Simple. We just hang out by the shuttle, when they come out we dust 'em.\" Stage said as the two men furiously walked across the busy street.\n\n\"And Sasha?\" Primal asked.\n\n\"No harm is to come to her. She's just confused, that's all. Kraid will straighten her out.\" Stage replied.\n\n\"Find the ship.\" Vladris said as the other two Hunter Elites carried heavy rifles in hand.\n\n\"There. The numbers match those of the Benzan shuttle.\" one of the Elites said, the pointed claw of his thick white hand showing the way.\n\nVladris led the group, a long blade sheathed to his back as his leg held a pistol and his massive hands clinched the stock of a rifle. A few citizens stared hard. Some had never seen men with such a look, while others knew all too well they were Hunters and were taken by surprise as the demonic clan of murderers rarely appeared in such a public place. Vladris and his two accompanying Hunter Elites slowly approached the Benzan shuttle, the moon reflecting lightly from the shaven head of Vladris. Meanwhile, his accompanying Elites looked equally as savage, their braided locks of shimmer white and teeth of luminous death only two of many features that led the citizens nearby to steer clear. The normal Hunter simply had a lifeless look in its eye, the pupil void of any pigment. Hunter Elites, however, had a slight red color which seemed to glow a bit. Much like the embers of a freshly discarded fire.\n\nIt wasn't clear which group of warriors first caught glance of the other, but to every citizen unlucky enough to be in the area, it was damn clear that lead began to fly without remorse. Stage hit one of the Hunter Elites with two solid shots, both slamming into the trunk of his chest, knocking the undead beast back a bit. Primal was too close for gunfire, his first reaction instead was to begin swinging fists at the demon closest to him. Quickly bested however, Primal fell to his back, sliding quickly out of the way to once again gain footing. The hair covered Benzan drew a long blade from a sheath on his right thigh, his full intention to attack. Quickly however, he found himself on the defense; the large blade barely able to withstand a downward strike from the sword of a Hunter Elite.\n\n\"What is it?\" Adam asked as Sasha looked through the drapes of the hotel room following the distinct sounds of gunshots.\n\n\"Oh God, it's Stage and Primal.\" she replied in shock, Adam joining her at the window seconds later.\n\nHe had never encountered a Hunter Elite before, but was pretty damn sure that's what stood on the ground below. Three of them to be exact.\n\n\"Dalton, pack our shit right now.\" Adam said.\n\n\"Just a second, let me finish this...\" Dalton replied, cut short as he and Whiskey lay on one of the large beds.\n\n\"Now,\" Adam yelled sternly. \"We got Hunters down below and they 'aint the garden variety!\" he added.\n\nSpilling what remained of his tall whiskey glass, Dalton jumped to his feet with haste, quickly sitting to try and put his boots and coat back on with frantic pace.\n\n\"I'm sick and tired of this fucking bullshit,\" Dalton muttered, pulling his brown coat on quickly, though it wrapped his body a bit crooked. \"Going from winning card games, surrounded by fine looking strange and endless streams of whiskey to running from these dead 'sumbitches. It's always these dead 'sumbitches. I told you not to take the fucking job in the first place. Told you not to do business with Anwick. I told you. Didn't I tell you?\" Dalton mumbled loudly as he continued to fight his feet into the thick leather of his worn boots.\n\n\"Shh.\" Adam said quietly.\n\n\"Well I did...\" Dalton began to reply.\n\n\"Shh,\" both Adam and Sasha insisted. \"They're gone.\" Adam said quietly, glancing out of the room's window for a moment. About the time he finished uttering the words, a solid knock came at the door.\n\n\"Shit.\" Dalton motioned with his lips, no actual sound escaping. Sasha motioned Dalton to answer the knock, stalling them long enough for Adam to open the window that led down by fire escape.\n\nDalton looked back at her puzzled, having no idea who was even at the door. Sasha motioned him once more as the knocking grew heavier.\n\n\"Um, if this is about child support you got the wrong room.\" Dalton said cheerfully, drawing a strange glare from both Adam and Sasha. Seconds later, the shots of Hunter rifles blew gaping holes through the solid wooden barrier on hinges. As the door swung open, smacking roughly against the wall behind it, Dalton held his shotgun out and discharged two shots. Blind as to what his target even was, but following the creed of a smuggler. He who gets shot at shoots back.\n\nVladris and his two battle hardened knights of undead walked in, the first Elite hit with both shotgun blasts at close range, putting him down onto the ground in pain. The same Elite had been struck with two shots from Stage's weapon only moments before, and the four combined wounds had seriously injured the Knight of immortality. Dalton was too close to the Hunters and too far away from the window to jump out, opting instead to stand on the other side of the bed. Out of desperation, Dalton began throwing liquor glasses, pillows, magazines and anything else his hands could grab into the direction of the two standing Hunters.\n\nWhiskey pinned his ears back, letting loose a growl proving he was ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for his proud human owner as he caught sight of the Hunter's accompanying hell hound. As the second Hunter Elite stood there, staring at the pathetic halfway house for fleas, he was struck with several shots from Adam's pistol.\n\n\"Dalton, bring your ass!\" Adam yelled, moving as Sasha then peeked in, firing her automatic pistol into the direction of Vladris.\n\nThe Hunter Elites had no choice but to stay hidden behind a wall as the bullets chewed into the wood while a drunk and his dog made their escape. The hell hound growled loudly, its voice a mixture of undead anger and warning.\n\n\"Told you not to take that fucking job,\" Dalton muttered under his breath a bit as his body shook with adrenaline; Adam and Sasha sliding down the large corner rail of the fire escape. \"Don't let him hit the ground!\" Dalton demanded, dropping his four legged friend as though he were a fur covered feather into the waiting arms of Adam Michaels.\n\nHe was safely caught, though the velocity of his fall knocked Adam to the pavement. Dalton slid down right behind, knowing well enough that Hunters would not be far behind.\n\nThe three smugglers turned fugitives ran hard, a brown dog at their side throughout as Hunter Elites trailed them on foot by less than two hundred yards. Dalton stopped abruptly.\n\n\"Go to the shuttle and get that bitch ready, just don't leave me!\" he yelled, Adam pausing slightly before turning to resume his getaway.\n\nSasha was in first, hitting the necessary switches to fire up the engines by the time Adam ran up the steel ramp, his boots striking loudly on the grated steel.\n\n\"Hey boys.\" Dalton yelled, the Hunters slowing their run to a walk. \"Go. Get the fuck out of here!\" Primal yelled under his breath, doing his best to hide below a small ship docked near the Benzan shuttle.\n\n\"Got one hiding under here.\" Dalton said, smiling a bit and pointing to Primal before turning to haul ass and join Adam and Sasha.\n\n\"You bastard!\" Primal yelled loudly, Whiskey barking at the Benzan for a moment before leaving to catch up to Dalton.\n\n\"Go!\" Dalton shouted, he and Whiskey both sprinting up the shuttle's ramp and diving into the passenger area. One of the Hunter Elites had given chase, his arms clinching the edge of the passenger area as the shuttle began to lift off.\n\n\"Told you. Told you not to take that fucking job Adam!\" Dalton said angrily, forcefully kicking the Elite flush in the face several times and eventually causing him to release his grip, dropping back to the ground. Dalton fell back onto the deck of the shuttle for a moment, door still open as he gave a sigh of both frustration and relief.\n\n\"Dalton, close the door so we can break atmosphere!\" Adam said loudly.\n\n\"Wait. I'm trying to decide between shutting the door or jumping out my damn self and putting an end to this shit.\" Dalton replied with sarcasm, finally moving his body over enough to kick the large button which drew the ship's door closed. Primal watched their shuttle ascend into the clouds, glancing for a moment at Stage who lay dead on the ground, his vision filled shortly after with that of the near grin upon a hell hound's face. His screams lasted only seconds as the immortal pet's teeth shaved through the flesh of a life short lived.\n\nTigon Twelve was a solid Colonial shuttle, but its current crew had pushed it to the limit as the silver ship ate fuel without remorse during its full burn.\n\n\"Not long before we get to Arch City my lady,\" Lassiter said loudly as the loyal soldiers all patiently waited with weapons at the ready. \"When we get there, you are to remain onboard with the Goliaths. Is that clear?\" he added.\n\nIt seemed strange, Lassiter giving orders to the leader of the Colonials. However, he was concerned for Sarah's safety and she was aware of the fact, though she had no clue of his mounting feelings for her.\n\n\"Just find Adam before they do.\" Sarah replied.\n\n\"Don't worry my lady, if he's there we'll find him.\" Lassiter responded as he sat directly in front of the mighty Husk warriors who were prepared to fight to the death for Sarah Blaine.\n\nArch City was located on the small but highly populated planet of Gali, known for its upscale living conditions, high priced fashion and modern technology. None of that appealed to Sarah Blaine, instead she only prayed that Adam Michaels was here and that he was safe. Of course, she wanted so badly for him to forgive her. Possibly give her a second chance at the storybook romance they once shared, but her love for him was the unconditional kind. Even if he refused to speak to her again, she just wanted him safe, wanted him happy.\n\nSarah had always been taught that she was in control of her own life, her own destiny. Which is why this was so hard to deal with. She couldn't control her heart's longing for Adam Michaels, it simply wasn't an emotion that could be turned on and off with the push of a button. In fact, nothing about the events which were about to unfold gave her any control. She was helpless. Was Adam alright? Would he forgive her and possibly give her another chance? It was all taking a huge toll on her emotionally, and none of it was to be controlled or decided by her. Instead, she could only pray for his safety and plead for his forgiveness.\n\n\"Sir. You better let us take the lead on this. If the Hunters have an Elite in their ranks it may take all of us to bring him down.\" one of the Husk said with reserve as the human Colonial soldiers looked at one another. It was a staggering thought, anything taking all of the mighty Husk warriors to kill.\n\n\"Well enough, but I will be right behind you with my Colonial team. The Hunters do not intimidate me.\" Lassiter replied proudly.\n\n\"Ever see a Hunter Elite?\" the Husk asked.\n\n\"Not up close, why?\" Lassiter asked. The Husk remained silent as they began checking their weaponry for several tense moments.\n\n\"Just let us take the lead. They are not to be taken lightly.\" the Husk finally replied.\n\n\"We are hitting the upper atmosphere now sir, should be on top of Arch City within minutes.\" the Colonial pilot said as he turned to Lieutenant Lassiter for a moment.\n\n\"Circle the city low and try to locate the Benzan shuttle. We'll have eyes on the ground looking for any signs of Hunters.\" Lassiter replied.\n\n\"Yes sir.\" the pilot responded, turning to bring Tigon Twelve down low and begin looking for the shuttle's identification number and description.\n\nZane slowly walked down the corridor of narrow steel and aged plating as gunshots rang out in the distance. \"Just keep your eyes peeled open and if we find them leave Roman for me.\" he said in a low voice which was answered by silent nods as all three men held riot style shotguns out in front of them.\n\nHearing footsteps, the men stopped and crouched to a knee in wait of what enemies might be ahead. Moments later, two Gali prison guards turned the corner, each with a repeater gun in hand. The Gali repeater was a semi-automatic rifle that fired hollow point shells, though the stock of the weapon was short. Best suited for close quarter combat, the well trained guards preferred them in the event of a prison uprising or riot.\n\nZane and his men stood up, quickly firing bursts from their shotguns as one prison guard immediately fell to his death. The remaining was hit in the leg, falling as he returned fire. The shots fired from his repeater easily cut through both flesh and bone, dropping one of Zane's men and chewing into the plated steel wall behind him. The injured guard tried to crawl back around the corner, blind firing his repeater while doing so. Seconds later Zane stood over him, smiling slightly before burying a shotgun blast into the guard's face at point blank range.\n\n\"Grab their weapons and let's head back. We go much farther and we are liable to run into a nest of the bastards.\" Zane said as they collected the weapons and key cards from the fallen guards, both Roman and Quinton watching from the rafters nearby.\n\nTheir plan was to climb down from the steel beams which held the ship intact shortly after Zane and his remaining henchman had turned back, however additional Gali prison guards arrived before they were able to put the plan into action. Checking their dead, they soon gave chase themselves, a total of eight soldiers carrying the deadly repeater rifles.\n\n\"What now?\" Quinton asked quietly as both men waited a few minutes before slowly climbing down onto the steel deck of the ship.\n\n\"Now we work on making our way to the landing bay.\" Roman said steadfast as he checked both corners of the short and narrow hallway.\n\n\"Gonna be hell taking it, Zane is likely to be expecting us to try.\" Quinton remarked.\n\n\"Zane's got it all figured out. Except for the fact that my hands have killed more men than his eyes have seen. He has no idea what I'm capable of when I'm pissed off.\" Roman replied.\n\n\"And let me guess my brother, you're pissed off right about now?\" Quinton asked. His question was simply answered with a stare that he had only seen Roman give a few times before. Indeed...he was pissed off.\n\n\"They left nothing behind.\" one of the Hunter Elites said as Vladris helped him search through everything. The third Elite had suffered several gunshots and was sitting in the floor near the bed of the room, grimacing with pain.\n\n\"I know where they are heading. At least I will.\" Vladris said, holding the receiver of a tracking module in his hand, the glow of pulsing red running through it. \"I just want to know who were are dealing with,\" Vladris added, turning to his wounded brother who sat in the floor. \"Will you make it?\" he asked. \"In time. The gunshots were dead on but I will heal.\" the Hunter Elite replied, doing his best to stop the bleeding of a nearly foot wide hole that gaped into his chest.\n\nThe Elite Knights possessed the ability to heal quickly, tissue regeneration only one of many Hunter traits. They were damn hard to kill, and the Elite sitting in the floor with a grin of pain had four gunshots attesting to the fact.\n\nTheir voices were easily heard by the approaching Colonial strike team, which walked with light steps into the direction of the room. Its door stood wide open, bloody footsteps leading them from the carved bodies of both Stage and Primal to their current location. The Husk gently pulled the blades from their backs, slowly bringing them to a ready and hoping not to alarm the Hunter Elites. They had no such luck. Vladris heard the silent but distinguishable sound of steel sliding against leather as the Husk unsheathed their blades.\n\n\"At arms!\" Vladris yelled, though one of his Elites was in no condition to fight. Both Vladris and his battle ready soldier pulled their blades with just enough time to meet the Husk on even terms, steel clanging against steel as every one of the warriors fought for survival.\n\nHunter Elites were the top of the food chain. That said, Husk were damn worthy opponents and in numbers they were slayers of Hunters, no matter the breed. The Elite who continued battling previous gunshot wounds slowly made his way to the same fire escape Adam's group had used to flee less than an hour before. A Hunter Elite fleeing was practically unheard of, but catching the sight of a full strike team led by Goliaths in the hallway, the demons knew there was no victory to be had.\n\n\"Get him to the shuttle!\" Vladris yelled. \"We will track them from the air!\" he added loudly, motioning his able Elite to pull the injured out of the window and onto the fire escape.\n\nMeanwhile, Vladris held his Vampiric fashioned blade above his head at a slant, daring the three Husk who circled him to make a move. They knew the dangers of fighting an Elite, even with three to one odds the Husk were over-matched. The equivalent of three finely trained attack dogs circling a Lion. What they didn't know, however, was that they stood before the top Hunter Elite. A fact they would soon learn the hard way.\n\nThe first Husk dashed in, his blade thrusting in front of him. A solid move against most, but not Vladris, who easily slipped past and cleaved his own blade into the shoulder of the beast. The Husk painfully screamed as the small bones of the shoulder area and attached tendons snapped unmercifully. Vladris quickly pulled his warm, salty steel from the Husk flesh, swinging it around and plunging it into the stomach of a second Husk. The beast like warrior immediately dropped his blade, a look of death slowly pasting into his eyes. Only Samuel remained, and he had promised to give his life for Sarah Blaine if need be. He was ready to do just that, though it wouldn't be on this day. Golaiths stormed the room, letting loose a wave of death worthy lead into the direction of a fleeing Vladris.\n\nSarah entered with the remainder of the strike team. She wanted to desperately search for Adam, but her first concern was that of a dying warrior. The Husk who had been cut from shoulder to chest sat in the floor, slowly bleeding out as his life flashed before him. Sarah knelt with him, doing her best to comfort the dying beast, an act that only grew stronger the loyalty of the remaining Husk. Never before had he seen such compassion for his kind by a human being.\n\nNormally the Husk fought beside humans who paid them well and discarded them from thought afterward. Yet Sarah's face told a different story. She cared for the dying Husk as though they were her own children. She was a leader worth dying for, the Colonial cause a noble one and that was reason enough to convince his people to follow her.\n\n\"Rest easy my brother, this is an honorable death. Your attacker will soon join you by my own hands.\" the remaining Husk said.\n\n\"Thank you my lady, I will sit with him. You find the one you love.\" the Husk said with great respect.\n\n\"Is he?\" Sarah asked.\n\n\"No, he's not here. They were though.\" Lassiter replied.\n\n\"How do you know?\" Sarah asked with hesitation. Lassiter held up a half empty bottle of rock whiskey, the preferred drink of Dalton James.\n\nSarah began to laugh a bit, relieved at least that they were alive and well.\n\n\"How will we find them now?\" she asked, looking to Lassiter for some kind of comforting answer.\n\n\"I overheard one of the Hunters say they would track them using a location device. The same kind of location device I had our men plant on the Hunter's shuttle before we entered the hotel.\" Lassiter replied with a grin, holding a small receiver with a luminous blue glow.\n\nSarah breathed a bit easier, knowing eventually she may once again lay eyes on Adam Michaels and simply nodding to Lassiter for his quick thinking.\n\n\"The bad news is when we do catch up to them, we will be seeing more of the killers who caused such quick death of two Husk warriors. I just hope we have enough firepower to fight them off again.\" Lassiter said.\n\n\"You let me worry about that.\" the remaining Husk said, approaching them with the blood of his own race on his hands and a look of revenge in his eyes.\n\nAs Lassiter and the Colonial soldiers cleared the hotel room, Samuel helped Sarah to the safety of the doorway.\n\n\"My lady, I am sorry that we failed you.\" the Husk warrior said regretfully. Rather than reply, Sarah simply broke down into tears.\n\n\"Sarah are you alright?\" Lassiter asked as he hurried back to the room's entrance to find the source of her sadness.\n\n\"These warriors died for me. Died because of my love for Adam, I can't live with that. People are dying because of my mistakes!\" Sarah said regretfully as she sobbed loudly.\n\n\"My lady, the Husk and Hunters live to slay one another. If these warriors would not have fallen here, eventually they would have fallen to Hunters somewhere. We are bred for this, to die in battle is the greatest of honors.\" Samuel said.\n\n\"At least we know Adam made it out alright,\" Lassiter said. Seeing the thought bring comfort to her as she smiled a bit, Lassiter walked closer. \"We know they had to leave in a hurry too, not like Dalton to leave good liquor behind,\" he said as Sarah began to laugh with emotional relief. \"Don't worry, we'll find them soon enough. At least you know Adam's still alive.\" Lassiter added. In Sarah's heart she already knew he was alright.\n\nThis was Adam's world, he made a living escaping with his life. He was a smuggler, and a damn good one at that. Her fear would be his unwillingness to even listen to her pleas as she laid her heart out in front of him. She had to be able to convince him of her true sincerity, otherwise Sarah would have to live out the remainder of her life without him. She wasn't sure that was even possible.\n\n\"It's gonna be tough,\" Quinton said as both he and Roman stood in the shadows of piping near the prison ship's landing bay. \"I'm counting fourteen of 'em, including Zane,\" Quinton added. \"All abundantly armed and waiting for us to try and take the landing bay.\" he added.\n\n\"In other words it's a fair fight.\" Roman replied.\n\n\"Yea, something like that my brother.\" Quinton replied, smiling a bit as he turned to his fellow terrorist. Before they could put any type of plan into effect, the ship began to shift abruptly.\n\n\"What the fuck?\" Quinton asked with shock. \"Looks like Zane's men have taken the control room,\" Roman replied. \"So what's the plan now?\" Quinton asked.\n\n\"Same plan. When that prison transport docks, we gotta be sure that we have control of the landing bay. Otherwise we are going to be stuck on this floating jail a lot longer than expected.\" Roman replied.\n\nThe two men moved a bit farther back into the shadows as a six man group of Gali prison guards rushed by and immediately opened fire into the direction of Zane and his men. Heavily outgunned, the six guards soon began to fall back, not that it would matter. More of Zane's men flanked their position and cut them to shreds with a hail of gunfire within only minutes. Knowing well enough that there was no chance of winning the fight in front of them, Roman and Quinton both remained in the shadows. The sight of dead prison guards being looted reflected back to the cutting pupils of Roman Raines, who did his best to memorize the face of every murdering bastard before him. Eventually their time would come, and when it did Roman would do his best to make sure he was a part of it.\n\n\"This shit 'aint gonna work Adam.\" Dalton said sarcastically as he stood there, dressed in a stolen guard's uniform. It was a snug fit, but manageable. His concern was the fact that they had decked Whiskey out in a guard's shirt as well.\n\n\"Relax.\" Adam said as he and Sasha both wore the same uniforms.\n\n\"Relax?\" Dalton said in a stunned tone. \"How the fuck are we supposed to explain a dog wearing a prison guard's shirt? Hell, the badge on the front is dragging the ground!\" Dalton said loudly.\n\n\"Just tell them it's a K-9 unit or something to that effect.\" Sasha said, turning to Adam as they both began laughing.\n\n\"I 'aint telling 'em shit. If it looks like they 'aint buyin' it then I'm gonna start shooting.\" Dalton replied angrily.\n\n\"Trust me. They are going to smell whiskey on your breath long before they catch a glimpse of the four legged variety.\" Adam added as Sasha burst into full blown laughter.\n\n\"Damn smart ass.\" Dalton replied, covering his mouth and nose for a moment before blowing to test Adam's theory.\n\n\"Relax, the hardest part will be passing as a prison transport shuttle with Benzan markings all over the outside of our ship,\" Sasha said as she began the landing sequence. \"I'm shocked they haven't hailed us by now, the landing bay is sitting wide open. May not buy any of this.\" she added.\n\n\"They don't have to buy anything for long, we don't have a single prisoner. Just land, look official when you exit and then start letting lead fly. Hopefully catchin' their asses off guard will be enough.\" Dalton replied as Sasha guided the ship onto the path of flashing red lights which lay on the prison ship's deck.\n\nRoman's attention was immediately taken by the sight of the transport shuttle to the left as it began entering the ship's landing bay.\n\n\"When it touches down, wait for the guards to exit the shuttle and then we make a run for it. Kill anything with a heartbeat, but do not stop running.\" Roman said.\n\n\"Got it.\" Quinton replied.\n\n\"Wait for them to exit and then spring the trap.\" Zane said as he stood with two of his men who were decked out in Gali prison guard outfits, while almost two dozen armed prisoners waited patiently inside of the room which controlled the landing bay doors.\n\n\"Here we go.\" Adam said as the shuttle touched down and a mixture of grey steam and smoke blew underneath its frame. Sasha followed Adam out of the shuttle door, walking slowly down the ramp as they skimmed the landing bay with an observant eye.\n\n\"How many did you bring us today?\" Zane asked as he approached.\n\n\"Actually we come bearing room for one more.\" Adam said quickly, pulling his gold plated pistol of Benzan craftsmanship and firing the first shot with such speed that Zane and his men still had no idea what was happening.\n\nHis shot surgically pierced the shoulder of the man to the left of Zane, rendering him defenseless as lead passed through the backside of the wound. As Zane and his remaining follower pulled their weapons to the ready, Sasha instantly cut Zane's other loyal friend down, her machine gun pistol tearing both cloth and meat as the man fell down in gripping pain. Outnumbered, Zane caught a glimpse of both Roman and Quinton sprinting for the ship from the corner of his anger ridden eye.\n\n\"Now!\" he yelled as armed prisoners flooded from the landing bay control room in all directions.\n\nLooking up to the shuttle entrance, Adam quickly extended his free hand, catching a fully loaded shotgun which had been tossed by Dalton. Nodding his gratitude, Adam turned and began firing shot after shot into the crowd of armed prisoners. Meanwhile, Dalton remained crouched at the entrance of the shuttle with a Benzan bolt action sniper rifle in hand.\n\n\"Take that ya' little bastard.\" Dalton mumbled as he fired a steadfast shot which instantly dropped one of the armed men. Whiskey remained near the shuttle's cockpit, waiting until the gunshots ceased and it was clear to leave.\n\nRoman was a reaver of men. It didn't matter their aranment or skill, he was simply unmatched when it came to blood letting and moments like these only added to his mounting legend. The combined movements of his Gali rifle and guard's baton allowed him to easily make a path through those who remained standing. Quinton did most of his work by way of rifle, zipping hot lead into the wall of guilty flesh before him.\n\nIt wasn't long before Zane's ranks had thinned and the thought of mortality began to set in. Dalton and Whiskey both exited the ship slowly as they joined their group during the last seconds of the gunfight.\n\n\"No, that's Roman!\" Adam yelled as Sasha pulled her pistol up and into the face of the former terrorist, not recognizing the man who had endured months of hell.\n\n\"Apologies my friend.\" Sasha said, slowly lifting the pistol away from Roman Raines, while continuing to use caution around the warrior's Black Cell brother.\n\n\"I told you I'd be back.\" Adam said proudly, answering the look of gratitude cast by Roman. Through all of the turmoil, Zane managed to gather himself from the floor, sprinting quickly out of the landing bay as his heavy feet clanged against the grated steel deck of the hallway.\n\nRoman thought long and hard about everything he had endured on the Gali prison ship. The food, the guard induced beatings, the inhumane living conditions and the fact that he had started to lose hope. He had truly started to believe that Adam and the Gunship crew had left him for dead.\n\nNone of that mattered now as Roman stood there, continuing to stare at the Captain of the most loyal group he'd ever been a part of.\n\n\"You're a man of your word.\" Roman finally said, extending his arm to shake the hand of Adam Michaels.\n\n\"I told you I would be back.\" Adam said again, proud of the fact that he was able to pull it off.\n\n\"Didn't say you would have Hunters right behind you though.\" Roman replied as everyone turned to see a Hunter distinct shuttle entering the landing bay.\n\n\"Ahh fuck,\" Dalton yelled, smacking his leg frantically and whistling until Whiskey began to run back to their position. \"Get them little legs running!\" Dalton added, crouching for a moment to coax Whiskey into moving quickly.\n\n\"Shit! Must have placed a beacon on our ship back at Arch City.\" Adam said with disgust.\n\n\"We better move now.\" Roman said sternly, motioning the group to follow him down the narrow hallway and into what would be no less than a hornet's nest of guards and rioting prisoners exchanging gunfire.\n\n\"See you lost a little weight and picked up a new friend.\" Dalton said jokingly as the entire group jogged slowly into a storage room. Filled with large wooden crates, it would be the perfect place to dig in and make a last stand if it came to that.\n\n\"This is my brother Quinton. As far as the weight, well I'm sure you all have noticed my lack of chrome.\" Roman said calmly, though his mind had already drifted back to the prison doctor barbarically pulling the meshed steel from his flesh.\n\n\"Your brother? You mean there are two of you?\" Dalton asked, stunned by Roman's statement.\n\n\"Many more than just two.\" Quinton said, a bright smile painted onto his face.\n\n\"I hate to break up the honeymoon here, but it would be wise to knock off the small talk and find cover. We don't know how many Hunters we are dealing with.\" Sasha said, the thought of Hunter Elites still fresh in her memory.\n\n\"She's right. Not to mention the entire prison ship is in a full scale riot. Guards are scattered and the prisoners are armed and on the hunt for us both,\" Roman replied. \"I'll take the front with Quinton.\" Roman said as both of the Black Cell members positioned themselves crouching behind a desk at the entrance to the room. Sasha waited quietly, hoping in her heart that Adam would position himself with her.\n\nIt would give them the perfect chance to be alone, and even under such stressful circumstances her heart felt so many different emotions for the true to his word smuggler. Their kiss in the rain still haunted her every waking moment, she wanted to live in that kiss forever.\n\n\"Dalton, you and Whiskey hide behind something. If we are going to die, I want to do it with my crew.\" Adam said, quickly joining Sasha as they took up residence in the corner behind a forklift type vehicle.\n\nAs Vladris stepped off of his shuttle slowly, gothic black boots striking the ground, the void pupils of his eyes skimmed the perimeter of the room. Quickly joined by his hell hound, who's ears skimmed the area for sound. Their keen senses instantly heard multiple gunshots being exchanged throughout the ship, but a prison riot was of no concern to him. Seeing out the execution of the last remaining Benzans were his only priority. Having left Arch City to regroup with more of the undead murderers, he turned to motion the rest of the group. Two additional Hunter Elites slowly exited the craft, followed by three of the less dangerous Hunter strain.\n\n\"Stay here and hold the landing bay until we return.\" Vladris commanded of the three Hunters as he turned and walked into the narrow hallway under escort of two more Hunter Elites.\n\nSoon the three ultra killers had disappeared from sight, taking with them only precision pistols and articulate swords of destruction.\n\nNearing the storage room, the Hunter Elites were taken off guard by a group of equally surprised prisoners. Heavily armed, the startled prisoners began to open fire without regard, clouds of bullets floating through the narrow confines of the hallway. In a normal scenario, six heavily armed men might stand a chance against a single Hunter Elite. But this was far from a normal scenario.\n\nThree Elites in close quarters led to a speedy slaying of the six prisoners, their flesh gouged to the bone and spines severed from the body. The screams and pleas of the prisoners being mutilated could easily be heard by Adam's group, which was positioned nearby in the storage room. They tried to remain focused, though both Adam and Dalton were horribly reminded of so many friends lost during the first Glimmerian War.\n\nThe screams of a dying man who is unready to go sound the same, no matter the killer or pleading man. The screams always sound the same. And that was a sound that both men had witnessed so many times first hand, a sound that made the skin of both men crawl. Told him not to that that fuckin' job. Dalton thought as they nervously waited.\n\nWith their jet black armor coated with the crimson splatter of blood and boots drenched in it, the Hunter Elites kept moving forward, stopping to glance in each room. Roman Raines was prepared to die to get his friends to safety as he clinched a combat blade in one hand and riot style shotgun in the other. They had came back for Roman and shown a type of loyalty that he had never known, and he wasn't about to let them die in front of him. He glanced at his Black Cell brother for a moment, turning to nod his appreciation one last time to Adam before moving his attention to the door. Vladris and his two skilled slayers stopped for a moment, looking into the room with malicious intent before taking fire from the end of the hallway. A three man group of prison guards held a riot shield and fired piercing rounds from an automatic sniper rifle. Hitting one of the Elites with multiple shots, the monster fell to the deck in agonizing pain. Sprinting to their position quickly, Vladris and the other Elite made short work of the guards, butchering the men into afterlife.\n\n\"It's important to me that these people make it to safety my brother,\" Roman said with a grave tone as Quinton looked at him solidly. \"They are good people. They don't know about our cause, but they are like family to me as well.\" Roman added as Quinton nodded slowly.\n\nRoman stood quickly, motioning the group to the door as the Hunters turned to exit the hallway.\n\n\"We gotta go now and pray they didn't leave many behind to guard the shuttles.\" Roman said.\n\n\"I'll take point, Quinton will watch the flank.\" he added. The group quickly ran out of the storage room and backtracked into the direction of the ship's landing bay.\n\n\"Well, there goes that idea.\" Dalton said as the group sprinted into the landing bay, quickly gaining the attention of the three Hunters left behind. As the Hunters contacted Vladris and his group by radio, Roman dropped his pistol to the ground, reaffirming his grip on the combat blade.\n\nHunters considered themselves to be at the top of the food chain, and when they were challenged by blade wielding cattle, they were quick to answer the challenge. The Hunters quickly drew their swords, impressions of both skulls and demons engraved into the pewter handles of the weapons.\n\n\"We got this.\" Roman said with thirst on his breath. Quinton was quick to join as Dalton tossed him a well built Glimmerian combat blade.\n\nAdam and the remainder of the group stepped back to watch the fight begin, ready to move to the shuttle quickly in the rare case of victory. They could have easily opened fire onto the Hunters, but there was a code of honor among all warriors in the Skyla System, no matter the flag.\n\n\"Be ready to bury some Hunter ass just in case.\" Adam said as the group quickly readied their weapons.\n\n\"All this shit and I still gotta buy my own damn drinks.\" Dalton said jokingly, though Adam knew him well enough to understand Dalton was trying his best to disguise fear. There was a good chance that every single one of them would die right here, the map of their lives drawn to a conclusion in this very landing bay.\n\n\"I've killed a Hunter Queen, you grunts aren't shit to me.\" Roman said insultingly, bringing anger to the faces of the immortal soldiers of death.\n\nThey were some of the best warriors ancient civilizations had produced, and now there was a feeling among everyone here. The best warriors of days gone by facing the most skilled warriors still mortal. While Adam and his crew were stunned at the former Black Cell member's statement, Adam was the only one to think it through. That's why he had been running. That's what led them to meet for the first time, and why the Hunters wanted him dead so badly. Sasha was the first to notice what the rest of the group quickly caught sight of. Three Hunter Elites. Walking into the landing bay, one seemed to be reeling from gunshot wounds slightly. Vladris looked at the group, especially the Benzans as he paced back and forth, dragging the tip of his blade across the floor. They would wait until the current fight was finished before blood letting, but wanted the group to see the sword which would end their lives.\n\n\"You're up next and you motherfuckers aren't walking out of here alive.\" Roman said bluntly, pointing his blade into the direction of Vladris, who quickly shifted his attention to the Black Cell terrorist.\n\n\"Your terrorist group has caused much grief for our people. Acts that you will soon be apologizing for by the edge of our blades.\" one of the Hunters said.\n\nTerrorist group? Adam thought as he watched Roman's movements, perfectly choreographed with those of Quinton.\n\nHe wondered how much he actually knew about Roman Raines. What kind of criminal had he been harboring aboard his ship since day one? It didn't matter, Roman had only been a good person since that day. That's what counted in his book. Especially since all of their lives depended on the skill of Roman and Quinton at this very moment.\n\nThe first Hunter made its move, lunging at the men with life ending intent. His sword was quickly parried away by the boot of Quinton, who threw a bone rattling elbow into the jaw of the beast. As he began to lunge to the wounded Hunter, Roman surprised all by spinning and burying his blade into the face of another Hunter, catching the beast off guard and ending its life in the same motion. Firmly planting his boot onto the chest of the lifeless Hunter, Roman pushed its carcass from his blade, bringing fragments of cartilage and bone with it.\n\nShrieking from anger, Vladris began to pace with purpose, his eyes focused onto the mortal man who had made such short work of the perfect species. While the injured Hunter staggered to gain his senses back, the untouched Hunter dashed for Roman with its blade extended. Side stepping the monster, Roman mockingly kicked it in the back, using its own momentum to push it to the ground. He glanced at Vladris for a moment before turning to slash the reeling Hunter who had made an attempt to attack him from behind.\n\nSlashing the stomach of the Hunter, Roman quickly gave a second slash that filleted the beast from waist to shoulder and then arched a stab which plunged into its back. The dying Hunter screamed before Quinton kicked it directly in the face, jarring several teeth loose from the dead Hunter's mouth. As if Vladris wasn't enraged enough, Roman spit onto the body of the dead Hunter to insult their race.\n\nScreaming with fury, Vladris unbuckled his armor piece by piece, throwing it to the ground with conviction. His pale white skin was fully exposed, throwing every bit of armor from the waist up onto the ship's deck. He wanted to end the life of Roman Raines, and do it without the aid of armor. Stiffening his body up for a moment, Vladris displayed muscle tone matching his skill with a blade. Both in plentiful supply.\n\nRoman and Quinton circled the remaining Hunter slowly, swagger filled steps from both men who waited for the perfect opportunity to strike. It was a feign from Roman that grabbed the Hunter's attention, but the blade of Quinton that ended the Hunter's life. Roman playing decoy just long enough for his Black Cell brother to thrust the shimmering blade deep into the spinal area of the Hunter, twisting the steel bluntly before pulling it upward and spilling the intestines of the creature. The two brothers had made short work of three Hunters and now stood covered in blood as well as anticipation. Vladris was obviously calling the shots, as well as very important to his people; which made him a marked target to the Black cell brothers. \"He's mine.\" Vladris said commandingly as his curved fingernail directed his finger into Roman's direction.\n\nAdam's entire group remained speechless after watching the two brothers make such short work of three Hunters. Finding no suitable words to describe what his eyes had just witnessed, Adam simply gave a look of awe as Quinton made his way over to stand with the group. It was well known that dogs had a dislike for the Hunter race, a fact that had come to fruition because of the Hunter Elite's uncanny ability to turn both humans and animals into undead themselves. Whiskey hid behind the ramp of the crew's shuttle, watching the battle unfold in vivid black and white detail. Meanwhile, Roman and Vladris walked a slow circle, neither warrior removing eyes from the other.\n\nVladris wielded a longsword, an advantage that Roman had quickly countered by wielding a second combat blade. The shimmering silver blade his brother had used only moments ago, now sitting in Roman's second hand. The idea of Roman fighting with a combat blade was testament enough, but when he held two blades the Gunship's crew could only try and imagine the possible destruction which could soon follow.\n\n\"When I cut the soul from your body, I will show your organs to your friends as they too lay dying.\" Vladris said calmly, dragging the tip of his sword a bit as both men continued to circle.\n\n\"Got it all wrong fang man. When this is over, my friends and I will be leaving on that shuttle, and you will know that your sense of immortality was false, that you were nothing more than a mortal masquerading as an elite warrior.\" Roman said, stopping to face the Elite.\n\nJust like the instant of sunlight filling a landscape, Roman dove at Vladris with both blades extended. Stabbing at the Hunter, Roman continued to thrust the blades down as he landed beside the Elite. Using his massive forearm to block the forearms of Roman, Vladris used his sword bearing arm to lay both fist and iron across the face of the Black Cell warrior, knocking him onto his back several feet away.\n\nThough quick to his feet, the nagging sensation of pain shooting throughout his face remained. His sight blurred by throbbing red as trace amounts of blood mixed with sweat and fell helplessly into the whites of his eyes. Such a punishing measure of blunt force trauma usually rendered his foes helpless, and Vladris was impressed with the zeal of Roman Raines, even if he was a man marked for death. Quinton started to intervene, but Adam quickly grabbed him, shedding light on the fact that two move Hunter Elites stood at the ready, their rifles drawn.\n\n\"Come on Roman, dust that 'sumbitch!\" Dalton yelled, knowing deep down that in hand to hand combat Roman was the best shot they had at walking out alive. His motivation was quickly prolonged by the barking of Whiskey, who remained hidden near their shuttle.\n\nRoman began to reflect on everything in his life up to this very moment. His family murdered at the hands of the Hunters, Black Cell being wiped out by the blood sucking bastards and how he felt alone in the Skyla System. Alone, other than Adam and the crew of the Gunship, a group that took him in and treated him like part of the family. He would be damned if he let them fall dead here at the hands of three Hunter Elites.\n\nAs Vladris jumped in for the kill, his blade struck metal, bouncing off of the grated deck of the ship as Roman spun quickly and split the ribs of the Hunter Elite wide open. His blade easily filleted the dead flesh of the mighty Elite, shocking the immortal if nothing else. He was only wounded, still Vladris was more taken back by the thought of a normal man giving such fight to a Hunter Elite. He had not been given a wound of this magnitude in several decades, if not longer.\n\nVladris staggered a bit, sword hanging down by his feet in one hand while the other covered the newly carved flesh wound. \"He always did prefer the blade!\" Dalton said, the idea of him possibly living to see another day exciting him. Wasting no time, Roman dashed in with incredible speed. Though not incredible enough. Vladris instantly used the hand covering his wound to grab the neck of Roman Raines and pull him into the air, looking into the eyes of such a dedicated warrior as he searched his soul. Seconds later, Vladris plunged his massive sword into the chest of Roman, lifting him into the air a bit higher by the length of his blade as he shook the life from the departed warrior.\n\nRoman Raines was dead. After cheating the afterlife so many times before, Roman was finally ended. He lay there on the blade of Vladris, blood gushing down to its handle as Roman glanced at Adam a final time as if to apologize.\n\n\"NO!\" Quinton yelled, running to the aid of his dying brother in arms before being hit with the unforgiving fire of a Hunter rifle. The bullet made a clean pass through the shoulder of Quinton, who lay on the floor suffering from both flesh wound and grief of the soul. Adam was fast to pull his pistol coated in gold and fire six shots, providing enough cover until he could grab Quinton and drag him behind the control booth of the landing bay.\n\nSasha opened fire, letting a swarm of angry lead loose with intention to kill. The Hunter Elites were faster than both normal man and normal Hunter however, dodging the gunfire long enough to seek cover of their own.\n\n\"Hold them back while I turn him!\" Vladris said, laying Roman's lifeless body onto the deck in front of him and pressing his hand firmly to the dead warrior's chest.\n\nSeveral minutes passed as both groups continued to exchange gunfire, when finally Roman's body began to show signs of the transformation. Opening his eyes slowly, the most noticeable trait was the milky white pupil of his eyes, a clear sign that the Hunter Elite's venom had done its job.\n\nRoman had become one of the undead monsters that he had spent a lifetime hunting down. He was now the enemy, a fact that Adam and his crew had yet to discover. As fanged teeth began to slowly push their course into Roman's mouth, his previous wounds reversed; healing themselves in only a matter of moments.\n\nAdam was the first to notice, quickly joined by the others. A Colonial marked shuttle making its approach into the landing bay. They were outgunned and not long removed from a painful death at the hands of Hunter Elites. Still, Adam's world seemed to stop as the Colonial shuttle slowly touched down onto the deck, steel connecting with steel. Standing there without breath or words, the grip of Adam's revolver loosened as he held the pistol at waist level by his side. His eyes had not caught sight of Sarah Blaine, but his heart already knew. His own death was no longer of any concern to him, just seeing her one last time.\n\nBullets continued to zip strategically through the air as Dalton and Sasha remained focused, exchanging gunfire with the Hunters. The Colonial strike team was first to exit the ship, closely followed by Lassiter. Sarah Blaine walked slowly down the ramp under the heavy escort of two Goliath soldiers and her loyal Husk warrior Samuel. Her own eyes immediately locking onto those of Adam Michaels. Sasha slowed her own gunfire, glancing deep into the heart of Adam as Dalton's shotgun continued spending large shells, its shooter cursing in the process.\n\nSarah nervously ordered her own Goliath escorts to the fight in an attempt to save Adam and what remained of his crew. The mechanical warriors quickly sprinted across the long deck of the landing bay, passing the Colonial strike team just before arriving to the fight. A fight began to ensue of epic proportions, the Hunter Elites holding their own against such an incredible force.\n\nWhen Roman rose to his feet, it wasn't obvious to most that he was a Hunter. Or that it was even Roman Raines. So many bodies were slaying, firing weapons and yelling that the confusion distracted almost everyone from the fact. Almost everyone.\n\n\"Roman's a goddamn Hunter!\" Dalton yelled loudly, nearly stretching the beard from his face in the process.\n\nWhiskey began to bark without pause, Dalton holding him back with a free hand by his collar while blindly firing his shotgun with the other.\n\nAdam and Sarah continued a stare of fate. An unspoken communication of sorrow, apology and above all, forgiveness. The stare was finally broken by Adam as Dalton's words rang true. Adam turned abruptly, looking over his shoulder as Dalton sprinted past. Already having thrown his weapon to the ground, he was now carrying Whiskey with both arms and running as fast as he had since boot camp more than a decade earlier.\n\n\"Roman's a 'mutha fuckin' Hunter!\" Dalton added wildly as he ran past.\n\nAdam caught sight of him. Roman stood there at the side of Vladris, the warrior's skin already beginning to turn chalk white. While his eyes milked over to merely void of any color, Roman could still see unhindered. His first sight being that of his brother in arms laying dead on the deck of the ship. His heart continued to feel. And his hatred remained. His hatred for the Hunter race. He reflected back to a time when he was a young child, the Hunters slaying his family as he stood helpless. As he watched Dalton sprint away, Adam and Sasha preparing for their own deaths and the Hunters pushing to them, Roman remembered two important things. His new family was still alive and at the mercy of Hunters. And he was no longer a helpless young boy.\n\nRoman turned to glance at Vladris momentarily, quickly following with a witching backhand that put the leader of the Hunter group to his back. Adam had drawn his pistol, but didn't fire. Instead his body fell into shock as he held his hand out, leading Sasha to quit firing her weapon as well. The remaining Hunter Elites and Goliath units both turned their attention to the newly born super killer. Roman's freshly clawed handed swiped with intent, gouging the throat of an Elite, ripping with it vital organs for survival as the Hunter fell face down. One of the Goliath units had aim on him, its rules of engagement clear. Leave no Hunter standing. However its mechanical arm was violently jerked from place, sparking wires flashing as the swinging arm now held by Roman planted flush into the face of another Hunter Elite. As the Elite stumbled back, his head was aggressively pulled to its side, snapping the neck of the so called immortal.\n\nRoman's flesh was hit several times by the stout slugs of the remaining Goliath's chain gun, only hurting enough to enrage the newly turned monster. Roman jumped onto the mechanical work of art, butchering him quickly by ripping away the parts needed for operation. Both Adam and Sasha stood silent, not knowing where their friend's heart was at by this point. They were both prepared to shoot if need be, though it would have little effect.\n\n\"Roman's a goddamn hunter!\" Dalton screamed, finally making his way to Sarah, Lassiter and her large Husk protector.\n\nSamuel had drawn his sword, standing in front of Sarah Blaine in case his destiny ended here.\n\n\"Did you hear me? I said Roman's a...\" Dalton yelled almost like a screaming child before turning to see the wake of destruction in the near distance.\n\nVladris stood to his feet, his hell hound having backed off a bit and watching from the shadows. He had taken the time to turn Roman Raines, given the man a gift of immortality and now he would have to end the man only recently turned. Vladris drew his sword slowly, walking in a circle as Roman turned to face him. Both had been great warriors in days gone by, in a previous life led by mortal standards. Both had life ending skills now that were unmatched by anyone, alive or otherwise. It was unheard of for a Hunter to turn on his own kind by free will. And though Vladris was shocked at the mortal will of Roman Raines, he knew only one Hunter Elite could walk away from what would be a barbaric display of slaying in the moments to come.\n\n\"Go my brother. It is not your day to die,\" Roman said in a low but stern voice. \"Tell your Queen I will be coming for her soon enough.\" he added.\n\n\"You do not dictate my fate or that of our Queen.\" Vladris replied, his sword still at the ready.\n\n\"Search your soul, it will tell you otherwise. Your Queen is weak, I have seen it. She relies on the true warriors to do her work. Go back and tell her I am coming. There will be a place for you in the future.\" Roman replied, acknowledging that Vladris had given him the gift of life.\n\nVladris knew Roman's words were true. He had known for a while that his Queen had grown arrogant, weak even. As his mind stuck to the fact, he soon found himself more concerned about dealing with a substandard Queen than slaying Roman Raines.\n\n\"Our day will come soon enough,\" Vladris said, pointing his sword directly at Roman before backing away slowly. \"Scucca...come!\" Vladris added, motioning the hell hound to him.\n\nInstead, Scucca slowly approached Roman Raines, sitting down at his feet and making public his new owner. Scowling at his recently lost pet, Vladris glanced back to Roman. \"Soon.\" he said, his stare never faltering. Moments later Vladris turned to slowly jog away, into the shadows which led to the heart of the riot.\n\nAdam and Sasha both stood there silently, trying to make sense of Roman having become one of the immortal Hunters; not to mention Sarah's arrival. \"So are you still Roman enough that...\" Adam had started to ask as Roman turned to them both.\n\n\"Don't worry. I'm not going to kill you.\" They both breathed a bit easier, approaching him with a great deal of caution.\n\n\"Good. Didn't much feel like getting killed. At least not today,\" Adam said with a grin, his words never phasing Roman. \"With just a little time I'm sure the Colonials can fix this. Have you back to normal.\" Adam added. Roman turned directly to him, the newly born Hunter Elite only feet away from both Adam and Sasha.\n\n\"I'm not going back. This is the end of our journey together.\" Roman said. \"There has to be something we can do to help you.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"I don't want to be helped. I am what the Hunters fear now, and I will bring their race to its knees. Don't try and stop me, it's taking everything I have this very moment to suppress the Hunter inside of me.\" Roman said abruptly, his voice altered a bit with demonic dialect.\n\n\"I'm not trying to stop you Roman. You're my friend, hell you're like family to me. I just want what's best for you. That's all.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"Then leave me be. You once told me I was free to leave, and now I am. Adam, it's taking everything I have left inside of me to not continue killing here. The Hunter side of me is strong. It's not safe to be around me now.\" Roman replied, a man torn between immortal and mortal in his eyes as they began to tear slightly.\n\nThe biggest battle to come for him would be the battle within.\n\nAdam understood. His friend wasn't leaving because of a lack of friendship, he was leaving because of his deep respect for the crew. It was for their own good.\n\n\"Well then, It's been an honor.\" Adam finally said calmly, extending his arm. Roman fought it.\n\nThe inner urge to kill for the sport of it, an urge forced onto him by the Hunter DNA. His soul was still strong, at least strong enough to extend his own arm and shake hands with the Captain of the Gunship.\n\n\"Goodbye old friend.\" Adam said as Dalton yelled loudly, clapping his friendship and gratitude.\n\n\"Until we meet again.\" Roman replied, quickly breaking his grip and turning into the direction of the Hunter shuttle that Vladris had arrived in, hell hound following closely behind.\n\nAs Adam watched Roman pull the Hunter shuttle from the ship's deck and slowly exit into the backdrop of stars, it suddenly hit him. Sarah Blaine was waiting. Adam quickly spun around, his eyes locked onto the stare of Sarah as she stood by the Colonial vessel. Dalton cautiously began making his way back to Adam and Sasha, this time forcing Whiskey to follow on foot. After several deep moments of exchanging apologies through their stare, Adam turned slowly to Sasha.\n\n\"Go Adam.\" Sasha said with regret.\n\n\"But I don't know what I'm supposed...\" Adam replied, unsure of which woman held his future in their hands.\n\n\"The look between you both just answered every question I had. I love you Adam Michaels, and I want you to be happy no matter what. So go, please.\" Sasha replied.\n\nAdam wanted to plead with her, maybe ask for time to think things through. Deep down he knew that his time was up. He had to choose between his love for Sarah Blaine or his possible future with Sasha Riley.\n\nSarah stood there, her beautiful red hair swaying slightly as tears filled her eyes. She had prayed for a second chance with Adam, her one mistake having forced her into nearly a year of regret.\n\n\"Just tell me what we had was real Adam? That's enough for me.\" Sasha said. A lie of course, she loved Adam from the pit of her soul. But she wanted him to be truly happy and had seen a look between Adam and Sarah that was undeniable.\n\n\"More real than you will ever know.\" Adam replied, nodding as he slowly turned to begin walking to the woman who had waited so long for the return of his embrace.\n\nSarah began crying a bit from happiness, her hands shaking as she prepared to once again hold the man of her dreams. Meanwhile, Sasha started to cry just slightly, her Benzan toughness standing in the way of her true feelings.\n\nAdam had walked nearly mid-way when he stopped for a moment, realizing that these last fifty or so feet would lead to the rest of his life. Everything he was, everything he would ever be was tied into this very decision. It was in that single moment that he felt it. He thought about a life without Sasha Riley and his breath evaporated, body numb from the thoughts of leaving her behind. He had felt this way about Sarah Blaine as well, but not anymore. As he looked into Sarah's eyes, he knew she would be best loved through the memories they had shared.\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" Adam said in a very faint voice as he stared at Sarah for a moment, turning back to Sasha and moving with a touch of haste.\n\n\"I forgot one thing,\" Adam said as he walked close to Sasha. \"I can't live without you,\" he added, holding a hand out as he waited for her own. Sasha immediately burst into heavy tears as her heart tried to make sense of things. \"My life changed the moment we kissed in the rain. I care for Sarah, and I always will. But I love you. I've loved you every since the moment we first kissed, and I can't go back from that. I just can't.\" Adam added, grabbing Sasha tenderly into his arms.\n\n\"I'm not the leader of a mighty military force Adam. Honestly, I don't even know where my life will go from this point forward.\" Sasha said, her body trembling as Adam continued to hold her with a comforting calm.\n\n\"I don't care. I just want us to go there together.\" Adam replied.\n\nSarah Blaine stood there, devastated. Her life had just been ripped from her from only fifty yards away.\n\n\"Get her onto the shuttle. Fire up and wait for me.\" Lassiter said commandingly, the Colonial Husk nodding and slowly helping Sara Blaine up the ship's ramp.\n\n\"Roman's a fucking Hunter.\" Dalton said as he approached Adam and Sasha locked into an embrace.\n\n\"Yea, I'm well aware.\" Adam replied, both he and his lover giggling a bit.\n\n\"I told you not to take that job Adam. I told you.\" Dalton added as the two lovers laughed a bit harder, locked into a poetic glance of destiny.\n\n\"Enjoying yourself?\" Lassiter asked with a wise tone as he approached Adam.\n\n\"Roman's a fucking Hunter,\" Dalton replied, Lassiter answering with a stone carved gaze. \"Well he is.\" Dalton added, walking away a bit to allow Lassiter time to speak.\n\n\"No hard feelings here Eric.\" Adam replied, finally pulling his arms from holding Sasha in order to face Lassiter.\n\n\"Sarah is back there right now crying her very soul out because of you.\" Lassiter replied harshly.\n\n\"No sir, she's crying because of the mistakes in our past. I care about Sarah a lot, but I can't live in the past. I have to move on.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"Yes. You do. All of you need to move on.\" Lassiter said.\n\n\"Now what the fuck is that supposed to mean?\" Dalton asked with ill manners.\n\n\"It means you all better move on, far away from Glimmeria and as far away from Sarah as you can possibly get. I won't watch her go through this kind of pain for someone hardly worth the effort twice.\" Lassiter replied.\n\n\"Well now,\" Adam said, stepping within inches of Lassiter's face in order to look him dead in the eyes. \"May want to word things with a bit more caution. We aren't in your usual Colonial comfort zone at the moment.\" Adam added. The Colonial shuttle fired its engines, loud torque nearly overwhelming the shouting conversation taking place.\n\n\"No, you're not in Colonial space at the moment. But if you ever venture into it again, I won't put you in prison. That would bring too much pain to Sarah. I'll just have you executed without her ever knowing. Are we clear?\" Lassiter said loudly.\n\n\"Are you threatening...\" Adam said, his question sharply cut off by Lassiter drawing a pistol and pointing it into their direction.\n\n\"Crystal clear,\" Adam replied, motioning Sasha, Dalton and Whiskey to turn and head for the Benzan shuttle. \"Oh and just so we are clear, it's a two way street,\" Adam said, turning to face Lassiter one last time. \"If I were you, I'd make sure this was the last time you ventured outside of your Colonial comfort zone.\" he added, turning to accompany his friends to the shuttle.\n\nIt would be the last time Sarah Blaine would see Adam Michaels through human eyes, watching him enter the Benzan shuttle doors through a window on her own ship. Her Husk protector lay dead as Vladris approached her slowly, his hand extended with clawed fingers gripped her chin.\n\n\"You have fought the Legion valiantly, an effort that is worthy of immortality.\" Vladris said, his voice both calm and demonic.\n\nSarah cried softly, her mortal life about to come to an end as Adam's ship began to pull from the deck; losing both her love and mortal life in the very same instant.\n\nMoments later as Lassiter watched the Benzan shuttle leave distant site, he turned to the Colonial ship, only to watch it pull swiftly from the deck. He wanted to yell at the top of his lungs, wanted his ride to hold long enough for him to get aboard. However the shuttle quickly left, a trail of orange fumes scattering behind by way of full burning thrusters. Seconds later he fell to his death, multiple rifle shots plunging into his thin frame as guards had once again taken control of the prison ship.\n\nRoman's shuttle slowly fell from the clouds on the planet Cres Nine, along with a heavy rain as the Hunter designed shuttle quickly approached for landing. It was a well known gangster hideout, one that Roman had deep ties with. And it was on the moon planet that Roman would begin building his new family. The Roman Empire. A family that would become large enough to stand against the Hunters and their Queen, at least if Roman had his way. The newly born Hunter Elite smiled a bit as his shuttle slowly approached through a curtain of rain, his dagger-like teeth showing crisply as Roman extended his arm down to pet his loyal hell hound.\n\nAs the Benzan shuttle pulled down for its landing on the small mining planet of Antillia, Dalton looked from a window, secretly hoping their faces weren't recognized for events that took place nearly a year before. They had met Roman, beaten several officers of the law and robbed a table full of patrons at gunpoint. Whiskey sat beside Dalton, his head of tangled fur laying on the man's lap as Dalton continued his train of thought.\n\nNormally he was excited when landing here, even if only to refuel. Paulie's was here, and piss poor drink aside, they at least had a stockpile of it available.\n\nThis time was different though. Dalton's mind wasn't on the alcohol. He watched Sasha sit on the lap of Adam Michaels, their overwhelming love for one another very obvious. Dalton was sick and tired of the Hunters. He was tired of running, tired of the Colonial war effort and had started to wonder if there was a Sasha out there waiting for him. How would he ever know if he was constantly on the run from a nation of undead. And now Roman was a fucking Hunter too.\n\n\"Guess now is as good as any time to tell you Adam. I plan on staying here when you two pull out.\" Dalton said with a serious tone, one he rarely used. Sasha turned first, quickly standing to her feet and offering to take the controls so Adam could talk to his friend.\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Adam asked quickly as he walked to the rear of the shuttle to sit with his friend. \"I know the loss of so many friends has taken its toll.\" he added.\n\n\"That's what has me thinking,\" Dalton said with a touch of sorrow. \"Running all the time, the war. It's not my fate man.\" he added.\n\n\"Come on man, this will pass. You and I are like brothers.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"We are brothers, in every sense of the word,\" Dalton said as he turned back to Adam. \"Which is why I need you to understand, something else is out there waiting for me. I can feel it.\" he added. A moment of silence fell throughout the shuttle as both men dealt with the inevitable. Dalton was leaving Adam's crew to go his own way.\n\n\"I gotta find my Sasha. She's out there somewhere and between you and me I hope she has just as nice of an ass. She doesn't have a sister does she?\" Dalton asked in a hushed tone as both men laughed a bit.\n\n\"I'm not ever going to find her running from the Hunters or fighting this damn war. Hell, I never wanted any of this. I did it because I think so much of you.\" Dalton added with much more seriousness attached to his words.\n\n\"I understand,\" Adam replied with a solid head shake.\"At least let me buy this round of drinks at Paulie's as a thank you.\" Adam added.\n\n\"Damn straight. Hell, if I knew it took leaving to get my drinks paid for I woulda' done it a long time ago.\" Dalton replied with a wide grin. Adam just laughed a bit, putting his hand onto the shoulder of Dalton out of gratitude, petting Whiskey for a moment as he turned to make his way back to the pilot's area.\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" Sasha said gently as Adam sat down beside her, the shuttle on its final moment of landing.\n\n\"No need for that,\" Adam said, reaching over and holding her hand. \"I make it a rule not to feel bad for the end of things, but rather happiness that I ever had a chance to experience them,\" he added. \"Besides, this is hardly the end. Just the end of a single chapter in what is going to end up being a long story.\" Adam said, turning to face the love of his life.\n\nAdam, Sasha and Dalton sat at their usual table in Paulie's bar the entire night. Talking about friends lost and experience gained. They laughed for the most part, though a little crying followed when talking about the life and death of Kelly, Steiner and Kato. Adam also found the time to tell the story of Luck one last time, which prompted Dalton to order another stout drink. The laughs continued as though they were family, Whiskey sitting directly at Dalton's side with the best display of loyalty imaginable.\n\nIt seemed blurred into a single night, though several nights later Dalton sat at the same table. Drinking and laughing by himself as Whiskey stood in the same spot by his feet.\n\n\"That guy? The homeless one at the rear of the bar?\" Cambria asked of the bartender as they both stood there, staring at the broken man tightly tucked into his brown coat.\n\n\"That's the one. Knows more about smuggling than everyone else in here combined. Be a big help to you all.\" the bartender replied.\n\n\"Well he looks down on his luck. May be able to hire him at a fraction of the going rate.\" Cambria said.\n\n\"Down on his luck? This son of a bitch is buried under the casino.\" Tank replied.\n\n\"Guess if we plan on smuggling, this is what the future holds for us one day.\" Skulls added, his loose fitting leather clothing moving just a bit.\n\n\"The hell it does. Not me, I got too much game for that.\" Tank added as they all watched Dalton pour a bit of ale onto the floor for his loyal dog.\n\n\"Wish me luck.\" Cambria said, taking the rest of her liquor in a swift shot before slamming the small glass to the bar and standing to make her way to Dalton's table.\n\n\"Mind if I sit?\" Cambria asked politely.\n\n\"Darlin' with hips like yours, you can do whatever the hell you want to.\" Dalton replied with a grin.\n\n\"Alrighty.\" Cambria said with a smile, slowly placing her perfectly sculpted body onto the small wooden chair. Barkeep says you are the man to talk to about hiring onto my crew. If I can buy you a drink and...\" Cambria said confidently, cut off abruptly by Dalton.\n\n\"I'm in.\" he replied.\n\n\"You're huh?\" Cambria said, taken back by his willingness to work a job he knew nothing about.\n\n\"I just hit on you and instead of the usual slap to the face, you smiled. After which you offered to buy me a drink. I'm in. Consider me hired.\" Dalton said.\n\nCambria smiled a bit, still trying to read the man wrapped in a lipstick stained coat of brown armor.\n\n\"Care to know what my crew plans to do? What your job entails?\" Cambria asked.\n\n\"Don't matter much either way, I've done it all. And twice if it was fun the first go 'round.\" Dalton replied with a grin.\n\n\"Alright then. Order whatever you want and when you are done here, just head outside. I Captain the \"Outer Heaven\" and her crew,\" Cambria replied softly. \"I'll tell the barkeep to put it on my tab.\" she added, standing slowly and noticing Dalton's eyes shift from her own to her perky breasts.\n\n\"Will do Captain,\" Dalton replied as she smiled a bit and turned to walk away. \"Now there goes a real damn woman right there Whiskey. She let me flirt with her, looks good as hell and even bought the booze. This could be love.\" Dalton said in a low voice as he watched her ass bounce slightly, making her way back to be seated at the bar.\n\nWhiskey barked loudly, gaining the attention of Dalton.\n\n\"Bullshit. I done laid claim to her, find your own.\" he added, looking into the sad eyes of his lust filled pooch.\n\n\"What'd he say?\" Tank asked as Skulls looked on.\n\n\"He's in.\" Cambria replied, motioning for another shot of Paulie's finest.\n\n\"Nice. So he knows we plan to smuggle?\" Tank asked.\n\n\"Nope.\" she replied.\n\n\"Well he at least knows we plan to work in The Drifts, right?\" Tank asked.\n\n\"Nope.\" Cambria replied.\n\n\"Well what in the hell did you tell him?\" Tank asked in disbelief. \"Nothing, I just bought him a drink.\" Cambria said, glancing back at Dalton who seemed to be in a deep discussion with his loyal dog. She saw a playful charm about him, almost child-like. She also knew seconds after meeting him that when it was on the line he was the type that would get things done. Exactly what their crew needed. She turned her attention to the window behind the bar, watching the rain fall elegantly onto the ships outside, including her own. The adventure of the Outer Heaven was about to begin, and though she had no idea where smuggling would take them, she looked forward to every moment of it.\n\n\"So I don't understand why we are coming back here if I pulled a gun on two of Kraid's most trusted?\" Adam asked as Sasha piloted the shuttle down onto the snowy surface of the Benzan home world.\n\n\"Benzans have disagreements all the time, you are still one of us and...\" Sasha said, catching sight of bodies laying all over the ground and partially covered in snow.\n\nAdam saw her grief instantly, taking over the controls as Sasha began to cry loudly. These were her people, and from the looks of it most had been slain by the Hunters. The shuttle touched down onto the crisp snow of a nearby field as Sasha hurried to the exit of the ship.\n\n\"Wait.\" Adam said, unable to stop her from making her way outside. He slowly exited to see Sasha standing there, crying as the snow fell from above. Hundreds of bodies lay slain on the ground; nothing short of a massacre.\n\nAdam walked up behind Sasha slowly, placing his climate jacket onto her and wrapping both arms around her waist tightly.\n\n\"Let's resupply, refuel and get out of here. I'll take care of everything, you need to get back on the shuttle. No need to see this.\" Adam said.\n\nAs his words hit the cold of wide open air, Adam and Sasha both caught glance of someone opening the lodge door, prompting Sasha to begin running into its direction. Adam had started to ask her to wait, but instead pulled his sidearm and sprinted behind her; knowing full well she wouldn't stop either way. It was a woman in the doorway of the lodge, a Benzan woman.\n\n\"It's Sasha and Adam!\" the woman said loudly.\n\nThe Benzans inside, which included the women, children and five heavily armed escorts, lowered their weapons as Sasha and Adam entered slowly.\n\n\"What happened? Where is Kraid?\" Sasha asked as Adam tried to catch his breath, not used to the cold planet's air. A few of the Benzan women began crying as one of the escorts shook his head, letting Sasha know Kraid had been slain by the Hunters. It took several moments to sink in. Her former lover and the leader of her people was dead. A vast majority of her people lay slain in the bloody fields of snow right outside and it was only a matter of time before the Hunters returned.\n\n\"We need to go. Now. The Hunters will send a return party to scout the planet, and if we are here they will end us.\" Sasha said, trying to appear calm.\n\n\"Go where? We have nowhere left to run.\" one of the soldiers replied, feeling bad for his slain brothers while a bit lucky that Kraid had selected him as one of the few to protect their women and children.\n\n\"There is something. I need the escorts to come with me, the rest of you pack any kind of supplies you can. Weapons, food and anything vital to survival,\" Sasha said, the survivors taking a moment before dispersing to collect any needed supplies. \"Come.\" Sasha said as Adam and the five Benzan soldiers followed quickly behind.\n\nTheir shuttle had flown for less than ten minutes when Sasha descended it back onto the frozen tundra of their homeworld. \"It's here. Something Kraid had been working on with a few of his closest,\" Sasha said. \"In case of an emergency, and I think this qualifies.\" she added.\n\nAs they all exited the shuttle slowly, Sasha led them into what looked like a large cavern. The first thing that stood out to everyone was the cavern had an open view to the snow filled sky above. Then, their attention quickly shifted to the reason Sasha had brought them here. A ship. A very large ship, which seemed to be outfitted with capable weapons. It was a pale shade of black, the words North Star painted onto the front.\n\n\"Kraid said it would hold a few hundred people if need be. Its navigational unit has information on another existing Benzan colony,\" Sasha said, turning to the group. \"But it's a travel into uncharted space. A long trip from what little Kraid spoke of it.\" she added.\n\n\"Why have we not heard of this before?\" one of the soldiers asked of the large ship.\n\n\"Because he planned to leave you, as well as most of the other Benzans behind in the event of emergency. It's the reason he and I parted ways,\" Sasha said, glancing at Adam for a moment. \"I could not be with a man who thought so little of our people. Every single one of you is important to me, and you will be important to the Captain of the North Star. Adam Michaels.\" she added.\n\n\"Captain?\" Adam asked, stunned.\n\n\"Yes. You are the only surviving Benzan that bears a golden weapon, signifying Captain. And if any of you take issue with the fact, let him speak now and remain behind to fight the Hunters on his own.\" Sasha said, turning to the soldiers.\n\n\"No. We have no issue with Adam as the ship's Captain.\" one of the soldiers said, all five showing a loyal face to the smuggler.\n\nAs the group of soldiers boarded the Benzan shuttle to return to the survivors, Adam and Sasha stayed behind to prep the ship; as well as make love in the most romantic fashion imaginable. Their souls became one for the next several hours aboard a ship that soon would embark on its quest to find other Benzans.\n\nA perilous quest, but one that not only had to be taken in order for their kind to survive, but one that both Adam and Sasha looked forward to. They would begin a life together without a war pulling them down or the thoughts of ex-lovers hindering them. Completely free to love and live their lives. Adam held Sasha softly in his arms as the Benzan shuttle arrived once more, full of survivors on its first of many trips to come; the lovers helping the surviving Benzan women and children aboard their new home. At least their new home for a long time to come. They would all escape the clutches of a war torn solar system...though they would soon fall into the clutches of yet another. One much more brutal.\n\n\"Speak to me of your failures! Who is this you dare bring before your Queen?\" Victoria shouted as Vladris and Sarah Blaine approached with purpose.\n\n\"Your successor.\" Vladris replied sharply, pulling his blade with speed and slashing upward; Victoria's severed head rolling onto the stone floor of the throne room. Victoria's two stationed guards rushed to her aid, seconds later joining her in the afterlife as the blade of Vladris bit sharply into the core of their flesh.\n\nHis unmatched skill with a blade would soon enough be put to the test by Roman Raines. However, there would be no test today. Vladris knew as well as every Hunter in the palace that he was the Elite of all present.\n\n\"My Queen,\" Vladris said, kneeling as Sarah Blaine slowly sat down in the throne chair, her skin having quickly flushed to little pigment as the Hunter venom was doing its job. She was as beautiful as ever, even if undead. \"I will protect you with my life from this moment forward.\" Vladris added.\n\n\"Good. Rise warrior, we have work to do. Together.\" Sarah said, her voice having changed drastically from serene to unnerving.\n\nAs Vladris walked through the palace, he did so with resolve. He knew that Sarah Blaine would be a strong Queen. Someone finally worthy of his unwavering loyalty. Entering the living area of the Hunters, dozens of them catching sight of him, Vladris threw Victoria's severed head to their feet. \"Let any of you who would stand against me do so now,\" Vladris said, drawing his still pulsating sword, a crimson fluid running down the edge of it. \"We have a new Queen. A much stronger Queen. Either you agree to bow before her, or you stand against me and we settle the matter right now, in true Hunter fashion.\" he added, daring any of them who were brave enough.\n\nSeveral minutes later he entered the throne room once more, nearly fifty Hunters behind him as they all knelt to their new Queen. \"The Hunters before you are the very strongest. We are loyal to you my Queen. The others will follow without question.\" Vladris said.\n\n\"Rise warriors. For now we begin our rise to power.\" Sarah said calmly, bringing a grimacing smile to the face of Vladris and the rest of the Elites, including Kraid.\n\nThe union of Legion and Theron forces had pushed General Ortega's soldiers to their breaking point. Tameca City was nothing more than smoldering wastelands as Lord Riven forced his army forward, his attempt to end the assault against their regime. He was nearly successful and knew it. He felt it in his bones as they had formed a massive group outside of the large warehouse that General Ortega had secured the wounded refugees. Lord Riven's feeling of victory instantly turned to nothing more than the black smoke that rose into a sky full of Gali war ships. Help had arrived for what few Colonial soldiers that remained. And the Gali had spared no expense, throwing every able bodied soldier into their effort as the sky quickly blackened out, ships blocking every speck of sunlight and landing with haste.\n\n\"Sir, help has arrived!\" Lieutenant Scott yelled loudly, prompting General Ortega to join the refugees as everyone looked through the dingy glass windows and places where windows once sat.\n\nThe Theron began pounding their weapons into the sky, though their best effort did little to slow the Gali as ships began landing, full of troops with hearts full of payback. They too had seen the horrific video feeds broadcast from Tameca and arrived bearing no offer of quarters. They were there to execute every single person involved with the Legion, Theron descent or otherwise.\n\nAs the young man who had listened to General Ortega stepped up to a small window of his own, he saw them. The huge Husk warriors exiting their shuttles by the hundreds, firing chain style machine guns as they cut through the Theron soldiers; exposing them for the cowards they were. General Ortega was given his first communication since being left on Tameca's surface. Paul Lassiter was dead and Sarah Blaine was missing. Effectively leaving Ortega in charge as the ranking Colonial officer.\n\n\"Sir, we have captured the Legion's leader.\" Lieutenant Scott said following several hours of widespread gunfire throughout Tameca city. Ortega nodded, though his thoughts remained with Adam Michaels. General Ortega knew in his heart that Adam had killed Lassiter and taken Sarah Blaine. Soon enough the search for Adam Michaels would begin. However, the battle at hand was his first priority. Ortega glanced around the room, looking into the faces of the refugees who had lost so much. Family, homes and lives. They had been crushed.\n\n\"Sir, where should we take him for processing?\" Lieutenant Scott asked as two Colonial soldiers held Lord Riven in restraints. General Ortega looked into the eyes of the soulless man, the person directly responsible for such a massacre.\n\nColonial code would call for a trial by jury, a lengthy legal fight to convict a person who had been responsible for such war crimes. But Colonial code was of little concern to General Ortega, who would soon become Commander. As everyone in the room looked on, General Ortega drew his sidearm and fired a single shot, hitting Riven between the eyes and removing a great portion of the back of his skull in the process. \"The shallowest grave you can find.\" Ortega replied, his soldiers dragging the corpse outside. It was soon strung up for all to see, a reminder to everyone that justice had prevailed and Tameca was, and would always be, a world where free people lived.\n\nAnd that's how the story of the original Gunship crew would end. At least a story of how their time spent together would end. For each of them it was just the beginning. Fate had placed them onto their own paths to destiny. Roman had become immortal, and his agenda now included ending as many Hunters as possible. Adam chose the love of Sasha, and together they would begin a journey of their own. One that would introduce them to something horrific and devastating. Sarah took her place as the rightful Queen of the undead, soon to launch a full scale war against every mortal being in the Skyla System. And Dalton found another job. One that included a visually breathtaking Captain and free drinks. It would present him and his faithful pooch with plenty of opportunities to tell the stories of his life so far. Including his favorite, the one where Roman was a fucking Hunter.\n\nBook 4\n\nGears And Spears\n\nGeartown\n\nAnd there he sat. Dalton James. A veteran of several wars and several bars, both the drinking and incarceration type. He wore a heavy brown duster as testament, if nothing else, to his storied life up until this point.\n\nHe was a smuggler, and moving illegal merchandise through space while skirting the authorities had both an upside and a downside.\n\nFor the past decade he had worked for his good friend and former military comrade Adam Michaels.\n\nAfter the first Glimmerian War they decided that no man in political position would ever force them to live out another day, choosing instead, to fetch a ship and begin the black market work of great risk and great reward.\n\nAnything they could do to earn a living, they did it. Every cargo hold of illegal merchandise moved, led to connections on the wrong side of the law. And with each underhanded deal they pulled off, their reputation grew. By the time the older model Gunship, one that the Glimmerian government leaned heavily on during the first war, was fully staffed with crew; they had become notorious.\n\nSuch notoriety led to a job offer from the Hunter Clan, a sadistic group of Vampires who were both wanted and feared. Offering a huge payday, Captain Adam Michaels took the job, double-crossing the Hunters a short time later. He had fallen in love with his cargo, Sarah Blaine. And the direction his heart led him, also led the crew through violent times.\n\nEventually they went their separate ways. Various reasons, of course, but Dalton's reasoning was simple. He was sick of running from the undead. A near death experience has a way of making a man feel alive, even if it includes bullets flying into his direction. But so many near death experiences, sometimes on a daily basis, has a way of wearing down even the best of men.\n\nDalton had reached the point of wanting something more. A peaceful calm, if nothing else. And so he left the Gunship, and her crew, setting off onto his own path in search of his own destiny.\n\nA destiny that was sure to include his running mate Whiskey. The four legged bucket of fleas was Dalton's best friend. Whiskey was a good ear to talk to, had a stomach for alcohol and even a way with the ladies. They wore matching brown coats, and together would take on the Skyla System, one shot of hard liquor at a time.\n\nThe former soldier turned smuggler quickly found himself hired by Cambria Sims, Captain of the Outer Heaven. She was brilliantly beautiful from head to toe, shocking blue hair and cream white complexion only further accenting her perfectly sculpted curves.\n\nShe had offered him a paycheck, even paid for both Dalton and Whiskey to get fitted for custom brown coats, rather than the bargain rack faux leather that currently covered their backs.\n\nIn exchange, Dalton would bring experience to a crew of faces that was fresh to the black market world of smuggling. Though none of that mattered to him.\n\nAll that mattered was the fact that they would no longer be running from the undead. Dalton had made damn sure of it, or at least he had thought so up until the moment his eyes caught sight of a poster that plunged into his heart like a chilled dagger.\n\nThe Outer Heaven had landed in the Drifts. A very primitive, yet extremely elegant string of planets on the fringe of uncharted space. A mixture of Victorian influence and steam powered engineering, its citizens had shunned the modern lifestyle of computers and thrust engines for wind-born airships and a luxurious, yet simplistic, style of living.\n\nDalton had considered it a paid vacation of sorts, going to stay a while in a much calmer enviroment while throwing a few brews back. But all of that changed as he slowly read the header of a poster hanging on the wall of the airship transport terminal. Do not provoke the undead.\n\nAfraid to ask, Dalton simply sat there. Stunned. As they waited for a transport from the terminal to Geartown, he continued to stare at the poster which had shattered everything he thought he knew about their upcoming trip.\n\nThe terminal was the one centralized location on the planet, and each Drift planet had one. Simply put, you landed your ship here and then boarded an airship. Hundreds of airships came through daily, each one stopping in even the most remote locations.\n\nSome of the destinations were large cities, Victorian styled skyscrapers peaking to the heavens with their clockwork shaped tops and brass accented artwork. Others consisted of dusty towns populated by colorful characters who had a curiously playful charm about them.\n\n\"Is he OK?\" Tank asked.\n\nHis God given name was Greg Shelling, but was soon handed the name Tank based on his unbelievable size. A bit taller than anyone currently sitting in the transport station, Tank was packed out in terms of muscular composition. His skin resembled a thin coat of dark paint as it stretched across his physique, barely able to contain the bulging muscles that were easily seen as he wore a solid green shirt with short sleeves.\n\nSkulls simply shook his head.\n\nTrevor Lagrange by birth, Skulls earned his name branding through the odd hobby he took so seriously. Collecting teeth, bones and severed fingers from the dead. Easy enough for him, because when the Salvation model sniper rifle that currently hung down by his side was in hand, people had a tendency of dying.\n\nSkulls resembled an undertaker at first glance. That is until you got close enough to see the solider in him, the wrinkles on his face merely a map of battles seen and horrors lived; at which point you wished he were merely an undertaker.\n\nHis rifle was a very unpopular model, the bolt action considered outdated. But Skulls preferred the weapon because it had pinpoint accuracy when looking through the large telescopic lens mounted on top. It was a very elegant weapon in his mind, and a well respected rifle among snipers.\n\nHis stringy hair flowed from beneath a dark top hat, mushrooming out a bit in the back and falling wildly down between his shoulders. Loose-hanging black leather clothes covered the body of such a tall and thinly boned man. And for such a strange Human, vanity was important, regularly slicking his black pants with grease to create such an obvious luster.\n\n\"Dalton. Are you crying?\" Cambria asked with shock.\n\nDalton didn't reply, though his eyes remained crisped with tears. He simply continued his stare onto the poster warning those entering the Drifts of the undead. Zombies you could call them, though citizens knew them as Drifters.\n\n\"It's alright. They aren't a common sight, more like cattle if nothing else. They are mindless and without intention.\" Cambria said in an attempt to calm Dalton a bit.\n\n\"They're undead,\" he replied, fighting back tears of rage as he bit into his lower lip. \"I'm tired of the undead. So fucking tired of people that should be taking a dirt nap trying to put my ass six feet under.\" he grumbled.\n\nWhiskey gave a long and deeply pitched whine. Even the charismatic dog had seen his share of immortals.\n\n\"Best bite your lip because our ride is here.\" Tank said with a bit of chuckling mixed in as he stood up and began watching a large airship swoop down to them.\n\nIt was the typical transport airship, nothing more than a large and elongated hot air balloon; cabin area below constructed of metal with luxurious wooden trim.\n\nDalton gave a look of ill intent as he also stood to his feet, his stomach turning into knots as he glanced one last time at the poster warning of Drifters.\n\nEverything about the Drifts came across to him as being outdated. Even the very poster which currently had his attention, reminded him of an old military poster. Bold words at the top with a poorly colored sketch below.\n\nBoth Skulls and Cambria slowly stood, the Captain putting her arm around the experienced smuggler for a moment.\n\nShe was from the Drifts, and to her, Drifters were just a common thing. A background detail, like snakes in a sand-filled desert or deer in woodlands. Even so, she tried to empathize with Dalton.\n\n\"We'll be fine. Trust me.\" she said with a poetic tone, her undefinable beauty helping to comfort Dalton.\n\nAs the airship slowly elevated back into the sky, heavier by a couple dozen passengers, Dalton found himself staring out of the thickened glass windows surrounding them and wondering exactly what he had signed up for.\n\nHe had known about the Drifts for most of his life, and honestly, up until now, hadn't cared about them one way or the other. In his mind, anyone who shunned technology deserved to live in huts made of dirt and grass. He had just thought them to be basic and written them off.\n\nThe impression he had gotten since arriving was different. Much different. Sure, they lived without the modern technology that the rest of the Skyla System coveted. But they did it in a very artistic way. Even the very balloon they traveled in now, was a helium filled canvas of linen. The fabric was almost a portrait of style, dark browns accented with gold flakes. And then it was pulled together and held into place by brass links of chain. As it wrapped around the balloon, the links locked together with a large brass medallion; a lion's head designed and pressed into the coin-style lock.\n\nThey were headed for Geartown and from what Dalton could gather, it was full of opportunities for a young smuggling crew. All kinds of people who had goods to move off world, and were willing to pay a smuggling fee in order to avoid having their goods so heavily taxed by local government.\n\nWith his frustration of the walking dead soon turning to anger, Dalton sat in the wooden booth-style seat and continued to look out across the clouds and thriving green pastures below. He quietly cursed the Drifts and their damn regulations on modernized weaponry.\n\nTwenty seven. That's the number of capable weapons he had to leave back on the Outer Heaven. If a shotgun fired too wide of a spread, it was against regulations. A digital counter on the side of a battle rifle, against regulations. Needless to say his grenades had been left behind as well, adding to an already pissed off demeanor.\n\nHe carried only two weapons at the moment, which was as close to naked in front of clothed women as he had been in a very long time. At least in public. A Magnum style revolver that held six rounds inside of a rolling chamber and would damn near cut a man in half, as well as a large buoy blade strapped to his leg that would complete the cut if his revolver failed.\n\n\"I wouldn't sweat it. Hell, I hear they hunt Drifters down here like big game man. We may throw a few beers back and go on the hunt ourselves.\" Tank said in a low voice.\n\n\"I 'aint huntin' shit,\" Dalton said loudly, gaining the attention of every passenger aboard the airship. \"Anything comes at me and can't recite the alphabet is getting shot up.\" he added, turning for a moment to glance across the isle.\n\n\"The fuck you lookin' at?\" Dalton asked belligerently as an older man with literate glasses and a finely pressed suit looked on.\n\n\"Calm down Dalton, you're scaring people.\" Cambria said, quickly sitting beside him.\n\nDalton wanted so badly to mouth off in response, but after catching sight of her beautiful face he started to realize that his soul began to ameliorate every single time she was near. So calm down he did. For the next several hours Dalton was silent, staring out of the window by his seat as the airship coasted passionately through the clouds.\n\nAs they made their approach, Dalton's first reaction was one of curious suspicion. When he had first met Cambria Sims, she stood out. Her loudly colored hair and choice of clothing style was refreshing, but out of place. Looking across the streets of Geartown as the airship landed softly, Dalton realized that he and Whiskey would now be the ones out of place. Every citizen he caught sight of looked unique. Women with blue, watermelon green and even neon purple hair walking abroad. Outfitted in corsets and carrying small umbrellas that were stitched of glamor.\n\nIt 'aint even fucking raining. Dalton thought as he watched the women, all who seemed overwhelmingly attractive to him, twirling their parasols a bit as they walked in Victorian-style dresses. The men he caught sight of, appeared to be the opposite for the most part. Tophats, aviator style caps of leather and even a few gas style masks. Most wore either Victorian influenced shirts filled with ruffle or sharp suits, complete with a pinstriped vest.\n\nHe knew deep down he was about to step off of the airship and into a world he knew nothing about. Usually comfortable in his brown coat, this was the first time he began to feel that he would have to shell inside of it a bit; do his best just to try and fit in.\n\nAnd he felt sorry for Whiskey as well, having to endure the same type of out of place awkwardness. That is until he glanced down at his flea-bitten friend only to discover Whiskey wearing a pair of oversized goggles. Tank and Skulls had placed them on the pooch, and the goggles seemed to have the perfect fit as Whiskey stared back at Dalton. Sad eyes now protected by clear lenses and rounded brass as he stood a bit more firmly, proud of both his brown coat and his Victorian specs.\n\n\"What the?\" Dalton managed to mutter as everyone stood to their feet ready to exit the airship.\n\n\"It's showtime.\" Cambria said playfully as she cast a warm smile into Dalton's direction.\n\n\"You call it showtime, I prefer go time.\" he replied in a low voice, glancing down to make sure his revolver was still holstered before breathing deeply and following the crowd off of the airship.\n\nGeartown wasn't nearly as large as Dalton had envisioned. It was in fact...a town, and a small one at that. The fact that so many people wanted goods smuggled off world held true. It's just that a majority of the citizens in and around Geartown favored the around part. Houses scattered throughout the croplands and wooded terrain that surrounded such a Victorian-style town. Still, Geartown had everything it needed; including a watering hole for those who preferred adult drinks.\n\n\"Trading Post?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"Yep. That's the name of Geartown's busiest building. Serves as a general store, mail dispatch, surplus shop and saloon.\" Cambria replied.\n\n\"I've never heard of a mail dispatch and saloon in the same building.\" Tank added as the group walked from the recently landed airship into the heart of Geartown.\n\nThey continued to skim the town with their eyes, each wrapping their thoughts around the same idea. If it weren't for the beauty, the damn near artistic perfection of the town around them, it would otherwise be a dusty town on the edge of nowhere. But the Victorian influence around them was obvious, as the gold flaked trim and brass accents of daily life in Geartown were simply marvelous to anyone who visited.\n\n\"At this point who gives a damn. She's buying and I'm drinking, don't really matter what sign is hanging from the front door.\" Dalton replied, a grin of long-overdue plastered onto his face.\n\n\"Well said.\" Skulls added, holding his bolt action rifle behind his neck.\n\nTank and Skulls broke from the group, heading into the direction of Geartown's finest, not to mention, only hotel; The Stage Inn. Meanwhile, Cambria, Dalton and a slightly promiscuous Whiskey made their way to the Trading Post. Dalton quick to notice that Whiskey was walking with a bit more strut.\n\nMust be the goggles. Dalton thought as the three entered the large building of wooden shingles and thick brown logs.\n\nDalton just wanted to fit in, maybe slip into the building unnoticed and hang out until they found a job and got their asses back into the familiar territory of space.\n\nHowever, as the three entered through a heavily creaking door, nearly forty people suddenly turned to see who had arrived. A shroud of unnerving quiet draped across the room as only small sounds of glasses connecting with wooden tables could be heard. Maybe it was Cambria's look of angelic sexuality. Possibly Dalton's rugged look of a poverty-stricken ranch hand. Of course, there was always a dog standing close, outfitted in a thick brown coat with large brass goggles to accent the look.\n\nBut the truth was it had nothing to do with any of the above. They had recognized Cambria Sims, and knew all too well her badly ended romance with Johnny Edmonds. The same Johnny Edmonds who currently sat at the bar looking into her tantalizing eyes, and the same Johnny Edmonds who had earned his nickname the hard way. The Revolver. He was by all accounts the fastest gun in or around Geartown and everyone knew it to be the truth.\n\n\"Welcome back.\" Johnny said as he rose to his feet, clapping loudly in the process.\n\nHe had everyone's attention, except for Dalton, who quickly walked past him and sat down by the bar.\n\n\"Double shot of your strongest.\" Dalton said quietly to the barkeep as he too turned back to watch the former lovers speak.\n\n\"When you told me you were leaving Geartown to live out in the black, leaving to find a ship and crew,\" Johnny said as he stood close to Cambria, their eyes interlocked. \"I had no idea you'd come limping back with a single buster and his homely looking bag of fleas.\"\n\n\"Let it go Johnny, we've been over for a long time now.\" Cambria said, noticing Dalton finishing the large shot of rum before standing to his feet.\n\nShe tried to motion Dalton to sit back down, but it was of no use.\n\n\"Yea Johnny. She went out and fetched her a real man. Aint' got no use for make believe cowboys anymore.\" Dalton said provokingly.\n\n\"Careful outlander. Best sit back down and put those lips on the rim of a glass before they get you killed.\" Johnny said as he continued to stare at Cambria.\n\n\"Only thing these lips are going to be on, boy, is that pretty little woman standing in front of you.\" Dalton said, earning a very strange look from Cambria in the process.\n\n\"Alright. You've had your chance, and now you gotta die.\" Johnny said as he turned slowly.\n\nDalton was the first to go for his revolver, barely raising it from his holster before Johnny's barrel was aiming down at him.\n\n\"Oh shit.\" Dalton said, stunned by the gunslinger's speed. He hadn't seen anyone that fast with a pistol. His good friend and former Captain Adam Michaels maybe, but even that was a stretch.\n\n\"Law says I'm within my right to cut you down right here where you stand.\" Johnny said as Dalton felt a sober panic flow through his rum tainted blood. \"But I'm not going to, I like your demeanor outlander.\" Johnny added, pulling his pistol down, holstering it once more with blazing speed and slapping Dalton on the arm a bit.\n\n\"Damn straight you're not.\" Tank said, hoisting his large shotgun up into the direction of Johnny as he and Skulls entered the building.\n\nImmediately, fourteen men stood to their feet, each pulling a sidearm and taking aim on Tank. Skulls was quick to pull his rifle as well, determined to take a few with him if need be. Reluctant to do so, Dalton finally pulled his revolver and held it to the face of Johnny.\n\n\"Everyone!\" Cambria shouted. \"Calm down! We just came in for a drink and a little down time for the evening.\" she added. \"Johnny, call them off!\" she said, her voice of soothing persuasion doing the trick.\n\n\"Do what she says boys.\" Johnny said, the large group of men slowly putting revolvers back into their side mounted holsters. Johnny then turned back to Dalton.\n\n\"I let you live because you are new here, won't be extending the courtesy twice.\"\n\nBoth Tank and Skulls kept their weapons raised as Johnny and his group slowly left.\n\n\"Gotta go anyway beautiful, taking a Drifter hunting party out tonight.\" Johnny said with a smile before turning to exit the large room.\n\n\"Well that was fun.\" Dalton said as he slowly sat back down and ordered another stout shot of rum.\n\n\"Point of interest,\" Tank said as he slowly sat down. \"The next time someone has that many armed friends, it would be helpful to know BEFORE I draw down on him.\" he added with emotion.\n\n\"Sorry, it all happened so fast.\" Cambria said with apology.\n\n\"Don't sweat it baby, I still love you.\" Dalton added as he slammed the shotglass down and gritted his teeth from the burn.\n\n\"Speaking of which,\" Cambria said as she slapped Dalton across the top portion of his arm. \"What is this about your lips being on me?\" she asked.\n\n\"Did I say that? I never said that?\" Dalton replied in an attempt to back out of his ill chosen words. \"Stay out of it!\" he added angrily as Whiskey barked loudly as if to turns state's evidence on him.\n\n\"Been a long time since we've seen anyone stand up to The Revolver.\" a woman with soft blonde hair said as she slowly approached Dalton, pink accents glimmering across her soothing flow of locks.\n\n\"Mind if I buy you a drink?\" she asked, Dalton turning to his crew with a hard look before turning back to accept her offer.\n\n\"Well, um, I gotta go find some more ammunition anyway.\" Tank said, standing to his feet slowly.\n\n\"And I should look into finding us work.\" Cambria said, slowly standing to her feet as well. Her lushly curved bottom reason enough for Whiskey to stand quickly, though his most important part was already standing to attention, watching her every move through the thick of his goggles.\n\nAs they waited for Skulls to follow suit, the sniper sat there, skimming the interior of the building. Cambria cleared her throat slightly as a suggestive hint, one that never struck home with the skilled killer. Shortly after, his chair was kicked hard by Tank, who motioned him away with a tilt of the head.\n\nSkulls looked at Dalton for a moment and shrugged before standing and following the group.\n\nAbout fucking time ya squatter. Dalton thought, before turning to the blonde with a manufactured smile painted onto his face. \"My name's Selina, and you are?\" she asked playfully.\n\nIn most cases a name meant something, stood for beliefs or heritage. Not to Dalton. In his mind a name was merely words strung together and tied snugly around curves and parts capable of sexual loving. Like a wool blanket. And just like a wool blanket, when it got wet it got clingy.\n\n\"I'm Dalton. Dalton James.\" he said with a grin on one side of his face, though he had indeed contemplated using an alias.\n\nAs Cambria and group exited the Trading Post, once again the Geartown normal seemed anything but to both Tank and Skulls. Glancing through the busy street of such a small town, Skulls noticed a majority of the townfolk glancing back.\n\n\"What's that about?\" Tank asked as he glanced up into the air, a tall wooden tower standing above the entrance to Geartown.\n\n\"Warning system of sorts,\" Cambria said after a quick glance, her explaination falling from such tender lips.\n\n\"If you hear the bell on that tower ring, means a Drifter is nearby. If you are unarmed they ask you to get indoors as a precaution while the sniper up there scopes and shoots.\" she added.\n\nSkulls glanced at that moment, uninterested up until the word sniper was uttered. He was damn good with a scope and knew it. Rightfully so, he was thinking of the art of sniping most times and when another skilled shooter was nearby, Skulls found himself feeling almost competitive.\n\n\"Is he any good?\" Skulls asked.\n\n\"Hasn't been a Drifter reach town before,\" Cambria said softly. \"But I'd say you're a bit better with a rifle.\" she added to calm the artifact of death collector.\n\n\"And here I was trying to calm Dalton down. How bad are these Drifters?\" Tank asked.\n\n\"They wander in close to town sometimes, but you were right to calm him. They are mindless and roam the badlands mostly.\" Cambria responded.\n\n\"Are you crying?\" Selina asked as Dalton indeed teared up a bit, quickly blaming it on the house liquor through hand motions.\n\n\"It's just that Roman was a good friend and now he's a Hunter. One of the walking dead and it's a hard pill to swallow.\" Dalton finally replied.\n\nWell this Roman sounds like a good enough guy. But the way you beat him in a blade fight and turned the Hunters away single-handed, that's amazing.\" Selina remarked.\n\n\"Thanks babe. It wasn't easy. All I had was a blade and a six-shot revolver, but eventually I sent about twenty of the bastards to the grave or running. Got bored with it all to tell you the truth, and that's when I found myself here.\" Dalton said, lying without reserve.\n\n\"In fact, I drew slow on Johnny on purpose. I wanted to see his hand to holster motion, so the next time we meet I'll be well prepared.\" Dalton said, further piling onto the heap of cattle shit verbiage.\n\n\"That's amazing.\" Selina said as she wrapped both of her near glowing arms around the waist of the brown coat wearing weaver of lies.\n\nAnd the day continued, falling slowing into the clutches of night as a fully starred sky draped above Geartown.\n\nThe Trading Post continued to see newcomers to its establishment as the daily airships and roar of a steam powered train brought more outlanders to Geartown. For such a small town, it was booming around the clock with brand new faces. Some in search of smuggling work, just as Cambria and her crew were. Others arriving for the thrill of the hunt, or even just to visit such a beautifully crafted society of simplistic living.\n\nYou could always pick the outlanders from a crowd as they stopped to see what the loud noise of the incoming train actually was. Geartown citizens had grown so used to the iron passenger train screeching into the heart of town that they continued with their routine without pause. For everyone else, the commanding sound of iron sliding recklessly on steel rails was piercing.\n\nThe train came complete with a shotgun toting soldier in the front compartment and a heavily armed rear platform. A gatling style mini-gun was mounted to the rear with four soldiers who stood heavily armed. The train, and others like it, made their way between Geartown and several other towns. Each separated by The Badlands.\n\nThe rolling hills of high grass and thick trees had earned its name for a reason. Drifters roamed, sometimes in groups of four or five through The Badlands, not to mention criminals. Gangs led by Johnny Edmonds and his type, and sometimes they felt the need to take a train by force; robbing its passengers, while stripping the steam engine of any valuable armor and weaponry.\n\nThe Royal Army, which was the military backbone of the Drifts, sometimes routed supplies through The Badlands as well. Of course they knew of outlaw activity in the area, but such an underfunded army was already stretched to its limit. And so the trains served as both a transportation system and armored supply vehichle.\n\nA couple hours after arriving, Cambria and her group had returned to the Trading Post, sitting at the far side this time in order to afford Dalton some personal space.\n\n\"I'll never understand what he sees in women like that.\" Cambria said as she watched Dalton continue his conversation with Selina.\n\nIt was at that very moment that Dalton casually slid his hand down to Selina's ass, prompting Cambria to adopt a look of disgust across her face.\n\n\"Well, if you don't understand, I'd be glad to explain it to you in detail.\" Tank said as Skulls chuckled a bit while Whiskey barked.\n\nEven the flea-induced warrior of a four-legged variety knew the game. And though Dalton was the one about to score, Whiskey knew that when he did, it put the smuggler into a great mood. Which meant a healthy leg of finely-cooked meat and possibly even some smooth hootch. A good complimentary prize to a long night spent swimming under cheap hotel linen.\n\n\"No, that's quite alright. Spare me the details.\" Cambria said with sarcasm.\n\nHer look of sarcasm quickly vanished, turning ghostly white as everyone inside of the Trading Post heard it. The warning tower bell rang once. Quiet fell through the building as everyone listened closely, a single shot firing from the sniper's rifle inside of the tower.\n\n\"Tessa 112.\" Skulls said. \"Accurate but weak, they should be using better.\" he added.\n\nNormally the bell would toll once more, letting the people of Geartown know that the Drifter was down and they were safe. But not this time. The bell began to ring continuously as several shots rang out from both the sniper's rifle and a shotgun held by the tower's other stationed soldier.\n\nPanic of the unknown quickly set in as everyone inside of the Trading Post stood up and began running to the door in search of answers. And answers they got, watching a group of Drifters climb the wooden tower while a larger and more coordinated group made its way into town.\n\nNearly two hundred of them total. Some of the citizens and outlanders began firing their weapons into the crowd of Drifters, while most simply fled as quickly as possible, sprinting for any building that was still located on the side of town the Drifters had yet to reach.\n\nAs the creaking of wood led to the large warning tower falling quickly to the ground below, Dalton grabbed Selina's arm.\n\n\"Stay here!\" he said with compassion. \"Everyone, stay here!\" he yelled, catching the attention of his crew and a handful of citizens who were ready to flee.\n\n\"Close those goddamn doors! Now! Get 'em locked up and start piling anything in front of the windows you can!\" Dalton yelled, knowing deep down if there was one place in town designed to keep people out, it was the Trading Post.\n\nIt didn't matter the planet, the town or the situation. Through his years of experience, Dalton had learned that society went out of its way to protect both money and hooch, putting them smack dab in the best location for survival.\n\n\"Hate the fucking undead.\" Dalton mumbled as he shoved a large table closer to the door.\n\n\"He's right,\" Cambria replied. \"This is the one building in town with all of the valuables. Thicker walls, doors and very few points of entry.\" she added, talking loudly as screams accompanied gunshots outside.\n\n\"Nothing to worry about my rosy red ass!\" Dalton added with anger, upset over another showdown with those who knew life after death.\n\nAs the majority of those few lucky citizens inside began pulling the furniture to the door, doing their absolute best to blockade the entrance, a heavy knocking came.\n\n\"Help me...please!\" a man cried out, continuing to relentlessly beat his fist on the door.\n\n\"Go on! Get! Gonna bring them 'sumbitches over here in hordes!\" Dalton responded with anger.\n\n\"Please, I have a child!\" the man replied.\n\n\"Ah shit.\" Dalton mumbled as he opened the door just slightly, catching sight of the man holding an infant.\n\n\"Move this clutter out of the way!\" Dalton yelled to those inside as he pulled his revolver to the ready.\n\nTank joined him at the door, shotgun in hand as they both waited for the citizens to once again move the heavy furniture. Dalton expected to see the undead as the door opened once again. He had studied the poster at the transport station, even heard the bell tower ringing.\n\nBut as the door opened to allow the man and his child a safe place to hide, Dalton's arm dropped down to his side; still holding the revolver in hand.\n\n\"Oh my God.\" he managed to push from his lungs as Whiskey stood at his feet, both of them witness to hundreds of Drifters killing citizens in the streets. Mutilating their bodies, climbing the exterior walls of buildings in order to reach windows and many of them pulled to the light that now shined outside through the open Trading Post door.\n\nAs a large pack began sprinting to the open door with unnatural speed, Dalton shakily pulled his revolver to the ready. Firing all six shots in succession, five Drifters fell to their deaths. Five headshots and one miss, not bad work in the pitch black of night while under the influence of alcohol.\n\nTwo Drifters remained as they continued their sprint of immortal fury. Dalton had nearly made it back inside when they were on him, infected teeth prepared to dig into his duster smothered flesh.\n\nThe first Drifter quickly became nothing more than dead flesh as Tank fired his shotgun, the Zombie's head dissipating into a fine red mist. The last remaining Drifter of the group lunged, though its entire body was nearly cut in half by a single shell fired by Skulls. The sniper had mounted his bolt-action Salvation rifle to a table at the far end of the Trading Post, using its front end tripod to balance the heavy weapon.\n\nThe gunshots had done away with the small pack, but gained the attention of every remaining Drifter; at least two hundred turning to sprint into the direction of the Trading Post as more of the undead arrived to Geartown. Yet Dalton stood for a moment, simply in shock at how many Zombies were closing in on them.\n\n\"Better,\" Dalton said, still holding his empty revolver. \"Better be getting inside and putting as much between us and them as possible.\" he added calmly, shock having numbed his usual panic.\n\nAs Dalton staggered back inside, Tank quickly secured the door and began helping the citizens pull the heaviest furniture back in an attempt to barricade themselves in. Dalton staggered to the bar, empty revolver in hand and hanging by his side.\n\n\"Are you alright?\" Cambria asked.\n\nUsually full of life and sarcasm, Dalton simply sat on a bar stool, grabbing a bottle of whiskey without even a hint of reply.\n\n\"Dalton. Are you alright?\" Cambria asked again, a bit more firmly as she sat down beside him on a stool of her own.\n\n\"Just fine.\" he replied calmly.\n\nCambria looked down at Whiskey long enough for the pooch to respond with a concerned bark, wet whiskers flaring wildly.\n\n\"Dalton. I need you to be alright. We all do. You are the only one here with enough military experience to see us through this.\" Cambria said.\n\n\"We're going to die.\" Dalton replied in a calm voice, throwing back a shot of the hellacious brown hootch.\n\n\"Hey,\" Cambria said, moving a bit closer while lowering her voice. \"I need you to be positive.\" she added.\n\n\"Oh I am,\" Dalton said as he took another shot. Screams of the dead began to blare throughout the Trading Post as dozens of Drifters beat and clawed the wooden door of the large building. \"I'm positive we are going to die.\" Dalton added.\n\nCambria stood up slowly, taken back by the submissive attitude of such a seasoned warrior. Maybe it was meant for them to die, no hope of surviving to speak of. Still, she knew someone had to take charge of the situation. At least give everyone the faint possibility of hope.\n\n\"Talk to Dalton. See if you can get his head back into the game.\" Cambria said to Tank in a low voice as the dead continued their quest to find a way indoors.\n\nCambria then turned her attention to Skulls, who's eye remained pressed to the telescopic lens of his rifle's scope.\n\n\"Good job staying focused Trevor. Just keep your eye on that door, you are literally our last line of defense if something goes wrong.\" Cambria said softly.\n\nThough Skulls acknowledged her statement, his eye remained on the scope. A few others stood near the door, their pistols at the ready. But even Skulls knew they would delay the Zombies, at best, if they somehow got inside.\n\n\"What are we supposed to do?\" Selina asked loudly, her words frantic as the noisy dead continued their job of trying to rip through the wood. Cambria turned to answer her, though it was a question in the minds of all sixteen surviving citizens.\n\n\"I...I don't...\" Cambria began to reply, sharply cut off by Dalton James.\n\n\"We need to collect as much damn firepower as we can find. Guns, ammunition and if it comes down to it we can even make a few Molotov Cocktails,\" he said, motioning to the large collection of man drink inside of the Trading Post. \"Need to put a bulk of our firepower at the door. It's the only way they can funnel in, and it's a strategic choke point in our favor.\" Dalton added as Cambria began to smile a bit.\n\nShe found her own mind easing as Dalton's extensive military background began to show. He was a lot of things, but the soldier of many wars is who she needed right now. They all did. And as Whiskey rose to his feet, standing proudly beside his best friend, Dalton smiled a bit.\n\n\"But the cocktails are a last resort. Got it?\" he asked as everyone near him nodded. \"Waste not want not.\" Dalton said as he glanced to the alcohol, and quickly back at Cambria who was smiling wide.\n\n\"Also be a good idea if we can get a small group to the roof of the building. Be able to assess how many there are and see if we can find a way out for ourselves.\" Dalton said.\n\n\"The train,\" Cambria replied, gaining everyone's attention. \"The airships will see the Drifters long before landing, and that's sure to turn them away. But the train is heavily armed and couldn't stop in time even if it wanted to. We just need to figure out a way to get on it when it comes through.\" she added.\n\n\"Is there a way to the roof?\" Dalton demanded to know as he clinched the shirt of the bartender in the process.\n\n\"Yes...this way,\" the bartender replied, the chubby man then quickly leading them to a small area in the rear of the Trading Post. \"Ain't many windows to speak of, but this ladder will take you all the way up to the roof.\" the scraggly looking man said as he led them to a narrow red ladder that was firmly bolted to the wall.\n\nCambria was the first one up, her perfected backside serving as a man lure of sorts. Both Tank and Dalton nearly began fighting for the chance to climb up right behind her, Tank finally backing off after reading into the scowl on Dalton's face. As the smuggler started up next, he heard Whiskey, who was whining in a begging fashion.\n\n\"Ah shit.\" Dalton said with frustration, wanting so badly to enjoy the view of Cambria as he climbed but not daring to leave his faithful pooch behind.\n\n\"Don't worry, I'll enjoy the view for you.\" Tank said with a chuckle as he mounted the ladder to climb.\n\n\"Are you guys coming?\" Cambria asked, looking down for a moment.\n\n\"Don't I wish.\" Tank replied under his breath as he climbed steadily.\n\n\"Damned smart ass.\" Dalton said with frustration. As they climbed what seemed to be at least two stories by way of ladder, Dalton clinched Whiskey tightly, all while listening to Tank's lightly spoken sexual innuendos.\n\nFinally making it to the top, Cambria forced open a thick door of steel and anchor bolts. The thickness of the door was such that she couldn't force it completely open, Tank placing his arm around her to help the steel loose. Dalton scowled at Tank making a play on such a beautiful woman, then turning his scowl to the true guilty party. Whiskey glared back as if to apologize, wide eyes staring through the thickened lenses of his goggles.\n\nAs Dalton and Whiskey made it topside, the brown coat booty chaser slammed the door as if to break up a romance. Tank turned to grin as Cambria remained standing, her eyes locked onto the receiving end of a set of binoculars.\n\nDalton approached slowly while the screams of both undead and citizens who would soon join them rang out below, though they had calmed a bit. A very good indication that few living folks remained.\n\n\"Is Skulls on the door?\" Cambria asked, her eyes still skimming the area below.\n\n\"Yep, she's locked down tighter than a tick's ass.\" Dalton said proudly. Cambria turned to look at him, a daze upon her face.\n\n\"That's pretty good.\" she said, smiling a bit.\n\n\"Thanks.\" Dalton replied, his thick beard doing little to cover the grin beneath it.\n\nFinally getting his own hands on the binoculars, Dalton began to skim the surrounding area. \"Has to be a way out of this 'sumbitch,\" he mumbled as his eyes continued to focus. \"What the...\" he said under his breath, locking his sight onto a fixed position.\n\n\"What is it?\" Tank asked, moving closer to the roof's ledge to stand beside Dalton and his trusty sidekick.\n\nDalton stood there, staring out onto the group as he tried to put two and two together. \"The Revolver,\" Dalton replied in awe. \"Johnny fucking Edmonds.\" he added, watching the gunslinger tear his way into town by way of pistol.\n\nSuddenly, the thick steel door sprang open, Selina quickly pulling herself to the rooftop.\n\n\"Woman, what the hell are you doing up here?\" Dalton asked sternly as Tank walked with him, both approaching the bar girl slowly.\n\n\"They're in.\" she replied frantically.\n\n\"Huh?\" Tank asked.\n\n\"They're in!\" Selina yelled to confirm their worst fears.\n\n\"What the fuck do you mean they're in?\" Dalton asked with emotion. His question was immediately answered by the sound of a sniper's rifle firing below.\n\n\"Oh shit.\" Dalton finally said as Tank began helping others up onto the roof.\n\n\"Help them up!\" Cambria yelled with panic as screams flooded beneath them, accompanied by seemingly non-stop gunshots.\n\nThe barkeep was up, as well as Selina and two other men who seemed dazed at best.\n\n\"Where's the kid?\" Dalton asked with no answer following.\n\n\"Where the fuck is the kid?\" he asked again, this time with a commanding voice as his arm grabbed the shirt of the barkeep.\n\n\"We couldn't get anyone else to safety. There are too many.\" the man replied in self-disgust as he tried catching his breath. They got in through the front door, pushed it open and before we knew what was going on, they had flooded the place and separated us in the process.\"\n\n\"Fucking undead.\" Dalton mumbled as he checked the rolling chamber of his capable revolver, reloading it as quickly as he could.\n\n\"Dalton, what the hell do you think you are doing?\" Cambria asked.\n\n\"That kid is down there surrounded by a horde of these non-hygienic fucks.\" he replied as he headed to the steel trapdoor. \"Might be other people down there trapped, we don't know.\"\n\n\"What about Skulls?\" Tank asked.\n\n\"Skulls is a trained killer with a weapon! This kid 'aint got nobody but us. I'm a lot of things that most people would be ashamed of, but I ain't a coward.\" Dalton replied with truth as he readied himself to go downstairs. And at that very moment, Cambria Sims began to feel an emotion she hadn't felt in a very long time. Love.\n\n\"Don't lock this door until I'm back, you got me?\" Dalton asked of Tank, answered with a nod of the head.\n\n\"Cambria, don't you let him...\" Dalton added, turning to his Captain. Whiskey quickly let loose a firm bark to assure his best friend that if needed, he'd protect the door himself.\n\n\"Don't worry, I won't. You just go get that kid.\" she replied, a smile on her face that no crew member had ever seen before.\n\nAs Dalton began to quickly leave the rooftop on his way back down, the group watched him as though he were nothing short of a hero. Something this town needed at the very moment he had arrived, even if their hero cursed the gods on his way downstairs and left a blanket of Rum stench behind.\n\n\"Stay on this door, I'm going to try and get Johnny over here to help.\" Cambria said, moving quickly to the roof's ledge as the walking dead continued to terrorize the streets below.\n\n\"Doesn't he want us dead?\" Tank asked.\n\n\"Well, that was before all of this. Besides, Johnny is easy to forgive. Just keep your eyes on that door.\" Cambria answered.\n\n\"Don't worry, it's locked down tighter than a tick's ass.\" Tank said with a smile.\n\n\"Not really that clever now that I've heard it again.\" Cambria said, turning to begin finding Johnny Edmonds once more.\n\n\"Well you thought it was funny when Dalton said it.\" Tank replied with childish envy.\n\n\"Yea. Yea I did, didn't I?\" Cambria said under her breath.\n\nAs she gazed through her binoculars in an attempt to locate and coordinate with Johnny Edmonds, she continued to think about Dalton James. Of course he wasn't the kind of guy she could see herself ever falling for. But every single time she learned something new about the hardened smuggler, it led her to believe he was a completely different man on the inside. A kind, compassionate man with an exterior that was nothing more than a mask to the world.\n\nBesides, he did have a damn cute dog. As Cambria broke her stare for a moment to glance down, the lustful eyes of Whiskey glared back at her through thickened goggles. Well, maybe not that cute. she thought as the brown coat sporting dog licked his tongue across his lips.\n\nDalton knelt slowly on the floor below the ladder, the tail end of his duster laying slightly on the wood grain. A Colonial soldier is trained to always assess the situation and then react. And as Dalton James remained knelt close to the floor, he first glanced up.\n\nIt was dark, but he saw a handful of stars above that let him know his friends were indeed keeping the door open for his return. As he glanced around the back of the Trading Post, he saw a few bodies, bloody trails and expended shells.\n\nWhat stood out as bothersome to Dalton was the lack of noise. Only moments before, gunshots rang out in near parade fashion. Now things had become deathly quiet and that scared the hell out of the former soldier.\n\nPulling his large revolver to the ready, a trickle of light refracted from the chrome of the barrel as Dalton slowly made his way to the end of a hallway which led to several smaller storage rooms and eventually the main drinking area. It was the first time Dalton had dreaded entering a bar in, well, forever.\n\nGlancing out of the doorway momentarily, Dalton began to enter the main room when he suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. A natural reaction to the sound of steel coming to a ready as a gun stood prepared to fire. He slowly turned to see Skulls kneeling in a small room to his right, large sniper rifle at the ready.\n\n\"It's me damnit!\" Dalton said under his breath.\n\n\"Get down.\" Skulls replied.\n\nTaking a moment to fully register, Dalton finally knelt to the floor. A mere second later, dedicated lead burst from the rifle of Skulls, slicing through the air and into the formerly dead flesh of a Drifter who was approaching.\n\n\"We gotta move, now.\" Skulls said calmly as he pulled his rifle from the ready in order to exit to the roof.\n\n\"I came down for the kid, we gotta find...\" Dalton replied, cutting himself short as he spotted both the man and accompanying child, sitting snugly behind Skulls.\n\n\"Good work,\" Dalton said. \"I'll be right back, don't let them shut me out.\" he added.\n\nSkulls nodded firmly as the quiet killer led the old man and child to the safe confines of the ladder.\n\n\"Where's Dalton?\" Tank asked as he helped Skulls to the roof.\n\n\"Don't know. Didn't say.\" Skulls replied as he ushered the older man and confused child to the rest of the survivors.\n\n\"Didn't say?\" Tank asked in disbelief.\n\n\"Well fuck that, we need to at least shut the door until we know something.\" he added, reaching for the trapdoor.\n\nThe well muscled warrior stopped short, small hairs standing tall all over his body as the sound of a pistol readying halted him.\n\n\"You would dare pull a gun on me?\" Tank asked, furious that Skulls had the guts to hold a piece in his direction.\n\n\"You scrawny little bitch, I'll beat the fucking sense back into you.\" Tank added, walking slowly to Skulls.\n\n\"Tank! Enough!\" Cambria yelled, demanding her crew member stop at once.\n\n\"He pulled a fucking gun on me!\" Tank yelled in reply.\n\n\"He's waiting for Dalton. We all are!\" Cambria shouted back.\n\n\"We'd be doing the same for you if you would have had the guts to go yourself.\" she added.\n\nTank scowled for a moment at Skulls to let him know the issue wasn't over.\n\n\"They're here, they're safe,\" Tank yelled as he pointed to the older man and child. \"My question is where the fuck is Dalton?\" he added.\n\n\"Right here, why did you miss me?\" Dalton replied as he slowly climbed the ladder, gunshots ringing out behind him.\n\n\"Tank wanted to leave you down there.\" Cambria said in disgust.\n\n\"Is that a fact?\" Dalton asked as he stood to his feet. \"Well sir, no liquor for you.\" he added as he pulled three of the tallest bottles of rum from his coat that any of them had ever seen.\n\n\"You risked our lives for liquor? You son of a bitch!\" Tank yelled, storming into Dalton's direction.\n\nThe much larger man stopped abruptly, his face merely inches from the barrel of Dalton's revolver.\n\n\"Best think this through. You got the physique and clothes to fit the part, but I'm a true soldier boy. I'm not playing commando; I am one.\" Dalton said with wily sarcasm, though his words held nothing short of the truth.\n\n\"Damn. I'm falling in love with this guy more and more every minute.\" Johnny Edmonds said as he climbed up behind the experience-worn smuggler, a couple more bottles of whiskey in hand.\n\n\"Now Skulls, you can shut the door.\" Dalton said, his eyes still locked onto those of Tank.\n\n\"I won't forget this. Next time maybe I got your back, maybe I don't.\" Tank said as Skulls secured the lock that bolted the thickened trapdoor into place.\n\n\"I could give a damn young man, just remember that kind of respect is a two-way street.\" Dalton replied as Whiskey growled heavily.\n\n\"Young man. That's clever.\" Cambria said in a low voice, intrigued by the man known as Dalton James.\n\n\"What's it like out there beyond town?\" Cambria asked as Johnny approached her.\n\n\"It's bad girl. Real bad.\" he replied, spitting a bit of tobacco drenched saliva onto the rooftop.\n\n\"What?\" he asked as she stared at him in disgust.\n\n\"Over the ledge maybe?\" Cambria replied.\n\n\"Oh uh, yea.\" Johnny said, spitting a second wad of saliva over into the crowd of undead below.\n\n\"Best we've come up with is getting to the train somehow.\" Cambria said as her eyes skimmed the horizon.\n\n\"That's a bad plan. Really bad plan.\" the gunslinger replied.\n\n\"Huh?\" Cambria replied.\n\n\"Me and the boys,\" he said, taking a moment to pause. \"We hit the train a few hours ago. Left it sitting out there beyond the hills. At least a six or seven mile walk.\" Johnny said.\n\n\"You robbed the train and left our only escape vehicle out in the middle of nowhere? Really?\" Cambria asked furiously.\n\n\"Well hell, I didn't know these son of a bitches was gonna get coordinated today. Hell, we was thinking about the money.\" Johnny replied in his own defense.\n\n\"And the boys?\" Dalton asked as he approached loudly.\n\n\"Some of 'em got dusted during the robbery, the rest are laying nearby. Dead fucks killed 'em on the way in.\" Johnny replied.\n\n\"You know I hated your guts until about thirty minutes ago, right?\" Johnny asked as he turned to Dalton.\n\n\"Yea, I figured as much. You don't have much of a rack on you though darling, so I wasn't going to lose a lot of sleep over it tonight.\" Dalton replied with a grin.\n\nCambria watched the two men converse for a moment, all while deep in thought herself. Johnny was the typical cowboy, strong on the outside and empty on the inside. Even though Dalton appeared the same at first glance, Cambria now saw through all of that.\n\nIf nothing else, the broken man used his brown coat to cover the true man inside. He had a heart, and Cambria suspected it was a big one. Her suspicions were confirmed when Dalton gave himself away with a soft glance into her direction while conversing with Johnny.\n\n\"Cambria,\" Skulls said as the entire group has stopped to stare her way. \"You alright?\" he added.\n\n\"Yes, fine,\" she replied as she quickly broke from her daydream. \"Just trying to think of a way out of here, that's all.\" she added.\n\n\"Aint' no way outta here.\" Dalton replied as a group of Drifters had begun beating on the steel door which separated them from the small group of survivors that had found refuge on the roof.\n\n\"And even if there was, where the hell would we go?\" Johnny asked. \"Me and the boys came back to Geartown because we figured it would be safer. The hills are crawling with the bastards.\" he added.\n\n\"Well we can't stay here, that fucking door 'aint gonna hold forever!\" Tank yelled as he remained sitting.\n\n\"Relax, would ya?\" Dalton said as he glanced at Tank sharply for a moment. \"The door will hold, it's a choke point. Hundreds of the fuckers down there, but they gotta come up the ladder single file. And 'aint one of them gonna be strong enough to bust through,\" Dalton said calmly. \"But eventually we do gotta find a way off this roof. Gonna be needing food and such.\" he added.\n\n\"And you're sure we can't get to the Cliffs?\" Cambria asked of Johnny.\n\n\"Trust me, if it was doable I'd be there and not here.\" Johnny replied.\n\n\"Well we sure in the fuck can't stay here!\" Tank yelled with frustration.\n\n\"Well hop on down there and clear the way for us big boy.\" Dalton replied, a slight grin on his face. Tank's attempt to get up and confront the smuggler was easily stalled by a warning growl on Whiskey's part.\n\n\"Alright, guys,\" Cambria said loudly, trying to overpower the loud beating on the steel trapdoor by the undead. \"We need to work together. Figure out an exit strategy.\" she added in a more convincing tone.\n\n\"Well the hideout up at Mulden Cliffs, like you said, would be the perfect spot to hold up if we could make it. Got plenty of supplies and and weapons just waiting to be dusted off. It's well hidden and only one way in. Even if the fuckers followed us up, we'd be able to thin them out once they started funneling up the narrow pass to us.\" Johnny said as he remained deep in thought.\n\n\"Say they was pretty thick outside of town too?\"Dalton asked.\n\n\"Thick as thieves,\" Johnny replied. \"And coming from a thief that's saying something. They are organized now though, don't make a peck of sense. Just yesterday they were brainless and random.\" he added.\n\n\"Best bet would be for us to sleep on it. Get some rest and then maybe sort things out come sunup.\" Cambria added.\n\n\"Skulls, you take the door and I'll watch the ledge. We'll pull first watch,\" Dalton said. \"In a few hours we'll rotate out with Johnny and Tank. Go on down the line until sunup.\" he added.\n\n\"Sounds like a good plan.\" Cambria said as she looked for a place to rest.\n\nThe roof on its own was pretty large, to her estimation it was about thirty feet wide by thirty feet long. Aside from the steel trapdoor that stood between the survivors and flesh eating dead below, there were a handful of steel pipes along with a flat surface of concrete.\n\nThey had plenty of room. The problem seemed to be the lack of supplies. No type of shelter, little food and nothing to put between themselves and the cold concrete they would be resting on.\n\nShortly after, the group became quiet. It was the perfect opportunity to rest, though little sleep would be had. Dead flesh pounding roughly onto the thickened steel of the roof's trapdoor.\n\nQuiet times were always the worst for Dalton. He was a man with a laundry list of life events, most of them not so great when it came to re-living them. And as he sat on the ledge of the Trading Post, with legs dangling and cigar ashes falling down onto the crowd of Drifters, he began to think about his old crew.\n\n\"Damn woman, you got a death wish or something?\" Dalton said, quickly pulling his revolver to the ready as Selina approached softly.\n\n\"You are alive, right?\" he asked as the barrel remained on her.\n\n\"What does this tell you?\" she replied, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him deeply.\n\n\"Tells me this trip 'aint been a total loss.\" Dalton replied with a grin.\n\n\"May I sit?\" Selina asked. Dalton simply pointed to the ledge beside him as Selina sat down gracefully.\n\n\"Do you think we'll be alright?\" she asked in a somber tone.\n\n\"Hard to say,\" Dalton replied as he took a deep inhalation of Rum treated cigar. \"I expect that if anyone makes it out of Geartown alive, it'll be us.\" he added.\n\n\"I hate that all of this happened, but I'm really glad you're here.\" Selina said as she looked deeply into the smuggler's wide eyes.\n\n\"I'm sorta' glad I'm here too,\" Dalton replied, drawing another lung debilitating puff. \"Truth is, this has me feeling more alive than I have in a long time. Don't get me wrong, I could do without the crowd of undead. But otherwise, it's kinda peaceful out here in the Drifts.\"\n\n\"It can be,\" Selina said with a grin. \"At least before all of this happened anyway.\" she added.\n\nDalton agreed with a nod, flicking his cigar stump onto the crowd of animated flesh below.\n\n\"Technology has a way of complicating things. Has a way of pulling people apart and taking the luster away from life's greatest moments.\" Selina said.\n\n\"That's deep,\" Dalton said, his eyes widening just a bit. \"I get it though. \"I've been a lot of places and seen a lot of unhappy people. Most of them were living on the cutting edge of technology.\" he added as he pulled a small flask from his coat.\n\n\"Crash landed once; well, more than once,\" Dalton said prior to taking a healthy swig of whatever his flask was readily offering. \"The planet was off the map, nothing to speak of really. Just a village full of the most primative people you could ever meet. But they were good people...happy people.\" he added as Selina squeezed him a bit in hugging fashion.\n\n\"Really? What happened to them?\" Selina asked, intrigued by his story.\n\n\"Oh they all died,\" he said, starting to take another swig as he realized the damage. \"Not that we are gonna die or anything.\" he added quickly.\n\n\"Well this is a very encouraging conversation.\" Selina replied softly.\n\n\"Ah, don't fret it none babe, I'll come up with something.\" Dalton said.\n\n\"I hope so,\" Selina said with a concerned look. \"Everyone is looking to you.\" she added as she slowly stood up to find a nice spot to rest for the night.\n\nThey were looking to him, especially Cambria at that very moment. Watching his every move. Wondering why such a good hearted man would hide away from the world beneath the shield of his brown coat. As she lay there, she continued to stare at him. The way he sat calmly on the ledge let her know of his experience in battle, but the way he gently placed his hand on the pup beside him let her know of his good spirit.\n\nShe was becoming confused under the worst possible conditions. But still she thought only of Dalton James as she slowly drifted into a world of dreams.\n\n\"All we can do is sleep it off,\" Dalton mumbled as he sat on the rooftop and prepared his duster in a way as to present the illusion of a fine mattress. \"Nothing else we can do.\" he added as he lay down and rolled away from the group of survivors.\n\nIt would be hard for them to sleep. Damn near impossible, actually, as dead flesh continued pounding against the thick trapdoor of steel which separated them. Eventually, seemingly hours later, the beating subsided. Those on watch noticed a lack of interest by many of the Drifters, who began finding their way back out into the streets in search of less difficult victims.\n\nThe interior of the ship was different from anything he had ever seen before. That's what had first caught Dalton's attention. Gauges that looked alien, yet eerily of death.\n\nAs Dalton first sat up, his reaction was to check for Whiskey. But the faithful running mate was nowhere to be found. As was the same fate for his sidearm, in fact, as Dalton felt around for it his holster was no longer a part of the uniform. His eyes told a tale of unanswered questions as he glanced down to see himself clad in solid white. It seemed surreal.\n\nJumping swiftly to his feet, Dalton began to visually search the room. Solid steel walls, though not a single seam could be seen with his naked eyes. He wondered how such a ship could have even been constructed, seemingly flawless in every respect. There did appear to be a door, and as the wily smuggler began to approach it slowly in search of answers, three colored triangles illuminated the wall directly above it. All of them brilliant red and further adding to the mystery.\n\nMoments later, the door opened quickly enough to startle Dalton back against the wall. His reasoning led him to only two possibilites. Either he had been drugged or the Drifters had indeed found him. Maybe his dream was merely a part of the conversion process, leaving the mortal world and joining a very feared nation of walking dead.\n\nNormally, Dalton would have played out each scenario in his head, but his train of though was interrupted as two figures entered the room. Though visible, they both seemed a bit blurred, almost as if his eyes could not focus them. Both were clad in solid white, from boot to riot style helmet. Even the shielding of their helmets glimmered a satin white, while three red triangles formed a larger triangle as the only marking on their helmets.\n\nDalton felt the need to ask questions, and had started to approach them before stopping dead in his tracks. A tail of some sort was visible as the soldiers turned to the side in order to watch the door. It extended slightly from the rear of their helmets and seemed to penetrate the top of their spinal cords. Though the soldiers remained perfectly still, the brown tail wiggled a bit, its tissue both knobby and covered in scales.\n\nIt was unlike anything the smuggler had ever seen before, the sight truly scaring Dalton for the first time in many years. He felt a chill run through his skin, raising bumps all along his arms as his hands shook a bit, preparing to fight for life if needed be.\n\nAll of that changed with the entrance of a third. Solid white cloak, hood pulled up to protect both emotion and identity. Dalton's heart nearly stopped beating when it became evident what was about to occur. The hooded figure carried a glass cylinder in one arm; inside the cylinder a small creature. Its tail matched that of the ones draping from the helmets of the posted guards, though the rest of the creature was also visible.\n\nIt was almost flat, though it had six legs clad in scales of dark brown and the eery tail that appeared to form a large needle-like shape at its tip. The creature began striking toward Dalton, almost as if it were a venomous snake waiting to be loosened from its cage. As the cloaked figure slowly pulled the hood from its head, Dalton began to cry aloud.\n\n\"Help us.\" Adam Michaels said, a monster similar to the one encased in glass attached to his skull with tail running down into Dalton's former Captain's spine. Just as Sasha's overpowering screams could suddenly be heard, Adam threw the encased monster toward Dalton, its glass confines quickly disappearing as the freed monster lunged for him.\n\n\"Dalton!\" Cambria said in a loud whisper, trying her best to force the smuggler to awaken.\n\nHe had started to come to a bit, though he remained, for the moment, between the world of dream and that which required oxygen for survival.\n\n\"Dalton, are you alright?\" Cambria asked again, this time her words filled with concern.\n\n\"Yea,\" he replied, hand gripping his head a bit. \"Splitting headache and,\" he added, seemingly holding back for a moment. \"Really bad dream.\"\n\n\"It's alright, we all have them.\" she replied.\n\n\"Not like this one. God, it seemed so real.\" Dalton said.\n\nCambria gripped his shoulder for a moment, a gesture to let the smuggler know she was by his side.\n\n\"I woke you up because day is breaking,\" Cambria said in a soft voice. \"Be a good idea to assess our situation.\"\n\n\"Off 'yer asses!\" Dalton yelled loud enough to wake everyone who still slept. \"It's time to put our heads together, find out what we got and what we don't got.\" he added, nodding his appreciation to the Captain of the Outer Heaven.\n\n\"It's official. What we got is eleven survivors, five bottles of hooch, three bottles of water and two cans of pork and beans.\" Tank said with a touch of disgust.\n\n\"Twelve survivors.\" Dalton added as Whiskey barked loudly in order to be counted, his angle, simply put, to be considered for the pork and beans.\n\n\"We also have guns.\" Skulls said.\n\n\"Yep, that we do got. May just be our biggest asset at the moment,\" Dalton replied, turning to the remainder of the survivors. \"I know my crew and Johnny are damn capable with a weapon,\" he said with pause. \"Any of the rest of you a decent shot?\"\n\nThe barkeep, older man who held a child in his arms and one of the younger men stepped back a bit. Experience with a weapon was surely not on their list of skills.\n\n\"No Dalton, I don't. I'm sorry.\" Selina said.\n\n\"It all good,\" he replied with a cowboy wink. The kind that was accompanied by fatigue, bad hair and whiskey laced breath. \"What about you?\" he asked of the remaining man.\n\nThe man had medium length hair, dirty blonde, though his clothes were anything but. The light-skinned man wore dress slacks and a pinstripe vest that rested over a white shirt.\n\n\"Yea,\" the man replied. \"I served with the Legion during the first Glimmerian War. I put a right many Colonials into the grave, so I guess that qualifies.\"\n\nDalton bit his tongue as he thought back to the first Glimmerian War. He had been involved as well, on the Colonial side, and had watched dozens of his friends butchered in a losing effort. There was even a good chance that the man who stood in front of him fired a shot or two that may have ended the life of a friend.\n\nBut these were different times. Different circumstances. Once bitter enemies, they now stood together with a common goal. Survival.\n\n\"I fought there as well. Fought for the Colonials,\" Dalton replied as the air that surrounded the group seemingly got very thick. \"And if we were in any other situation, the words you just spoke to me would have been paid for with teeth,\" Dalton added, looking the man from head to toe. \"But the war is long over, and we need every gun we can get.\"\n\n\"Fair enough,\" the man replied, extending his hand. \"The name's Christopher.\"\n\nHe was testing Dalton, and the brown coat smothered man of ill-repute was sure of it. Purposely crossing the line to see if Dalton meant his words. His gut told him to slug the son of a bitchn' redcoat, or better yet, shoot his ass and be done with it. But Dalton soon realized his gut hungered for food too, and the sooner they smoothed things over when it came to Glimmeria, the better.\n\n\"Dalton James.\" he finally replied, shaking hands with a man he would have been under orders to kill back on Glimmeria.\n\n\"We need to figure out if this is the spot we call home, or if we go looking for something else.\" Johnny said.\n\n\"This is the spot. It's a safe spot, otherwise they would have gotten through during the night.\" Cambria replied.\n\n\"Agreed,\" Dalton said. \"So we need to form a small group. Go scavenge what we can and get back before nightfall.\"\n\n\"What are we supposed to do for food all day?\" Selina asked.\n\n\"What we got goes to the kid,\" Dalton said with seriousness. \"We can make it days without eating if need be, but won't have to. Just need to make it through one.\"\n\n\"Well who's going?\" Tank asked.\n\n\"You and I got things to work out, so we're both in.\" Dalton said.\n\n\"Huh?\" Cambria asked with amazement.\n\n\"One of the things you need to understand about smuggling is there will be arguments,\" Dalton replied. \"Lots of arguments,\" he added. \"Hell, my previous Captain and I used to fistfight when it came down to it.\"\n\n\"What the hell does this have to do with scavenging?\" Tank asked.\n\n\"You need to learn that no matter what we got going on between the two of us, we always get each others backs.\" Dalton said.\n\n\"Yea right.\" Tank added, blowing the advice off.\n\n\"Which is why you aren't taking a weapon.\" Dalton said.\n\n\"The fuck I 'aint!\" Tank replied with anger.\n\n\"You'll be carrying all of the luggage. You a big 'sumbitch, we'll be able to carry a lot more this way. And I'll be there to watch you back, just like Johnny will.\"\n\n\"You a crazy motherfucker! No way in hell that I'm going out there unarmed, especially with you and Johnny. I'll be dead within five minutes!\" Tank said.\n\n\"No you won't, cause what you will learn really quick is the smuggler's creed.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Oh yea, what's that?\" Tank asked, his words filled with both mystery and sarcasm.\n\n\"That no matter how bad you piss me off, I got your back.\" Dalton said, nodding his head to show everyone the truth of it.\n\n\"Or as I like to say, trust not, eat not.\" Johnny added.\n\n\"Skulls will stay behind,\" Dalton said. \"Not that you're no good in combat my man. But in the event that we come hauling ass back with a crowd on us, you're the only one skilled enough to thin them out.\"\n\n\"I have no problem providing overwatch. It's what I do best.\" Skulls replied with a nod of approval.\n\n\"Ever have to use a slugger to bring peace back to the bar?\" Dalton asked of the bartender.\n\n\"A bat? More times than you can count.\" the barkeep replied.\n\n\"Same principle,\" Dalton said as he un-sheethed his large blade and handed it to the man. \"Drifter comes up, you swing for the hills. This blade will cut the sumbitch' in half.\"\n\n\"I'm coming too. Right?\" Cambria asked, hoping to impose her authority.\n\n\"Not this time out. If things go to shit we need someone capable of putting together a rescue plan.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"What am I supposed to do? Just hang out here?\" she asked.\n\n\"Hand Christopher a piece and keep these people safe. Stay on that trapdoor and pray we make it back in one piece.\" Dalton said.\n\nSeveral minutes later, the survivors had laid out everything they would need for the scavenging group's trip. Several empty sacks, a couple of throw sacks using thick shirts and a few bare-chested men.\n\n\"Dalton, I cannot believe you had the nerve to ask me for my shirt!\" Cambria said, furious that he had used the excuse of Drifters as reasoning.\n\n\"Hey, just trying to do my part.\" Dalton said, chuckling as Johnny, even Tank, joined in the laughter a bit.\n\nSkulls, Christopher, the barkeep, old man and another survivor all lent their shirts. It would allow the three man scavenging party a chance to scale down the rope, rather than attempt their way down a stairwell which led to sure Drifters.\n\nThey geared up, weapons in hand and belt, while Tank's firm grip held a dozen or so makeshift sacks.\n\n\"We'll drop down and hit the Eastern side of Geartown. Remember to keep sights on us.\" johnny said as a very pale-chested Skulls nodded.\n\nAnd while Dalton embraced Selina one last time, harboring his body in the warmth of her own, even he noticed the dedicated stare of Cambria Sims. He had seen it many times, and knew that it was one of love unexplored.\n\nHe tested his theory, purposely walking past her without saying a single word.\n\n\"Dalton,\" Cambria said, approaching him slowly. \"Please be careful.\"\n\n\"Will do,\" he said with a grin. \"And when I get back, I think it's time we had a little talk.\"\n\n\"Talk. About what?\" Cambria asked, her question answered with a simple glance.\n\nOh God! Cambria thought. How could he know? How could he possibly know my feelings? Are they that obvious? Did keeping them a seret even matter to her anymore? She had fallen so suddenly, so head over heels with a man who might be marching to his own death just to feed the survivors.\n\nKnowing it could be their final moment together, she wanted to reach out and kiss the man so desperately. Plead with him, beg him if needed be, to stay and let someone else go in his place. But she knew why had had thrown himself in the situation. Because otherwise, the scavenging group wouldn't survive.\n\n\"Just take care of my damn dog and quit with the last moment together ever look.\" Dalton said with a smile.\n\nCambria wanted to curse his arrogance, maybe even curse herself for exposing such feelings. Instead she just smiled wide and nodded her head, doing her best to hold back tears that could have easily fallen if she would have let them.\n\nThe plan was a simple one. Repel down the rope made of less than expensive shirts, which they had knotted together to form a rope. Johnny would lead the group, his familiarity of the town was key.\n\nTank would follow next, his large size allowing him to carry the bulk of what they had found. Even though his job for the upcoming trip was technically that of a pack mule, it was also the most important. He would be the one who brought back needed supplies for an extended stay.\n\nThe flank of the three man group was Dalton, who carried his revolver in hand; three more handguns tucked into the leather belt around his waist. The pockets of his pants were shoved full with ammunition clips and spare bullets. He was responsible for protecting himself, as well the pack mule.\n\nAnd so the three assigned to loot Geatown eased themselves over the side of the roof, one at a time, each praying the shirts held as well as they had hoped.\n\nSkulls had spotted some Drifters roaming several blocks away, as well as a group directly in front of the Trading Post. And the sniper's hand motions let the group know where the Zombies were located, directing them almost like some sort of gothic GPS system.\n\n\"We gonna need a lot of food, tents, blankets and weapons if we can find em.\" Dalton whispered, just loud enough for the two men in front of him to hear.\n\nJohnny acknowledged his words with a nod, holding their position at a standstill while peeking from the corner of a nearby building.\n\nAnd though they had to remain hidden for nearly thirty minutes, eventually the three man scavenging group made their way, cautiously slow, out of the sight of Skulls and deeper into Geartown.\n\nCambria felt a chill come across her at the very moment they disappeared from sight. It wasn't the temperature of the low-passing winds, but rather one that made her, for whatever reason, truly believe that she would never see Dalton again.\n\nAnd even though they were no longer visible in the bright rays of sun that fell down onto the Drifts, Cambria continued her stare for several minutes. Praying, if nothing else, that her gut feeling was wrong.\n\n\"Keep on your scope,\" she said, a bit of panic in her voice of deep concern. \"Please.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, I believe they will be fine.\" Skulls replied.\n\nThose who remained back on the Trading Post rooftop seemed to finally grasp the devastation. The previous night had been filled with screams, terror and non-stop fighting for their lives. They had been given no time to sincerely think about the events which had unfolded.\n\nBodies laying out in the streets surrounding their building. Most, if not all, mutilated and dead by horrific measures. There was no doubt that the very building beneath them was filled with more of the same.\n\nDrifters walked among them. And they knew but one purpose. Killing. And as the survivors looked from their rooftop of safety, they saw the bodies, smoking buildings and walking dead throughout the streets.\n\n\"It will be alright.\" the barkeep said, trying his best to comfort Selina as she began to sob heavily.\n\n\"How could this happen?\" she asked, her words falling between two outburst of tears.\n\n\"Let's just hope it's contained to the Drifts,\" Christopher said. \"So we can find a skiff and get the fuck out of here.\"\n\nCambria didn't respond. As she turned to Christopher, she wanted to. So badly, she wanted to respond to the man she knew was less than half the man Dalton James was.\n\nShe didn't know the complete history of Glimmeria, but she did know of both wars there. She knew that Dalton had fought for the very side she would have, if it would have been her. The side that just wanted to be allowed to live. The side that fought, only as a last resort, to protect their families.\n\nAnd as she watched Christopher, his every move giving clue to the character of the man, she knew he was a coward. He had more than likely killed several Colonial soldiers during the war. Soldiers, just like Dalton, who were forced into protecting everything they lived for. But he had done it from a distance, maybe with the odds heavily in his favor. At least that was Cambria's opinion, as she saw a man who only wished he could measure up to a Dalton James.\n\nWhiskey had been quiet since the group of scavengers departed, choosing instead to take his place near the elderly man and child who sat far from the trapdoor. The faithful pooch watched over the pair as though he were a ill-bathed guardian angel. And, while his eyes skimmed the group, his head remained flat to the ground.\n\n\"What's your name old man?\" Christopher asked.\n\n\"Carlos.\" the elderly man replied softly, doing his best to keep the babe in his arms calm.\n\n\"A little old for a baby aren't you?\" Christopher asked.\n\n\"Are you watching the trapdoor or writing for a newspaper?\" Cambria asked sharply.\n\n\"Just trying to get to know everyone,\" he said without even turning into her direction. \"That's all.\"\n\n\"He's not mine,\" Carlos said. \"I found him in the street about two blocks down. Didn't seem right to just leave a infant boy laying.\"\n\n\"What about you, what's your story?\" Christopher asked of the other surviving man.\n\n\"Name's Kieth,\" the man replied. \"I sell prospecting licenses,\" he added. \"Or at least I used to.\"\n\n\"Wow, a licensing official. How exciting.\" Christopher said with sarcasm.\n\n\"True. Not all of us can be cold-blooded killers fighting under the Legion flag,\" Kieth replied. \"If I was the killing kind, I would have killed your kind with a brown coat on my back.\"\n\n\"What the hell did you just say?\" Christopher asked agrily.\n\n\"That's enough,\" Cambria added, stepping between the two men. \"Been enough fighting down below, we don't need it up here too.\"\n\n\"Fair enough, but don't get too comfortable being in charge.\" Christopher said with a grin.\n\nTank held the large sack open as Johnny filled it with haste, pushing his arm onto the shelf and then raking the groceries inside.\n\n\"Seems like you are picking all of the heavy shit.\" Tank said.\n\n\"Getting all of the protein I can find. It will keep us a bit fuller for a bit longer.\" Johnny replied.\n\n\"Shh.\" Dalton added, using one of his arms to calm them to silence as sever Drifters walked by the front door of the small general store.\n\n\"We need to speed this trip up, they seem to be getting thicker outside.\" Dalton said in a whisper.\n\n\"Alright,\" Johnny replied, his voice just as low pitched. \"Tank, you grab as many more groceries as you can carry. I'll look around for anything we can use for an extended stay. Survival gear.\"\n\nTank simply nodded, still steaming a bit over being assigned the group's pack mule. He froze in place, however, as the ringing of a small bell attached to the front door rang out.\n\nA single Drifter had entered the building, leaving the front door open in the process.\n\nJohnny quickly made his way back, a single bag filled with loot and three brand new tents, still folded and sealed, draped across his shoulder.\n\nOnce the Drifter had gotten far enough inside, Dalton sprang from behind to grab the monster around its throat. It tried to bite, tried to fight back, but a quick plunge into the forehead, a knife blade held by Tank, changed the struggle as the Drifter fell limply to the floor.\n\n\"We got to move!\" Dalton said, this time loudly as several Drifters passing by had spotted the killing of one of their own.\n\n\"Might as well use the front door, and don't stop running until we make it back!\" Johnny yelled as the three men began sprinting. Tank, who had never been accused of lacking in the muscle department, hoisted four large sacks filled with groceries with ease.\n\nHis muscles flexed hard, proven by the sudden outline around the bulging in his arms. Yet he was able to keep up with a pistol-wielding Dalton and Johnny as the three men stayed only a dozen or so feet in front of a large crowd of animated flesh.\n\nDalton opened fire, staying to the rear of the group as he executed nearly a half-dozen Zombies at close range.\n\n\"I found an old radio back there,\" Johnny said loudly as the group continued its brisk run. \"It's an older, crank-type model, but it was brand new. Ran across a flare gun too.\"\n\n\"We need every bit of it, good thinking.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Should have enough food for weeks if we ration it right.\" Tank added, as the group slowed down, quickly finding every street blocked by a few Drifters.\n\n\"Johnny,\" Dalton said as the three men began to back up into one another. \"What you got in your bag is damn important. You get it back there, ya' hear?\"\n\n\"What are you rambling about?\" Johnny asked.\n\n\"The street to our left runs right back into the Trading Post. I remember the street light,\" Dalton said. \"You and I thin out the bastards blocking that direction, then you run for it. Tank and I will hold up the remaining.\"\n\n\"I 'aint going back without 'ya.\" Johnny said.\n\n\"Yea you are. You have them get a damn rope of some sort ready and waiting for us.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Don't have to worry about that, I found a rope back there as well. Two to be exact.\" Johnny replied.\n\n\"Well you get your ass up to that roof and have ropes waiting. We'll be a few steps behind, and coming with a whole lot of bastards on our heels.\" Dalton said.\n\n\"Make it back.\" Johnny said, patting Dalton on the shoulder for a moment before joining the brown coat wearing smuggler in clearing a path. As the last Drifter fell, Johny Edmonds sprinted away, bag of vital equipment over his shoulder.\n\n\"Alright brother, let's dust these 'sumbitches,\" Dalton said, pulling a second pistol out from his belt. \"Just stay behind me.\" he added, shots ringing out a mere moment later.\n\nDropping eight Drifters with his first eight shots, Dalton dropped the empty piece and pulled another from his belt, letting more shots loose in the process.\n\nAnd so continued the killing, the cleansing of life after death by one Dalton James, until his last revolver, a shiny Magnum, clicked empty.\n\nOne remained. A single Drifter remained, coming to the men, slowing only to make its way across the heaping pile of bodies which lay truly dead at the hands of Dalton James.\n\n\"Where are the others?\" Cambria said frantically as the men helped Johnny over the ledge and onto the rooftop. \"Johnny.\" she yelled.\n\n\"They're coming,\" he replied, heavily winded at best. \"They stayed back a ways to cover my flank,\" he added. \"Two ropes in my bag. Get 'em and tie them to the steel pipes up here. Be ready to throw them down in a hurry.\"\n\nCambria stood to her feet, in shock and praying, as the group quickly sifted through Johnny's bag to find the rope. Placing them around the piping system, and re-enforcing the knots to hold, they all patiently waited for sight of Tank and Dalton, as well as whatever horrors may be behind them.\n\n\"Only one of them,\" Dalton said as the Drifter approached, its teeth snarling gruesomely for fresh flesh. \"\"I'll draw him to me, and when I do, you stab that 'sumbitch right in the back of his skull.\"\n\nAs his words closed out the sentence, Tank fired a gunshot that flew by, striking the Drifter in its forehead and killing it stone cold dead.\n\nAs Dalton James turned to find out where the shot came from, he saw the barrel of a solid black pistol bearing down on him.\n\n\"Now let me tell you my version of the smuggler's creed,\" Tank said with a bit of a grin. \"You really think I would come out here without a fucking gun on me? I'm a smuggler!\" he yelled.\n\n\"Yea, I know you are man. Just calm down.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Don't tell me to calm down man,\" Tank said. \"You don't know the half of it. I am calm,\" he added. \"The minute I found out you and Christopher fought on different sides of the Glimmerian War, me and him sat down. Had ourselves a real long talk.\"\n\n\"What the fuck are you rambling on about?\" Dalton asked, the sound of Drifters closing in on them becoming louder.\n\n\"You won't get away with this!\" Cambria yelled as Christopher held her at gunpoint. Her own gun, the same one he had, only moments before, used to shoot Whiskey, now reflecting back to her.\n\n\"Shut up you bitch!\" Christopher yelled, a second gun pointed into Johnny's direction. \"I know you're fast with a pistol, but I already got the bead on you. And the sniper over there, just keep your damn eye to the scope. You turn around, just the slightest bit, and I'll end both of them.\" Christopher added.\n\n\"See Dalton,\" Tank said somberly. \"This group of survivors needs to be led by the strong. And while Christopher is up there handling business, it's my job to dust your ass and leave you laying for the Drifters.\"\n\n\"You 'aint got it in you.\" Dalton replied, walking very slowly toward the gunman.\n\n\"Sure I do,\" Tank replied, pulling the slide lock back on his pistol. \"And right about now, Christopher is killing that sack of fleas you travel with. And when I get back, plan on having my way with Cambria.\"\n\n\"I'll fucking kill you!\" Dalton James yelled, Drifters closing in on them quickly.\n\n\"Only one problem with that statement. You'll be dead.\" Tank replied.\n\nAnd with a single shot, the life of a smuggler officially ended.\n\nAs Dalton's eyes fluttered, the cold of concrete drawing warmth from wounded body, the smuggler lifted his head slightly.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"Luckily, Skulls caught the end of your conversation with Tank,\" Cambria said, her nerves uncontrolled. \"As Tank fired his weapon, he was hit with a shot from our resident sniper. The shot Skulls fired was true, and luckily for you, Tank's swayed off its mark just a bit.\"\n\n\"Don't feel like it was off the mark.\" Dalton replied as pain shot through his extremities.\n\n\"It his your shoulder and passed through,\" Skulls added. \"No doubt it hurts like hell, but you should recover.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" Dalton replied with sincerity.\n\n\"May want to thank Johnny as well,\" Cambria replied. \"If he hadn't went back over the wall after you, the Drifters would have had you for sure.\" Cambria replied, tears crisp in her eyes.\n\n\"Well, if I am alive, what the hell are 'yall so damn sad about?\" Dalton asked, doing his best to cheer their spirits.\n\n\"Whiskey,\" Skulls replied, filling in as the messenger for Cambria, who had succumb to her emotiions. \"He didn't make it.\"\n\n\"What?\" Dalton demanded to know, instantly forgettting the pain of a flesh wound as he rose to his feet quickly. \"What the fuck are you saying man?\"\n\n\"Christopher shot him,\" Cambria said, trying her best to regain some much-needed composure. \"Planned on shooting us all I think.\"\n\nHer words were received, though no response followed. Just a smuggler who knew loss, kneeling over the dead body of such a faithful dog..\n\nIt was the first time any of the crew had seen Dalton James cry, stroking such rough hands through the long brown fur of the dog's face. Whiskey had been his running mate, and their understanding for each other was hard to explain. Many nights, in the privacy of Dalton's bunk, the smuggler had vented his feelings to the dog. A mutt who seemed to listen with genuine concern.\n\n\"Where is he?\" Dalton asked of Christopher, replacing his overwhelming grief with uncontrollable rage.\n\n\"Dead,\" Cambria replied, doing her best to calm the smuggler. \"When Skulls fired his shot, Christopher had us at gunpoint. As his eyes drifted, Kieth,\" she added, turning to the man. \"Kieth grabbed his arms while Johnny finished him off.\"\n\nNormally, Dalton would have thanked the men. But his grief remained. The loss of such a true friend haunting his every breath of oxygen-ripened air.\n\nFinally, the smuggler knelt one last time, rubbing his hand through the fur of his running mate before removing the dog's goggles. Dalton slowly placed them onto his own head, pulling the banded-leather strapping under his chin.\n\n\"We,\" Dalton said, doing his best to pull things together for the sake of those who survived. \"We need to get our shelters up, figure out what we have. Need to make sure Whiskey didn't die for nothing.\"\n\nCambria simply placed her hand onto his upper back, trying to comfort him while finding comfort for herself in his survival.\n\n\"What should we do with Christopher's body?\" Kieth asked.\n\nDalton swiftly walked to the man, reaching down with a single arm, grabbing Christopher's body and tossing it over the ledge. A motion that forced the smuggler to cringe momentarily for the pain of his gunshot wound.\n\nAs darkness crept in, the survivors huddled around for a well-rounded meal and some plans for the immediate future. Including the child, there were ten of them left, and hundreds of dead below who wanted them badly.\n\n\"Seems like our friends down below are getting more aggressive.\" Johnny remarked, pulling a piece of stringy meat from the bone, and chewing the tender hunk.\n\nThey had built a small fire, using collected lumber from down below and a propane torch Johnny had collected. Each person understood the coming weeks, possibly even longer, would be a much rougher way of living. Still, they all agreed that a single night of luxury was much needed after the previous events. And, if nothing else, they considered it a celebration of the life Whiskey lived.\n\n\"Sumbitches are getting hungrier,\" Dalton replied. \"Fuck 'em\"\n\n\"Still, we do need to put together some sort of plan. A safety net around us while we are forced to remain here.\" Cambria added.\n\nThere was something about her voice. Even though Dalton James sat with Selina by the warmth of their campfire, his eyes remained on the woman who continued to tug at the restraints of his heart. Cambria Sims.\n\n\"Be back girl, I need a little bit of air.\" Dalton said, standing slowly to his feet in order to walk to the opposite end of the building's rooftop.\n\nSlowly he sat down, easing because of the gunshot wound which remained bandaged on his right shoulder. Of course, there was always the fact that a slight stumble would have thrown him to the horde of Zombies below.\n\nDalton glanced up to see Johnny approaching, the light of fire flickering across the seated smuggler's face.\n\n\"So, you really love her huh?\" Johnny asked, sitting down beside him.\n\n\"What you talking about?\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Come on man. I may be from a planet that's on the low end of technology, but it doesn't make me stupid. Or blind. You and Cambria are both throwing off stares of chemistry that paints a pretty obvious picture.\n\n\"I don't know. And that is the truth,\" Dalton said, turning away for a moment. \"Hard to think about something like that with Zombies screaming below and my running mate dead to the world.\"\n\n\"Well, for what it's worth,\" Johnny said. \"If she won't be with me then I at least want her to be with someone who will take care of her. I'm pretty sure you fit the bill.\"\n\nDalton nodded, his way of showing a mutual respect for the outlaw.\n\n\"Not to get too far ahead or anything, but if you guys need a crew member?\" Johnny asked.\n\n\"Not for me to decide, besides, we got a long wait with the Drifters on our heels.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Fair enough. Just thought I'd mention it,\" Johnny said, standing to his feet slowly. \"Cause that train we robbed,\" he added. \"Talking a whole lot of money.\"\n\n\"How much money is a whole lot?\" Dalton asked, feeling as thought the conversation had turned into a job interview of sorts.\n\n\"Enough,\" Johnny replied with a grin. \"Enough to go around and be life changing for everyone.\"\n\nGreat. Dalton thought as he watched Johnny walk away. As if I didn't have enough shit to think about.\n\nMoments later Dalton stood to his feet, turning to rejoin the group and begin a solid plan of safe survival.\n\n\"We rotate in shifts. During the day, Skulls is at the corner with rifle in hand. At night, I'll take his place so he can rest. Daytime, Kieth watches the trapdoor coming up. Nighttime, Johnny takes his post.\" Dalton said.\n\n\"I don't know if I'm the guy to be asking.\" Kieth replied.\n\n\"Come here.\" Dalton said, waving Kieth into his direction. As they walked to the roof's edge, Dalton turned to the man.\n\n\"I appreciate what you did, grabbing Christopher and helping put that sorry 'sumbitch down.\" Dalton said.\n\n\"Anybody would have done the same.\" Kieth replied.\n\n\"No,\" Dalton said. \"No, they wouldn't have.\" he added. \"It takes guts to put it on the line like you did. Guts that a lot of people don't have,\" Dalton said with a pause. \"Cambria told me about you and Christopher having it out. Told me that you said you would have fought against the Legion during the War of Glimmeria.\"\n\n\"That's right.\" Kieth replied.\n\n\"The Legion had us outnumbered fifty to one in that war, but we still gave 'em hell. Wanna know why?\" Dalton asked.\n\nKieth answered with a nod, hanging on the words of the smuggler.\n\n\"Because we were protecting our families and our homes. When you are pushed into that, you tend to fight like hell. Do things you never thought you were capable of. Things like wrestle an armed man to the ground.\" Dalton said with a grin.\n\n\"I guess so.\" Kieth replied with a wide grin of his own.\n\n\"I want you to have this,\" Dalton said, reaching deep into the pit of a pocket on his brown coat. \"It's a Glimmerian coin, specially minted for my unit during the war. Everytime one of us dusted a redcoat, we got one of these,\" Dalton added. \"Truth be told, I pissed all of mine away. Been holding this one as a reminder. But tradition is tradition,\" he said, holding the coin out for Kieth. \"That 'sumbitch more than likely killed plenty of good men. And you did them all a favor when you helped dust his ass.\"\n\n\"Thanks, I don't know what to say?\" Kieth replied, slowly grabbing such a storied piece of war history.\n\n\"Don't say anything. Just know we are fighting a different war now, but the circumstances are similar. This is your family and this patch of roof is home. These fucks down below are trying to take what's yours, and we need you to help us give them hell. Can you do that?\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"I sure can.\" Kieth replied.\n\n\"Good,\" Dalton said, turning to the rest of the survivors. \"Johnny, give this man a piece. Something that can't miss.\"\n\nSeconds later, Dalton's hand snatched hold of a pump-action shotgun, tossed to him by the gunslinger.\n\n\"Pump once, aim in the general direction and get a good look at it. Cause once you fire this bad boy, the sumbitch in your sights is gonna be nothing but a memory.\" Dalton said with a grin, handing the man his weapon.\n\nIt was the simple gestures, things like boosting morale of the common man which really left an imprint on Cambria Sims. And as she watched Dalton joke with Kieth for a few moments, she was even further impressed by his good nature.\n\nSadly, she was not alone. Cambria glanced to Selina only to find the barroom girl also mesmerized by the known as Dalton James.\n\nThey had been on the roof for nearly six days as the sun began to rise. Dalton sat on the roof's corner, Salvation rifle by his side and cigar in mouth. The group still had needed supplies, such as food and water. What they were starting to run out of was hope. Hope that anyone else remained alive in the Drifts. Hope that the Colonial Army would send help, or, for that matter, was even aware of their situation. And Dalton found himself wondering if a growing love for Cambria Sims even mattered. Questioning if they would ever find themselves free of the rooftop to even explore the possibilities.\n\n\"Mind if I sit?\" Cambria asked, shaking the smuggler's calm as he quickly begin to lose his train of thought.\n\n\"No,\" Dalton said, trying to appear calm. \"By all means.\"\n\n\"I was just thinking that we can't win a war of attrition. Seems the Drifters aren't leaving like we had hoped, and another supply run would stretch us thin.\" she said.\n\n\"I agree,\" Dalton replied. \"Just not sure what to do about it.\"\n\n\"Is making a run for it out of the question?\" Cambria asked.\n\n\"Yes, for two reasons,\" he replied. \"We've no idea where to run to and would be carrying a child with us. I couldn't risk that knowing I couldn't guarantee his safety.\"\n\n\"Well, Johnny has said the Bluffs are well supplied and would be easy to defend. Aside from that, it would have to be the terminal and hope our ship is still intact.\" she added.\n\n\"Not a good plan.\" Dalton responded.\n\n\"You, I, Johnny and Skulls could make the trip. Bring our ship back for these people.\" she said\n\"No I can't risk it.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Risk what?\" Cambria asked, her tone changing to one of questionably soft.\n\n\"I can't risk anything happening to you out here,\" he replied, turning to look the tender-skinned woman eye to eye. \"I'm willing to go, willing to come back for you. But I can't see you put into harm's way.\" he said.\n\n\"And I want to see you go out there? Is that what you think?\" Cambria asked.\n\n\"It's different,\" he replied. \"My feelings for you are growing by the minute. I can't have a concern for your safety in the back of my mind.\"\n\n\"What about my feelings? You think you're the only one that sees the other and loses an ability to breathe? Do you know how many prayers I said while you were gone on the supply run?\" Cambria asked.\n\n\"Oh really?\" he replied with a smile, as if to brag of his importance.\n\n\"Yes really. I can't even remember what life before you was even like. And now I have to watch you sit with Selina, smile at her jokes and comfort her. And it kills me.\" Cambria said.\n\n\"Well, life before me included a lot less empty bottles, I'm thinking.\" he said with a grin, closing in slowly to kiss the grin of her lips.\n\n\"Cambria, Dalton, come quick!\" Skulls announced loudly as the rest of the group made their way to him as well.\n\nThis guy is forever blowing my game! Dalton thought, grumbling a bit as a kiss with Cambria was cut short.\n\n\"What is it?\" Cambria asked.\n\n\"Picking up a radio transmission from the Royal Army.\" Skulls replied as everyone listened closely to the male voice which transmitted by way of their portable radio.\n\nConstruction continues on Sky City, as we continue to bring in survivors. If you remain alive and well, please do not lose hope. We will get to you with time. The Royal Army is advising against travel as a majority of the countryside is now overrun with Drifters.\n\nThe outbreak of V2 is now thought to be intentional, the strain of virus now being traced back to the Hunter Clans. A Colonial Armada remains in orbit over our planets, strictly prohibiting us to leave until the viral strain is under control. The Colonials, however, do continue to drop supplies to our people. Each silver crate contains weapons, freeze-dried rations, medical kits and a blue flare.\n\nThe following locations are due a Colonial airdrop within the next twenty-four hours: Baltic, Cansoon, Mile View and Geartown. Again, our airships will be looking for blue smoke as a sign of survival.\n\nRemain vigilant, for you are a key part in the survival of our race. I look forward to meeting you soon in our city in the sky, current population, thirteen-thousand and fifty-nine souls.\n\nAnd, as each survivor finished listening to the message, they not only realized that hope existed...but that life as they knew it had officially changed. Forever.\n\nRoman\n\nAnd They were on him. Tu'nak knew well that the Hunters were closing in quickly. He knew not the number, nor the weapons in which they carried; he only knew of their intentions.\n\nThe Hunters were drinkers of mens' souls. Vampires by every definition. They wore Gothic black, carried the most elegant of weaponry, and, above all, thirsted for the salty sting of Human blood.\n\nTu'nak was Human enough, though his structure nearly spoke a different tale. A shade above seven feet in height, the warrior had packed muscle onto his gigantic frame throughout a lifetime. Such meaty flesh was considered a top catch by the Hunters, and that was all the more reason for them to track him down. Slay him and feast on the seasoned frame of the warrior.\n\nYet, they needed no more reasoning aside from the one they carried. Their queen had ordered it. She had demanded Tu'nak, and the remaining warriors who rose against the Vampiric race be hunted down and slaughtered. A group of warriors who answered but to one.\n\nRoman Raines.\n\nRoman had been one of the mightiest warriors ever recorded into history by Human hand, spending an entire lifetime slaying the very Vampires who hunted him.\n\nWhen he met demise, the flicker of a hero's journey coming to a close, the Hunters turned him. He would be a great addition to their cause, becoming one of their mightiest slayers.\n\nHowever, the Hunters underestimated Roman Raines; or rather his hatred for their kind. Indeed, his body had transformed from a dying Human into a warrior of the afterlife. But his objectives remained true. Kill every last Vampire, cleansing Humanity of the bastards forever.\n\nAnd so Tu'nak ran, swiftly and with the guarantee of safety if he were able to make it back. Because the fact was, it didn't matter how many Hunters were on him. Nor did it matter the weapons they carried with them. None would be near the strength in battle as Roman Raines was.\n\nAs the warrior's feet crunched the freshly-fallen snow with haste, his legs continuing a stride of panic; his lungs working hard against the air of frigidness as he finally made it back to their base of operations.\n\nNothing more than a large cabin surrounded by the foliage of trees, blankets of snow covering the round hills which also held the personal shuttle of Roman Raines.\n\n\"Were you followed?\" Roman asked as Tu'nak quickly approached the steps which led to the cabin's entrance, lungs throbbing from such bone-stabbing cold.\n\nRoman wore a coat of fur, one that reached the length of his body and was white with a peppering of black. A single blade hung by his side, one of rugged craftsmanship, but elegant nonetheless.\n\n\"Yes,\" Tu'nak replied, his chest throbbing with the pain of cold air forced in. \"A scouting group.\"\n\n\"Get inside and inform the others. I will join you shortly.\" Roman replied, his voice ringing with a touch of demonic tongue as gray smoke floated up to the clouds, a single campfire to blame. His long hair of white and black nearly blended with the icy surroundings, as did his chalk-white skin.\n\nAnd there he stood, sword in hand as he walked a small circle, slowly facing the thickly-wooded area near camp.\n\n\"You can show yourselves. I smell you. Take arms and fight with honor, our code requires it.\" Roman said loudly, the chill of his voice overpowering that of the air.\n\nWithout warning, a Hunter jumped into sight from the wooded area, the demon holding sword in hand, fully extended and determined to end the life of Roman Raines.\n\nInstead, however, the soldier of immortality quickly became otherwise, the trunk of his body severed in half by a chopping swipe of Roman's blade.\n\nThe two bulks of flesh, both of them completely lifeless, fell to the snow before much of the gushing blood which followed, soaking the ground at the mighty slayers' feet.\n\n\"Go. Run back home with fear and tell your queen of the legend known as Roman Raines!\" he yelled.\n\n\"We will speak to our queen of no such warrior,\" a Hunter replied loudly, a total of two making their way into the clearing. \"My mouth is capable of no such lie.\"\n\n\"Then your lifeless body will speak of it for you.\" Roman said as the two demons began to circle him.\n\nSwordplay was indeed important to the Hunters, looked upon as honorable warfare. But no training they could have completed, no mentor among them, could have prepared the two Vampires for the skill with blade which ran through Roman's veins every moment of every day.\n\nWith just the slightest of feigns, only enough to force one of the beasts into a parry, Roman quickly turned to plunge the bulk of his blade into the chest of the other, unsuspecting demon. Then, knowing well that his enemy was on the door of death, Roman jerked loose his sword, crushing it down onto his other opponent.\n\nThe Vampire, who was recovering from a parry proven unnecessary, only found time to raise his blade to deflect the downswing of such a warrior. And, in most cases, it was a fine move. However, he was fighting Roman Raines on this day.\n\nThe punishing power of the Vampiric slayer of Vampires continued his swing, forcing it through the defending steel and shattering the victim's sword; finding a home in the upper skull of his outmatched foe.\n\nAs Roman forced his blade back out single-handed, bringing with it large fragments of bone, he slowly sheathed it once more while watching the doomed Vampire's lifeless body fall to the ground.\n\n\"We must find another home. The attacks grow more common.\" Gore said as Roman's group of warriors approached at arms.\n\nThe Husk warrior, a race that looked both of Orc and demon descent, had long hair falling from a majority of his large frame. The brown locks that were so common among his race did little to cover such a specimen of muscle, though it was covered in scars. He had seen many battles, and survived to tell of the horrors that had accompanied them.\n\nFor his people hated the Hunters, and their only goal in life was to end as many Vampires as possible; making him a perfect fit for Roman's Empire.\n\n\"I agree,\" Roman replied. \"The scouts they send pose little threat, but may one day be replaced with Hunter Elites.\"\n\nEveryone stood silently at the notion. Hunter Elites were the equivalent of Knights, though they were capable of acts unspeakable. Each had been a slayer of men while alive. So much, in fact, that they had been given the gift of immortality. Roman was one such Knight, or at least it had been planned so. He had been the first to ever resist their influence, and though he seemed unmatched in battle, he would now face the best warriors because of it.\n\nThe best warriors that centuries had spawned. Some kings, others but common men whose legend had grown in battle. Each Hunter Elite was, in his own right, the best warrior of his day. Once turned, they added the Vampiric traits to their own skill in battle. And towering above them all, Vladris.\n\nNo Hunter feared, their genetics would not allow such an emotion. But all Hunters, even Hunter Elites, knew of Vladris.\n\nThey knew of his legend, recognized him to be the greatest of their ranks and respected him because of it. And though he had seen many times of war, ending thousands of lives as both Human and Vampire, he now remained by the side of their queen; Sarah Blaine. Praying for the day that brought a battle which he and Roman Raines both knew was imminent. Their own.\n\n\"Where are we to flee? Draden asked.\n\nThe warrior was of Dragonborn descent. His people were clad in scales rather than skin, his a dark orange. Draden carried a long-blade on his side, and was capable with it. However, his gift was of a defensive nature. His exterior of Dragon hide made him nearly impossible to slay, all but the truest of swings merely deflected.\n\n\"I say we stay and fight the bastards!\" Pica yelled.\n\nThe Human archer was small by definition, his frame only about five and a half feet in height. The longbow that he currently held was about the same. And together, they were mighty. It took nearly everything Pica had to force the bow into a ready position, but the arrow that flew from his weapon of choice had decimating power.\n\n\"I'm glad you feel that way my brother. I have no intentions of fleeing,\" Roman replied, turning his gaze to Draden in the process. \"But we need to leave this cabin and strengthen our ranks before moving forward.\"\n\n\"Moving forward?\" Gore asked.\n\n\"There will come a day not long from now that our fight is taken to the Hunters. To their very doorstep. Their queen will know of my legend,\" Roman replied. \"Come Scucca!\" he added, a Vampiric hound of hell joining his side as the group entered the cabin to work on a thorough strategy. Each warrior taking heed as Scucca could not be trusted, often times lunging after any and all, aside from Roman of course.\n\nSarah Blaine knew of Roman's legend. Not only had word of his slaying made it back to her, but there was a time when both were mortals. Friends even, that had traveled together on the same Gunship crew. A smuggling crew that encountered many dangers along the way, and one in which Roman had defied the odds to save their lives many times over.\n\nSarah knew of Roman's abilities well, and it was the reason behind Vladris remaining at her side. Not that she was afraid of death, not by any means. But because she wanted nothing more than to witness the fall of such a warrior, one that had promised to end her.\n\nAnd though Sarah knew of Roman's legend, she had also started the process of reading the Hunter archives. And with each story she read, came a story of Vladris ending the legend of what Humanity had considered its best. Sarah believed in her heart that Vladris would surely end him.\n\n\"My queen,\" Vladris said, bending low to the floor of her throne room.\n\n\"Rise warrior, for only you are decorated in battle enough to speak to me on the same level.\" Sarah replied.\n\nAs Vladris slowly stood to his feet, his level of respect for her grew. She had replaced a queen who earned nothing of the such from him. She had been a coward, a butcher of her own people. The very reasoning behind Vladris ending her by his own blade.\n\nSarah had done the opposite, giving her race hope while treating them all with a level of respect that none had ever known.\n\nShe wanted to end Humanity, at least the part of it that hunted Vampires, this much was true. But not for the same reasons as those who ruled the Vampire nation before her. She didn't want them slaughtered because of sport; she considered the Hunters to be the most dominant race.\n\nAnd for that very reason, society would either live by their laws of die by their hands. The Hunters were to become the ruling government under her reign, or so she planned.\n\nAs Vladris stood there, a slick-shaven head that was home to several tribal tattoos, he gazed with respect. His pearl white pupils cutting into her with appreciation as a two-handed sword of reaving remained strapped to his back with leather bonding.\n\n\"Thank you my queen,\" he replied, his voice soft and polite by Vampiric standards. \"I have received word that our scouts have been slain.\"\n\n\"As expected.\" Sarah replied.\n\nNormally, during the conversion process, a Human grew worse in appearance. Not Sarah Blaine. She had grown exceptionally more beautiful, if that was even possible. It was almost as if she had been born to become a Vampire, not fully blossoming until her conversion.\n\nBoth her lips and eyes nearly glowed a crimson red, the rest of her skin whitening in a way that brought with it purified beauty. She looked as though she had been hand-carved from ivory, and then accented with the perfect coloring in all of the important places.\n\n\"Should I form a group of Elites?\" Vladris asked.\n\n\"No,\" she said quickly, turning to nod her answer as well. \"Roman will expect such a move and doing so will only bring the loss of mighty warriors to our ranks.\"\n\n\"Shall I track him down myself?\" Vladris asked.\n\n\"No.\" Sarah replied, turning to look out of the large opening which served as a window.\n\nThe Hunters had built what was the equivalent of a castle, inside the confines of a hollowed mountain. For centuries, each queen had lived here, overlooking their homeworld of Ronica through the large opening in the side of their mountain.\n\n\"You do not believe I would prevail against him my queen?\" Vladris asked.\n\n\"I believe nothing less than your victory against him,\" Sarah replied, quickly making her confidence in his abilities known. \"We will need to defeat Roman Raines by out-thinking him. I have a plan, and it involves you doing something completely different.\"\n\n\"Thank you my queen. Speak it and it will be so.\" Vladris replied.\n\nAnd so began the plan of Sarah Blaine, queen of Vampires; a plan that would surely bring an end to Roman Raines.\n\nAs Vladris stood in his own room hours later, built of stone block and vaulted ceilings, he remembered pieces of his mortal life. There was a large door which led to a balcony, and as Vladris walked onto the tiled floor of stone which overlooked a gushing river below the mountain, he remained deep in thought; a curtain of rain falling across their kingdom.\n\nRonica had always been such a beautiful planet. Its warfare being fought with steel, be it sword, arrow tips or axe. Its method of transportation one of horseback, and its climate filled with rain. At least ninety percent of its days filled with the hammering of rain, falling with intention from the heavens above to the soil which its people called home.\n\nThe Ronical Kingdom had been one of the last to fall under the rule of Vampires, staving off the sky-born demons time and time again.\n\nVladris had been one of the mightiest of Knights, slaying hundreds of Vampires over a period of time which spanned nearly a decade. And, as several Hunter Elites finally pinned him down in battle, Vladris remained true to his legend; slaying a few of them as well, before falling himself.\n\nShortly after, The Ronical Kingdom fell. Ronica's people had fought with such courage, such desire for life, that after the war had ended the Hunters allowed them to live. Under Vampire laws and rule, of course, but none were to be harmed without good cause.\n\nVladris had helped earn his people, to some degree, freedom. The Hunters even thought so highly of their champion that they defended the Humans on Ronica as well; placing their castle here and treating the Humans who remained as though they were better than simple cattle.\n\nEvery hard rain that lay before the eyes of Vladris reminded him of his mortal life on Ronica. Reminded him of the King he once served; the woman he once loved.\n\nIn fact, when fighting the Hunters many years ago, it was the thought of his true love which led to such feats on the battlefield. And, even to this very day, Vladris thought of Amelia when locked in battle. Her memory and loss of life fueled Vladris, tapping into an emotional rage with sword in hand that had brought him many victories.\n\nMost across the Skyla System had thought the Hunters to be without emotion. None had ever seen tears flow from the eyes of such a mighty warrior, as they did this very moment. His pain a true love lost forever; forever his death sentence. For he was immortal, cursed to live the remainder of a life never-ending without the warmth of his lover.\n\nAnd so the tears flowed heavily from the eyes of such a mighty soldier, a warrior who gripped the banister of the balcony and prayed for a time when someone could best him in battle, ending such a gripping emotional pain.\n\nRoman and his group of warriors rode hard, their mounted horses pushing forward in the blind of snow. They concerned themselves not with thoughts of bandits, highwaymen or even Hunter groups. For they rode with Roman Raines, arguably the greatest Vampiric warrior in history. Arguably.\n\nBetween that title of legacy and Roman stood Vladris, and in his very soul, Roman knew the day of confrontation was drawing near. Soon the warriors would meet in battle, it was destiny. And though he knew not the outcome, Roman believed on that day Ronica would know with certainty who deserved the title of greatest.\n\n\"Soon the snow will turn to rain. Let us make camp for the night.\" Roman said as the riders began to slow, finally spotting a small patch of trees which would provide cover enough to burn a campfire.\n\nMost notably, Pica was the first to welcome the mention of camp. Though he only carried a longbow, it was one of both exceptional quality and craftsmanship. It remained in such condition because of Pica's caring hands, conditioning the weapon regularly, just as he did on this very night by the light of a campfire.\n\nUsing a small piece of grit paper, the Human slowly brushed across the tough wood of the bow, doing away with any dings it may have recently acquired through use. Then, he brought the longbow back to a shine with a rag which he dipped into a small jar of oil. Clear, almost as if it were alcohol fit for drinking, Pica continued to care for every inch of his weapon.\n\n\"The way you stroke your weapon grows me to wonder of your intentions on this night.\" Gore said as the group burst into laughter.\n\n\"Worry not for me,\" Pica replied with a snarl. \"But for that rust covered blade which rides your back as poorly as you ride your mount.\"\n\nAs the laughter of the group grew, even Roman was forced to break his concentration a bit. He regularly meditated, losing himself into thought and mind as Scucca, his hellhound, stood guard over him.\n\nWith a loud bark which chilled hot tempers, Scucca glanced at the group as if to warn them of their growing noise.\n\n\"This rusty blade has killed many warriors,\" Gore replied, though his eyes remained on Scucca. \"A slew of them holding the very bow that you covet so greatly. The rust will fall from my blade when it finds a new home in bloody flesh, which may be that of a dog should Roman turn a blind eye.\" he added, staring as if to dare Scucca to move on him.\n\n\"And if the blade strike doesn't kill him, the gangrene of rust surely will!\" Draden replied, causing the entire group to burst out loudly.\n\n\"I hear you my brother,\" Gore replied, turning his attention to the Dragonborn warrior turned campfire jester. \"And many of the cowards wielding bows which my blade has slain had scaled-hides as you do.\"\n\nRather than reply, Draden scowled at Gore, defending his people with a stern look. Quickly after, however, the stern look turned to Scucca as well.\n\n\"That damn dog is the devil himself.\" Tunak said, the muscle-bound warrior also eying the guard dog of Roman Raines.\n\n\"Aye,\" Gore said. \"And should the the devil snarl his lips to me one more time, he will lay testament to what my rusted blade can do.\"\n\n\"Save it my brother,\" Tunak said, gently sipping from a metal cup filled with coffee as the light of fire illuminated their faces. \"Not so long from now we will be knee-deep in Vampires. Save what little life your blade has left for them.\"\n\nAnd with that joking insult, the entire group began laughing once more, followed by Draden tossing Gore his oily rag.\n\n\"We'll see whose blade chews more flesh when the dying begins my friends.\" Gore lashed out, though moments later he began shining his blade and ridding the rust.\n\nRoman heard the chatter of his group, and normally would have warned them to be more silenced. But he understood the situation. The Hunters knew they were coming, they must have.\n\nNormally Roman and his group would have encountered several Vampire scouts during their ride. However, they had not encountered a single one. Nothing. Which led him to believe all of the blood-sucking bastards had been called back to the castle to lie in wait.\n\nStrangely, since being turned to the ranks of the undead, Roman not only found the art of meditation relaxing, but felt as though it provided some sort of link to the mind of Vladris.\n\nHe knew not of the location of Vladris, or what thoughts crept into the warrior's mind; but rather a feeling of connection. Roman had often wondered if the same feeling was had by all Hunters, or just himself. He had promised himself that should he ever take a Vampire alive, he'd get the answer to his question. Unfortunately, no day had yet come. He simply enjoyed killing them too much.\n\nRoman also wondered of Scucca. What had spawned such loyalty from the dog, at first sight no less. The Vampiric hound of hell had partnered itself with Roman from the very first encounter, and he was still unsure why. As badly as Roman Raines wanted to watch the Hunters' castle burn to the ground, he felt an overwhelming need to visit their archives first. He wanted to learn as much about the race which he was forced into, because, like it or not; he was indeed a Vampire.\n\nThe battle of Callian saw thousands fall, hundreds of thousands even. The Husk allied themselves with what remained of the Ronical Kingdom, brining their massive blades into battle.\n\nAnd though the damned green-skinned Husk were born to slay us, still we pushed them back. Our Elites were killing Husk Tribals, their warrior of warriors, at a ratio of three-to-one.\n\nAs our great army began to crush what few Husk which remained, an unknown warrior arrived with but twelve knights. And though our enemy's force remained below a hundred warriors, standing against thousands of our own, the warrior led them to victory.\n\nOur own people are beginning to call them the twelve angels. They are whispering that the human warrior is a God among men. Could it be so? Could a God walk among them and protect such a beautiful kingdom?\n\nOur queen has announced such talk is to be considered treason, and that anyone guilty will be led to the gallows. Still, secretive chatter continues among our own ranks.\n\nAs Sarah continued to read the Hunter archives, she grew to understand the power in battle which Vladris possessed. Having him nearby made her feel completely safe, as if the Gods did not have power to harm her. For such a warrior to have been turned, giving him the strength and speed of an immortal, Sarah truly believed it was the Hunters' destiny to rule civilization.\n\n\"We approach Marlock,\" Roman said, his chilled voice only adding to the vivid mist which escaped his lips on such a cold morning. Adding a bit more eeriness to the sight of a hound spawned of hell running beside them.\n\nThe snow had subsided, leaving behind drifts deep with powder and a cold that hurt to the bone. Roman had known of Marlock throughout his lifetime of hatred for the Hunters. And as legend had spoken of it, he had imagined a great city, its buildings filled with warriors who remained true to their fight against the Vampires. A great city marked by the hanging of red skulls from limbs of surrounding trees. A warning to any Hunters who might approach.\n\nIt soon became evident to Roman Raines that the legends spoke of a lie, at least in the description of Marlock. It was no city, not in the least. Merely a village of only a few dozen dwellings, each made of thick logs and cemented mud.\n\nHe hoped that the rest of the Marlock legend held true. It spoke of an army so mighty, so in love with the bloodlust of Vampires, that the Hunters could not remove them from their city. Or in this case, small village.\n\n\"Let us hope the warriors put up a better fight than the beauty of their home.\" Gore said loudly as the group slowed to a trot.\n\n\"Or that their women are easier on the eyes.\" Tunak added, prompting laughter from most.\n\n\"Silence,\" Roman demanded, turning to his group for a moment. \"A warrior can never be judged by his surroundings. To do so is unwise. The mightiest I have ever had the honor of doing battle with, or against, came from such conditions,\" Roman added. \"For these men know of no comfort, they know of no luxury. They only know of pain, which makes for a dangerous warrior indeed. A grizzly among men.\"\n\n\"A grizzly growls in my stomach,\" Pica said, his bow strung to the back of his thick coat. \"Let's hope these dangerous warriors know of food.\" he added, the entire group beginning to laugh once more.\n\n\"Halt!\" a man cried, walking from behind a nearby tree with crossbow in hand.\n\nThe stranger looked impoverished, as though he had not seen the basic Human comforts in many days. Still he stood there, his crossbow aimed directly into the direction of Roman Raines.\n\n\"What business do you have here?\" the man asked, as nearly a dozen more men walked from surrounding trees, each carrying either a large sword or man-slaying axe.\n\n\"We slay Vampires, that is our business. Have we arrived among friends of the same purpose, or do the legends of such a city merely speak a lie.\" Roman responded, turning to face the crossbow wielding man.\n\n\"Liar! You are a Hunter yourself!\" the man yelled.\n\n\"Indeed,\" Roman said calmly, turning his head a bit to view the remaining men as the snow steadily began to fall once more. \"But I am of no threat to you. If it were the case, you and your friends would already lay in a pool of your own fluids.\"\n\nThe man continued to look at Roman, into the eyes of a warrior who knew of life after death, yet traveled with men.\n\n\"You know it to be the truth,\" Roman said. \"We wish to eat, rest and then talk of an assault against the Hunters.\"\n\n\"You lie! To speak of such is to speak of suicide.\" one of the other men cried out, his grip holding a one-handed axe.\n\n\"To speak of suicide would be for another man to call me out as a liar.\" Roman warned.\n\nAs they continued to look Roman over, thick white hair braided down to the warrior's lower back, eyes nearly glowing as hot coals would, the man who held a crossbow nodded a bit.\n\n\"You are the one everyone speaks of. The demon which hunts demons, are you not?\" the man asked.\n\n\"I am the demon who hunts Vladris. I seek to end his reign of terror, slaying with him the legend which follows. The rest of the dead Vampires laying in my wake have simply gotten in the way.\" Roman said sternly, moments later grinning a bit.\n\n\"Then yes, the tales of Marlock are true,\" the man said, returning the grin. \"Take them in at once! They are heroes among us!\"\n\nAnd with that short, but fate-altering conversation, the warriors led Roman and his group into Marlock. Food they would have on this night, only the finest Marlock had to offer. For Roman's legend was growing across Roncia, having already reached the ears of such a secluded village and its warriors.\n\n\"Bring him!\" Sarah yelled, her voice anything but demonic as the Vampire queen sat in a luxurious throne of jewels.\n\nAs Vladris entered her throne room, carrying with him a young man with bound hands, he tossed the baggage down abruptly.\n\n\"Enough! No harm is to come to this prisoner,\" Sarah said loudly, warning her finest Hunter. \"If one of our own but splits a single hair on his head, you had better slay them in my stead.\"\n\n\"Yes my queen.\" Vladris replied, not quite understanding her fascination with the young man, but daring not question her.\n\n\"You will not be harmed. You have my word.\" Sarah replied with a smile.\n\nAnd though the prisoner's face, which remained under the veil of a sackcloth bag, couldn't see the queen of Hunters; her voice sounded familiar to him. Almost soothing.\n\n\"And that's when Roman sprung from the trees and together, we slew nearly a dozen of the bastards!\" Gore said loudly, slamming a steel mug to the table.\n\nIt was filled with a warmed brew. A drink similar to what humans considered ale, though it contained several herbal extracts as well. The people of Marlock considered it to have both healing and relaxation qualities; not to mention it would warm the bones of even the mightiest of warriors.\n\n\"Your numbers are far less than I had expected.\" Roman said with seriousness as the entire group, nearly thirty strong, looked back at him.\n\n\"We were once very formidable, just as your legend speaks. But years of war against an enemy who outnumbers us so greatly has taken its toll.\" Anthony replied. He had been the first to confront Roman's group hours before, crossbow in hand and served as leader of their people.\n\n\"And this other group of warriors you speak of?\" Roman asked.\n\n\"Indeed,\" Anthony replied. \"They are out on a supply raid and are not expected to return for the duration of four more days.\"\n\n\"Four cold days.\" Pica said, causing a chuckling-stir throughout the group.\n\n\"We realized the Hunters hate cold. They will enter snowy fields to do battle as long as they understand it is temporary. So we dug in here,\" a large warrior replied. His hair was a bit short, and fiery red at first glance. His faced was marred with scars of war, his eyes further speaking of their woes. \"They know we are here. Yet they have been unable to break us in a single battle...and unwilling to stay for more.\"\n\n\"This is my first in command, Bral,\" Anthony said. \"One of the finest men you will ever meet, and even more so when it comes to combat.\"\n\n\"Then it is indeed an honor.\" Roman replied, nodding to such a highly of spoken warrior.\n\n\"I do not understand your travels with the Vampires' dog if you are indeed a slayer of the undead?\" a man asked, speaking loudly as a two-handed sword lay snug to his back, strapped with leather bonding.\n\n\"Four!\" Anthony said loudly, scolding his warrior.\n\n\"It is alright,\" Roman said, staring hard at the sword-strapped man. \"I myself do not understand it. From what I have learned along the way, the hellhounds marry themselves to the strongest of warriors. Scucca was by the side of Vladris when we first met, yet he left with me.\"\n\n\"Then you truly are a greater warrior than Vladris? If it is true, we may very well turn the tides of war!\" Four replied.\n\n\"Roman, I apologize. Four speaks out of turn.\" Anthony added.\n\n\"I understand his questions, and have one of my own. Why Four?\" Roman asked.\n\n\"Because, no matter who we face on the battlefield, he fights as well as their four best warriors.\" Anthony replied.\n\n\"Interesting.\" Roman said.\n\n\"So our plan?\" Bral asked, always the one for strategy when it came to battle.\n\n\"Spread the rumor of a great assault against the town of Bainson,\" Roman said. \"The Hunters will deplete their ranks to seek such a battle and defend the town. Then, we strike their castle with our best men. It will be defended, but they should not be able to hold us. We will reach their queen long before the Hunters dispatched to Bainson return.\"\n\n\"It is a solid plan. There are many humans who worship Vampires in Bainson.\" Bral replied.\n\n\"First we must rest for the night and finish filling our bellies.\" Roman said.\n\n\"Agreed, my friend.\" Anthony replied, extending his hand to the Vampire which stalked his own kind. And with their handshake came a treaty of death to come.\n\nSarah's favorite place throughout the castle wasn't the room that held her throne, which had been the favorite of so many before her. Instead, she found herself drawn to the room of archives. She felt compelled to find out as much about the Hunters as possible.\n\nAnd on this great day, the day of our Lord 4072, our army of undead faced its toughest. A small army on the planet of Ronica, led by their King and a warrior among their finest. A warrior which fights like no other our species has ever encountered. A warrior who has slain many of our kind, including four Elite Knights dispatched by our very queen.\n\nPerhaps we have underestimated the will of humankind. The resolve of such an outmatched opponent. They must know of their inevitable demise. They must see the death and destruction around them. Yet this warrior of light gives them hope. Strength. Whatever the cost, whatever measures must be taken, this warrior must be ended if Ronica is to fall under our rule.\n\nSarah continued to read through books which were inked by the hand of Vampires hundreds, possibly even thousands of years before her eyes skimmed the pages of the moment.\n\nToday our species did the unthinkable. Retreat from battle. With our numbers strong and our greatest Elite, Graddon, on the battlefield, swift victory was sure to follow.\n\nYet we were bested, Graddon falling gruesomely to this knight of light which wields a longsword. He is the one our own people have spoken of as an angel. Our queen has called him a glorified farmer, yet he has, by his own hands, killed hundreds of our kin. Members of our own species have even begun speaking of him as the devil, if not the angel he appears to be. The very devil! They say he is un-slayable, though speaking of a human in such a way is considered treason.\n\nSarah stopped ubruptly.\n\n\"My queen.\" Vladris said.\n\n\"What is it my champion?\" the pale white display of beauty replied, a corset snugly fit around curves of perfection.\n\n\"The prisoner is under watch and being treated kind, just as you instructed.\" Vladris replied.\n\n\"Thank you my champion,\" Sarah said with pause. \"I will soon explain to you my reasoning, as well as our plan.\"\n\n\"You need not explain a thing to me, my queen.\" Vladris responded.\n\n\"A warrior of such valor deserves an explanation, even from his queen.\" Sarah said with both admiration and intrigue.\n\n\"Thank you my queen.\" he replied, nodding slightly before turning to leave the doorway.\n\nSarah wanted to know more. More about their race, and just as importantly, more about her champion warrior. Skimming through the pages of the Hunter Archives, she saw talk of a split in their ranks, the coming of a second queen and a war that would see the two Hunter factions fighting each other. Yet, none of it concerned her.\n\nAs she reached the next entry dedicated to the knight of light, her eyes began to focus with concentration.\n\nToday our queen executed dozens of our own species. Each of them guilty for speaking of this knight of light, Vladris, in such a God-like fashion. He slew Graddon, our very best, and did so with such ease. Our next move was to trap his caravan away from the confines of such a beautiful castle, slay him by the roadside. Queen Vivian dispatched her three finest Elites, a sure death sentence for any Human warrior. Yet, Vladris lives.\n\nOur three Elites fell in battle, along with a dozen Hunters as only two arrived back to speak of the battle. They brought with them a prisoner. A woman named Amelia. She seems to have the affections of Vladris, which our queen feels could be the achilles heel of such a mighty warrior.\n\nOnly time will tell of what is to become of her. But, as of this very moment, they are doing things to her. Unspeakable things. Many of our own warriors have reported her screams from behind the wooden doors in which she is being held.\n\nSarah stopped at that moment, having tried to imagine a warrior such as Vladris dealing with the loss of love. She too had lost her true love in Adam Michaels, feeling condemned, even cursed, with immortality. Forever to think about a love never realized; to grieve for the one her heart longed for.\n\nVladris had dealt with this very pain for many years now. And it was a trait that made him even more honorable in her eyes. The strongest warrior among her people growing even stronger in the affections of his queen.\n\n\"Non-sense! There can be no such victory, and to speak of it is insanity!\" the warrior cried out.\n\n\"Silence Ranthra, you speak out of turn!\" Anthony replied loudly, trying to lull the large warrior.\n\nHe was outfitted in brown fur, beneath which, rested a hide of leather that was finely stitched. The hulking warrior's head shaved clean with a scar protruding from the top of his skull to the outer edges of his top lip.\n\n\"I speak the truth,\" Ranthra replied with emotion. \"To march us onto the doorstep of the Hunters is a death sentence to all who would be foolish enough to follow you.\"\n\n\"Careful with your words Ranthra.\" Anthony said in a cautioning fashion.\n\n\"Your courage I do not question, for I have seen it many times over,\" Ranthra replied, turning to Roman. \"It is the courage and abilities of this man. The man who claims himself better than Vladris.\"\n\n\"Not a believer?\" Roman asked calmly.\n\n\"I have seen Vladris fight, even clashed my own sword against his. I have the very scar upon my face to show for it. Luckily, my life as well. Vladris cannot be beaten!\" Ranthra exclaimed.\n\n\"Not by a warrior who walks the path of a coward.\" Roman replied.\n\n\"I walk no such path, and you are in no position to question that statement.\" Ranthra said, drawing his sword and placing its tip to the Hunter Elite's throat.\n\n\"Enough Ranthra!\" Anthony yelled, standing to his feet.\n\n\"No, I want to see what this slayer of Vampires is truly capable of! Vladris went through my group of warriors, six of us in total! If he is as mighty as he speaks, let him prove it right here!\"\n\n\"Only six?\" Roman asked, a bit of sarcasm on his words as he remained sitting for a moment.\n\nThen, without a hint of warning, Roman stood to his feet and spun with inhuman speed, smashing Ranthra's head through the table before them. With the powder of wood filling the air, Roman maintained his grip on the back of Ranthra's neck, pulling him back to his feet abruptly before tossing the bewildered warrior against a nearby wall.\n\nAs Ranthra slid to a sitting position, nearly unconscious, Roman met his next challenge head on. The Vampiric warrior clutched the throat of a second warrior who rushed, applying enough pressure for the man to drop his axe, at which time Roman kicked him square to the chest, knocking him back against the opposite wall.\n\nA third warrior joined the fray, dagger extended fully in an attempt to end Roman's growing legend. Instead, his journey was cut short as Roman grabbed the warrior's wrist, his firm grip snapping the man's wrist as though it were but a dry twig. A backhand sent the reeling warrior to the floor with a thud, Roman having secured his dagger in the process.\n\nThrowing it end over end with surgical precision, the dagger dug into the wall behind a fourth warrior, merely inches from the man's face.\n\nIt was a warning, and Roman made damn sure it was a warning well received as he all but dared the warrior to continue with the gaze of his eyes.\n\n\"Six warriors, six-hundred warriors. It does not matter. I will have my fight with Vladris before whatever God you pray to. Any man who thinks me unworthy of ending the demon of demons, let him speak now.\" Roman said, a harsh truth blanketing his words.\n\nNo man dared step forward, the Hunter Elite having bested many of them in a matter of seconds. At that moment each one of them believed Roman would be the warrior to end Vladris. Every one except for Ranthra, who had been the only warrior who could claim an exchange with both legends of battle. In his mind, the battle could go either way. He was unsure of the outcome, but damn sure that he was officially in on the plan to reunite Roman and Vladris in battle.\n\nVladris stood on the balcony which overlooked the bursting water of a river below. Many things raced through the mighty warrior's head as he continued his stare onto the horizon at distant. Rolling hills littered with trees, all seemingly so full of life.\n\n\"His name is Troy.\" Sarah said, slowly entering the quarters of Vladris.\n\n\"My queen.\" Vladris replied with a slight bow.\n\n\"In my travels with Roman Raines, my human travels, Troy was taken in by our crew,\" she said. \"I am very fond of the boy, but my fondness is minascule compared to Roman's.\"\n\n\"You plan to use the prisoner as leverage?\" Vladris asked.\n\n\"I plan to turn Roman to our cause. I intend to force his hand by making him choose between total submission to our will or the death of Troy, because I know he will not allow the boy to die.\" Sarah replied.\n\n\"But he is a Vampire now. His affections for the boy may not remain.\" Vladris said.\n\n\"They will remain, as does the hatred for our own species. He will be forced to choose to accept his place among us or the death of a young man he thinks of as a son. And he will choose the safety of Troy.\" Sarah responded.\n\n\"And if he does not?\" Vladris asked.\n\n\"Then you will have your chance to prove the better warrior.\" Sarah replied.\n\nVladris longed for the battle. He knew that some of his own race had begun chattering of a demon who possibly could best him. Every chance Vladris had to solidify his own legend, was a chance he yearned for.\n\n\"Speak to me of Amelia.\" Sarah asked.\n\nVladris turned away from her, once again facing the balcony and view of the rolling hills curtained with rain. It was thought to be an insult to turn away from their queen, though he thought the outcome worse had his tears been discovered.\n\n\"My queen?\" Vladris finally responded, masking his overwhelming emotion. The very mention of her name sending shock waves throughout his entire body.\n\n\"My champion, your show of affection for her is not a weakness. It is a strength,\" she said, approaching him easily. \"Turn to face me. Tell me of your method in dealing with love lost, for I am cursed with the same fate.\"\n\n\"Killing,\" Vladris said bluntly as Sarah's fingers comforted the face of such an agonized soldier. \"When I am on the battlefield, sinking blade to flesh and cleaving apologies from enemies, my mind is not concerned with Amelia.\"\n\n\"Tell me of her. It speaks of Amelia in the archives, but briefly. Tell me of the type of woman she was.\" Sarah said.\n\n\"She was perfect. I have never met a woman who brought me more happiness with her mere presence. Everything about her made me better, and I do apologize for my weakness with emotion my queen, but think not that I am weak on the battlefield.\" Vladris said.\n\n\"I know only the opposite. The archives speak in great detail of the warriors who have faced you, all of them falling swiftly.\" Sarah said as they stood only a few feet apart.\n\n\"It also speaks of greater days. A time when the Hunters were a single society, led by both queen and king.\" Sarah said, the look of intentional seduction in her eyes.\n\n\"My queen?\" Vladris said.\n\n\"Become our king. Rule at my side, and let us unify every Hunter to our cause. I am no Amelia, but I may provide a comfort from her constant memory, and you from the constant memory of my own love lost.\" Sarah said.\n\nVladris stood there. At first puzzled, though he soon began to realize the potential behind such a marriage. Maybe Sarah could help him forget, at least to a degree, his Amelia. Together they could rule without their own personal struggles, and do so in striking fashion.\n\n\"My mind must be clear when facing Roman Raines, be it in battle or brotherhood. Once he is either with us, or in an eternal grave, then I will gladly become your king.\" Vladris replied.\n\n\"Good,\" Sarah said, smiling as wide as her powder-white face would allow. \"For these people already look to you as their king. And I look to you as my champion.\" she added, leaning in to kiss the warrior who would help elevate their species back into one of total dominance.\n\n\"I have not seen snowfall this thick in many years.\" Tunak said, several of the warriors sitting inside the cabin, watching the frigid moisture fall to the ground.\n\n\"It is a sign,\" Four said. \"Roman was born to end the life of Vladris!\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Ranthra said loudly, doing his best to overcome their loud chants. \"Or perhaps Roman has severely underestimated his enemy.\"\n\nNo chanting followed the statement, only silence as everyone stopped to hear his reasoning.\n\n\"I mean no disrespect to Roman,\" he said, both Tunak and Gore acknowledging his honesty. \"But I may claim to be the only warrior among us to have faced both men in battle, albeit shortly. Vladris moves unlike any man, or monster, that I have ever faced. No legend, besides his very own, tells a tale of such ability to slay.\" Ranthra said.\n\n\"You have yet to see Roman's true ability to slay. For I was with him when he had but a single blade; yet five Hunters still fell. Five!\" Tunak shouted.\n\n\"I do not doubt your claim warrior,\" Ranthra said, easing the tense of their exchange. \"But I ask you this. If Roman is a Vampire, it means he did indeed fall in battle. Who then? Who was the warrior to slay him?\" Ranthra asked.\n\n\"Vladris.\" Roman replied, shutting the door abruptly, his body-length coat of fur covered with snow.\n\n\"Vladris?\" Tunak asked, the entire group stunned with the information.\n\n\"Indeed,\" Roman calmly replied, his stare cutting into Ranthra. \"A better question may be who introduced Vladris to his death?\"\n\n\"I do not know for sure, and think no man does. You would have to dig deep into recorded history to find the answer you seek.\" Ranthra replied.\n\n\"Or dig my blade deep into his own flesh, for Vladris knows the answer. Vladris saw the face of his slayer, much like he will see my own face.\" Roman responded.\n\n\"I think it not important at the moment either way,\" Anthony said, following Roman inside and seeking a source of heat to defeat the chill of his bones. \"This snow will hinder our travels greatly. We would be wise to remain here until the sky breaks for our long journey ahead.\"\n\n\"No,\" Roman said, his voice unwaivering. \"I leave as scheduled. Any man who wishes to remain behind is free to do so,\" he added, the blaze red of his eyes brightening a bit. \"But he who seeks to become legend will accompany me, for Vladris will fall by my sword. I swear of it.\"\n\nAnd the group of warriors remained silent, each man contemplating his own destiny. Wondering what the outcome would be when the two legends finally collided. Anyone accompanying Roman would surely be slain if Roman fell, but if he was successful in bringing down the mighty Vladris? If indeed he possessed the skill to slay the demon of demons? Roman, as well as any warrior who stood with him, would forever be considered legend across Ronica. The dream of every true warrior.\n\n\"You would be wise to hold your tongue to Roman.\" Anthony said, walking quickly to catch up with Ranthra. A few warriors had left the cozy confines of the small lodge to seek good-burning wood for its fireplace.\n\n\"And you would be wise to remain here, as I intend to,\" Ranthra replied, turning to face their leader by committee. \"I do not doubt the abilities of Roman in combat, as everyone suspects. But I do not doubt the abilities of Vladris either. The legends hold true, for I have seen it with my own eyes. To follow Roman into a battle with the demon of demons is to throw yourself on your own sword. All while saving yourself the journey of days by horseback. I'll not ride hard to a rematch of swords which saw Roman fall during the first battle.\"\n\n\"So your choice has already been made?\" Anthony asked, bitter cold masking his voice with droplets of fog.\n\n\"My mind was made the moment I saw Vladris first swing on the battlefield. The Gods spared my life on that very day, and I will not spit in their face by marching into the same scenario again.\" Ranthra replied.\n\nAnthony shook his head for a moment, silently, before turning to begin a walk toward his small home in Marlock.\n\n\"So now you think me a coward?\" Ranthra asked.\n\n\"No my friend,\" Anthony replied, turning to face him once more. \"I have seen your bravery in battle, time and time again. No, I begin to question the definition of courage at this moment, and when it becomes ignorance.\"\n\n\"Go my friend, for you have much to think about on this night.\" Ranthra replied.\n\n\"Are they treating you well?\" Sarah asked, slowly entering the room in which Troy was being held.\n\nTheir castle was complete, right down to a full-size dungeon. Yet Troy had been placed in a room only yards away from Sarah's very own. One normally reserved for important guests among their kind.\n\n\"Yes.\" Troy replied, wanting to hate Sarah for being a Vampire, while also remembering the respect he held for her human memory.\n\n\"I have no intentions of harming you,\" Sarah said, walking closer to him. \"Leave us.\" she added, turning to the two Hunters who had been assigned to Troy's door.\n\n\"I have no intentions of harming Roman either.\" she said.\n\n\"Roman? He's here?\" Troy asked with enthusiasm.\n\n\"Not yet,\" Sarah replied. \"But we expect to see him soon enough. I intend to ask him to remain here,\" she added. \"And there is a place for you as well.\"\n\n\"Roman Raines will never join you! He despises your kind, as do I! Hunters killed my family in front of me, and you ask me to remain here to live among them?\" Troy asked, his voice raising in the process.\n\nIt was the first time Sarah had seen the boy's temper. She remembered holding him as Hunters closed in, remembered calming his fears as Adam Michaels and the Gunship crew protected them both against certain death.\n\n\"I think with time Roman will come around.\" Sarah said with a smile, brilliant white teeth cresting across such an angelic face.\n\n\"I think you're full of shit!\" Troy yelled, prompting the guards to come back into the room. \"I think you will soon find out how mortal you truly are, at the tip of Roman's blade...you bitch!\"\n\nAs the two Hunters approached, Troy decided it time to show his hard-earned skill. Kicking swiftly toward the floor, his foot caught one of the Hunters above its knee, instantly breaking the femur bone and sending the soldier to the ground in pain.\n\nThe second guard was met head on, Troy grabbing the monster's wrist. Of course, a young man barely eighteen years of age, he hadn't the ability to overpower the beast. Mythra. The art of stick-fighting, based around momentum-shifting. Troy had studied the art since losing his family, at first to occupy himself. However, he had quickly mastered the art and it displayed at this very moment.\n\nLetting loose the Vampire's wrist at the perfect moment, Troy used the monster's own momentum, allowing it to slam onto the ground. And as the guard began to get back to its feet, Troy's swift kicks broke the beast's forearm in several places.\n\nThe same foot kicked the base of a nearby table, loosing a wooden leg which was quickly kicked into one of his free hands.\n\n\"Time for me to take my leave you Vampiric bitch!\" Troy yelled, pointing the table leg into her face.\n\nShocked, Sarah simply walked back a bit. She had never seen Troy as anything other than a feeble child. Yet here he stood, two of her mighty warriors laying defenseless and her own safety in jepoardy.\n\nVladris slowly walked into the room, Troy's attention shifting to the large warrior.\n\n\"Back my queen, I will handle this.\"\n\nAnd step back Sarah did, knowing well that she had underestimated Troy this entire time. She also began to wonder if Vladris facing Roman was wise. Had she become too comfy in her new role? Had she underestimated Roman Raines as well?\n\nTroy's art of fighting allowed him to take advantage of larger opponents, and his mind knew that could prove disaster for Vladris, for he was a much larger warrior.\n\n\"Well come on.\" Troy said provokingly, continuing to hold the shattered wooden leg of a table in the Hunter's direction. He grew impatient, tired of waiting for Vladris to enter the fight with a mistake.\n\nWith the speed of the very rays of a sun, Vladris thrust his arm forward, wrapping Troy's attacking hand and squeezing until the wooden leg fell to the room's floor. The demon's freehand then plunged in, clawed fingers gripping Troy by the throat and forcing him to the wall, his feet leaving ground in the process.\n\n\"Vladris!\" Sarah yelled, continuing to want no harm to come to the young man.\n\n\"I have left very few lives to walk away,\" Vladris said harshly, his large eyes brimming with both red and black pigment. \"Know now that if it were not for a queen's command and a lover's wish, your lungs would plead for air as I ripped your head from the scrawny shoulders which held it.\"\n\nAnd with that statement of caution, Vladris loosened his grip of tenacity, letting Troy stand on his own feet once more.\n\n\"Are you alright my queen?\" Vladris asked.\n\n\"I am fine my champion.\" Sarah replied.\n\n\"What happened to you?\" Troy demandingly asked as he began to breathe easier. \"You used to hate the Hunters. I was there when your own father, the same father who fought against the Hunters, died in an explosion of flame!\"\n\n\"Yes, that was unfortunate,\" Sarah replied. \"But those were different times,\" she added. \"Different times indeed.\"\n\nSarah turned to Vladris for a moment while her two Hunters slowly gathered themselves from the floor. This was her species now, and it was her job to protect them at all costs.\n\n\"Change of plans,\" Sarah said firmly. \"If Roman denies his place by our side, Troy will indeed die. In front of the warrior.\"\n\n\"Understood.\" Vladris said with a grin.\n\n\"And double the security detail on Troy's door.\" she added.\n\n\"At once.\" Vladris said.\n\nThe morning light of Marlock brought with it more snow, falling powdery-white onto the ground without reserve. Roman sat on a fine horse, a steed which had been outfitted with the toughest armor available, at least by such a secluded group.\n\nTunak and Gore quickly joined him, as did the rest of his group, slowly galloping their own steeds to his piece of ground.\n\n\"Draden, Pica. You are to remain here. Should I fall, these people need someone to continue the hunt.\" Roman replied.\n\n\"Roman,\" Pica said, his large bow once again strapped to the upper of his back. \"We want to fight.\"\n\n\"A fact I both know and respect,\" Roman replied. \"But you know the location of my ship. You will be able to care for my dog,\" he added, glancing down at Scucca. \"You will succeed me should I fall.\" he added.\n\n\"We understand,\" Draden said, the brilliant-white light of snow refracting from his Dragon-scaled hide. \"And we wish you luck warrior.\"\n\n\"I make my own luck.\" Roman replied, thinking back to a time when his human flesh leaned on the spoken line heavily.\n\n\"And what say you?\" Tunak said loudly, his voice echoing toward the group of warriors led by Anthony. \"Who is ready to accompany us to the fall of the mighty Vladris?\"\n\nFour climbed to his mount quickly, the peppered-gray horse then trotting to Roman's group.\n\n\"That is all? One warrior?\" Tunak asked loudly.\n\n\"Relax my brother, it takes but one to slay Vladris and end his legend of lies.\" Roman said, nodding his respect to Four.\n\n\"Four is as capable as any that I have. He will serve you well in battle, and I will personally see to the proper care of your hound and warriors.\" Anthony replied.\n\n\"Gratitude my friend,\" Roman said, demonic eyes skimming the group a final time. \"I will return in one week's time with the head of a legend so easily spoken,\" he added. \"If not, continue my legacy and bring their race to its knees.\"\n\n\"Either way, it will be done. You have my word.\" Draden replied.\n\nAnd with that final exchange of words, Roman, Tunak, Gore and Four would turn to head away. Disappearing quickly into the thick of snowfall, well-supplied and well-intentioned.\n\n\"Sir, we have just received word of Roman Raines departing Marlock for us.\" a Hunter said, entering the lavish quarters of Vladris.\n\n\"Good. Let him come.\" Vladris replied.\n\n\"Should I double the guard?\" the Hunter asked.\n\n\"You have made me aware, which is as good as doubling the guard. So no, it is not necessary.\"\n\n\"And the queen, sir? Should I attach a personal escort team with her?\" the Hunter asked.\n\n\"I am her personal escort team!\" Vladris yelled, approaching the intimidated warrior of death. \"Do you not think me capable of slaying Roman Raines?\" Vladris asked.\n\n\"Of course sir,\" the warrior replied. \"There are those among our ranks that whisper of his ability in combat, but I am not one such warrior.\"\n\n\"Whispering is the work of a coward. Any warrior who believes in something so strongly, would proudly announce his belief. To whisper is to be weak.\" Vladris responded sharply.\n\n\"Yes sir.\" the Hunter said.\n\n\"You may go. Inform the others I will be speaking shortly.\" Vladris commanded.\n\n\"Yes sir.\" the Hunter warrior replied, turning to execute an order as the black leather of his boots struck loudly onto the stone-tiled floor\n\n\"Forgive them. They do not see you as I do, for they have not seen your history of battle.\" Sarah said, approaching her new love slowly.\n\n\"My queen.\" Vladris said, kneeling slightly in order to show his respect.\n\n\"Many among our ranks have heard of your legend, but have not seen it with their own eyes.\" Sarah said, wrapping her arms around the neck of the capable warrior.\n\n\"Their eyes will learn of it soon enough.\" Vladris said.\n\n\"I will offer him a place at our side, and I am a woman of my word. Please know that if he accepts it, he is not to be harmed.\" Sarah said.\n\n\"I would expect no less from you my queen. But I have seen into this warrior's eyes. He will not submit to our will, and you should expect no less from him.\" Vladris replied.\n\n\"Either way, he will be given a choice. And be it an end to his reign of terror against our race, or an end to the breath in his lungs, this will soon be behind us my champion.\" Sarah said.\n\n\"Yes my queen.\" Vladris replied.\n\n\"I have no idea? He has gone mad!\" one of the Hunters who stood in a watch house on the castle wall said, speaking to another.\n\n\"Surely he knows of Roman's ability in battle? Surely he would rather be enjoying a fine meal this night?\" the other guard remarked as they watched him. Their hero among heroes, sitting outside of the castle gates.\n\nA single chair of banded leather and wood beneath him, and a single sword of massive-scale strapped onto his back. Vladris sat there, patiently awaiting the arrival of Roman Raines.\n\nHe understood, of course, that Roman's arrival was many hours, if not days away. And that the warrior traveled with others. Still, Vladris intended to do things in such a way that his legend would never again be questioned.\n\n\"Sir, is there anything you need?\" a Hunter asked, walking through the gates slowly, daring not disturb the hero any more than necessary.\n\n\"Yes. Assemble our finest and bring them here, before me.\" Vladris demanded.\n\n\"Yes. At once.\" the Hunter replied.\n\nNearly an hour after Vladris had ordered it so, twenty of the finest soldiers the Vampires had to offer slowly made their way outside of the gates. Forming into a single group in front of their hero and awaiting his next command.\n\n\"Most of you have learned of my abilities in battle through words. Legends told, passed down through generations,\" Vladris said, standing to his feet slowly. \"And I am aware that a few have even started to whisper of this man-demon. Roman Raines. Even going so far as to whisper of his ability to best me in combat.\" he added, cutting his words to approach the faces of each warrior.\n\n\"There is a reason that legend of my ability to end lives continues to be passed down. Reasoning that each of you will now know holds true with your very own eyes,\" Vladris said in a sharp voice. \"And while the rest of you whisper in fear, I await the warrior who comes. I long for a fight with the man which so many of you fear. Because, when this man who rides to our gates to end my legend arrives, he will soon beg for grace moments before the very blade strapped to my back slays him. And each of you will then know who to fear. Who to make legend of. Now go, cowards, and do not disturb me further!\" Vladris yelled as if to dare any of them to speak.\n\nAs the group of Vampiric warriors turned to once again enter the castle, Vladris returned to his chair. Turning his back to their castle and facing the rolling hills of Ronica before him as the rain began to fall down.\n\n\"We make good time,\" Tunak yelled loudly as their horses drudged through the thick of mud, finally having left the clutches of snow-filled mountains. \"It is unusual to see no patrols this close to their castle.\"\n\n\"They have cleared a path for us. Their hero believes in the ability to slay me. An ability which he does not possess, but makes for an easier ride indeed.\" Roman replied with confidence.\n\n\"We will be on them by nightfall.\" Four said.\n\n\"Then we will stop to make camp. I wish to face him in the light of day.\" Roman replied, bringing his horse to an abrupt halt.\n\n\"I agree. If we are to slay the demon of demons, the daylight will give us an advantage.\" Gore added.\n\n\"I wish to face him in the daylight, not for an advantage,\" Roman said sternly as his body dropped from horse to ground below. \"I simply wish to slay him during a moment in which many eyes can see.\"\n\nFor the next few minutes, Roman and Tunak made camp with a small tent of white cloth, while Four and Gore collected any dry wood they could find. In such a rain-filled environment the task proved daunting, but eventually they had collected enough to produce heat throughout the night.\n\nVladris knew they were close. He had made the journey several times himself, and knew that they had to be just beyond the tree-line at horizon's end. It also warranted the assumption that Roman wanted his fight during the day, and that sat well with Vladris. He too wanted a thick of witnesses for their battle. And though he knew Sarah would attempt to bring Roman to their cause, the hero among Vampires had a feeling throughout his gut that it wasn't to be.\n\nSo Vladris remained in his chair, dedicating such a quiet night of rainfall and breeze to his thoughts. Though he had no intentions of falling in battle, he knew that if it were to be, he had lived a life worth speaking of. He had known of both lust and love. Known of greed and loss. He stared across the very hills which once worked with Ronical farmers to produce crops to feed their mighty army.\n\nHe remembered the king he served during his mortal life. An honorable man, one that was cut down by the Vampires shortly after Ronica began to fall.\n\nHe remembered, while still in the realm of a mortal, defeating the Hunter champion in battle. His own abilities besting those of the Vampiric legend. Vladris began to wonder if Roman Raines was one such man. Was it meant for Roman to cut Vladris down in battle, ending a life, and along with it the memories of a Ronica that once flourished?\n\nBut soon his thoughts began to turn to Amelia. His love for her had been one of such truthful purity. From the tip of his sword to the bones in his chest, he loved her. Everything he was or would ever be was tied into the woman who would never return.\n\nAnd that very emotion, one of horrific loss that would forever remain, was the emotion which allowed him to fight like a lion. As if he were a hundred lions in battle. And as the chills of a loss never-ending began to consume him once more, he knew it to be the truth. Roman Raines could not best him.\n\nAnd so he spent the remainder of the night thinking of his beloved Amelia, a life before the rule of Vampires and, of course, the rain. The soothing rain which hit the trees of a distant horizon, bringing with it a sound which calmed the warrior and allowed him to control his anger.\n\nVladris was not alone in thought on such a night of pouring rain, however, as Roman also reflected back on his life up until this point.\n\nHis entire family slaughtered for sport at the hands of Hunters. His involvement in killing one of their queens and a life sworn to ending the bloodline of the race which he considered to be the cancer of man.\n\nRoman did not fear death. A direct effect of having nothing to live for. His only purpose was to slay those who deserved death, and he did so well. By most accounts, Roman Raines was the deadliest warrior alive, but not all of them.\n\nMany still spoke of Vladris, hero of the Vampires. If he were able to slay the demon of demons, it would not only send ripples of fear through the Vampiric race, but solidify his legend as the greatest warrior to ever live.\n\nHe believed he could do it, and planned to do it alone. Pulling a dagger from his waist, he planted it firmly into the ground of their campsite while the others slept. Then, pulling a necklace from beneath his robe, a key to his shuttle dangling from it, Roman placed it around the dagger's handle. And with that, the Vampire who hunted his own kind walked away from camp and into the direction of a castle not far away. Alone.\n\nVladris was first pulled back from his memories with Amelia as a bell began to toll throughout the castle, one the Hunters reserved for the unusual event of an army marching to their doorstep.\n\nAs Vladris stood to his feet, he wondered how fitting it seemed. Roman walking to their castle by himself and to the toll of a bell that signified an entire army. One warrior looking to capture the legacy of another, almost as if two complete armies were nearing battle. Though only two champions stood, less than a hundred yards apart.\n\nAs Hunters began to make their way to the castle's entrance, they soon partitioned off a bit to allow their queen a quick passage to the two warriors who had become locked in a stare.\n\n\"I have long awaited this very moment, even seen it in my dreams.\" Roman said, squeezing his fists with crushing power.\n\n\"I respect your courage warrior. Just as I have respected each warrior before you, all of them dead by my hands.\" Vladris replied.\n\n\"Enough!\" Sarah yelled, approaching the two soldiers of destiny with two soldiers of her own. Escort soldiers who held Troy in chains.\n\n\"It's been a long time Roman Raines.\" Sarah said, her demonic tone very soothing by Vampiric standards.\n\n\"Not long enough you crazy bitch.\" he replied.\n\n\"Still the feisty warrior. Such a trait will be of great value to me when you bow your loyalties.\" Sarah responded.\n\n\"A long time indeed, then, as you've forgotten that I bow to no one.\" Roman said.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" she replied with a grin, motioning her escort soldiers to remove a hood from Troy's head. \"Or perhaps you'd like to rethink your loyalty to me.\"\n\nAs Roman laid eyes on Troy, his first reaction was the yearning to pummel those responsible to death. Troy had been like a son to him, at least up until the point of becoming infected with Vampiric DNA. He had purposely avoided contact with the boy from that point forward, hoping to protect Troy from the horrors which now followed him.\n\nHowever, Roman's rage soon turned to desperation, feeling as though he had already been beaten in battle.\n\n\"He has no place in all of this. Free him.\" Roman demanded.\n\n\"Well that depends on you,\" Sarah replied with a heavy tone. \"If you bow before me, before all of those which look on at this very moment; in return I will allow the boy to go free.\"\n\nHe would be bowing to a bloodline which had stolen everything from him. But if he refused, they would take the one thing he had left. Troy was as much like a son as any boy could have ever been; and worse, he was innocent of any crimes against the Hunters.\n\nRoman approached the group slowly, taking his massive blade and burying nearly a foot of steel into the moist ground as he continued his walk.\n\n\"That's far enough.\" Vladris said, holding his own blade out in order to keep Roman and Sarah distanced.\n\n\"All I know is killing,\" Roman said, holding his hands up slightly as a gesture of good faith. \"But Troy has a chance to live a life of value. Become something more than all of this,\" he added, staring directly into Sarah's eyes. \"I need your word that he will be allowed to leave, never to be followed. Never to be brought into this again.\"\n\n\"You have it, as long as I have your loyalty.\" Sarah quickly replied, a smile beginning to brim across her face.\n\n\"And I need a moment to say farewell to the boy. Given our history, I'm sure you understand that I want to make peace with him?\"\n\n\"Make it quick,\" Sarah replied. \"Cut the boy loose.\" she added, turning to her personal escort soldiers, each of them clad in banded steel of black.\n\n\"Don't talk, just listen,\" Roman said as Troy approached him. \"Take the set of footprints my boots have made and follow them as fast as you can run. Just beyond those trees, not even thirty minutes away, a group of warriors loyal to me have made camp. When you arrive, tell them I've sent you. Tell them I've left a dagger, necklace and dog for you. Have them wait until midday for me, and should I fail to return, they are to lead you to my shuttle.\"\n\n\"Roman, I don't want to leave you here. Maybe together...\"\n\n\"No!\" Roman replied fiercely. \"I've always looked upon you as my own son. I can't protect those I've lost, but I can still protect you. Go.\" he said, holding his battle-hardened hand out for Troy.\n\nAs the two men locked hands for a moment, showing both respect and truth, Troy turned to begin a sprint for the trees which were only a few hundred yards away. Roman watched the young man run to safety, finally turning back to Sarah and her group.\n\n\"Alright Roman, I've delivered my end of the bargain. Now, bow before me and help us deliver our bloodline to a future of absolute dominance.\"\n\nHe had never before bowed. Not to the Gods above, nor to anyone with blood in their veins. And though it hurt as much, if not more, than a defeat on the battlefield, Roman lowered himself to the ground. His knee had never touched ground for the cause of obedience, yet his pants began to saturate just a bit from the rain-drenched soil.\n\n\"Good,\" Sarah said with a feeling of accomplishment. \"Now rise warrior and join your brothers.\"\n\nAs he rose slowly, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike, his eyes remained locked onto the queen of Vampires. And with the slightest flicker of his eyes, came a large knife which had been tucked into the back of his pants.\n\nSometimes it's unbelievable how a single moment changes the world around us. One second, frozen in time, that has the ability to alter who we are and how we believe.\n\nAs Roman turned his torso, ensuring every ounce of power went into the flight of the knife which left his hands, even the smallest muscles of his body popped to life under his pale skin.\n\nThough he had bowed, the Hunters still had thought of him a bit cautiously, and that very caution saved Sarah's life. Though the blade struck home, it missed its mark as she slipped to her right. The knife which was meant for the base of her skull, instead drove into the meaty flesh of her shoulder. A wound that would not come close to slaying Sarah, though she screeched as if it would.\n\n\"Protect our queen!\" Vladris yelled, turning to face Roman in what was now an inevitable showdown.\n\nRoman had reclaimed his large blade, pulling the massive handle skyward, its gleaming edge covered with a bit of damp soil.\n\n\"Now you will know of the origin behind my legend.\" Vladris said, holding his sword out provokingly.\n\n\"A legend which dies today.\" Roman replied.\n\n\"We'll see.\" Vladris responded, quickly swooping his blade forward.\n\nRoman was able to parry the shot easily, though he seemed a bit surprised by the sheer amount of force behind the bite of Vladris' steel.\n\nRoman then lunged forward, his sword leading the way as he quickly turned the forward strike into a circular motion, chopping toward Vladris.\n\nHowever, Vladris quickly stepped back to easily avoid it, stepping back a bit more.\n\n\"You disappoint me Roman Raines. You carry the traits of a Vampire, and still I could have beaten you in the days of my own mortality.\" Vladris said in mocking fashion.\n\nThe one thing Roman had learned through his years of fighting was the defining moment. A single breath in which your mind catches up to the body which follows your emotions. A moment when a warrior knows who's better, and as Roman's mind caught up to his extremities, he understood it to be true. Vladris was better.\n\nHe would never admit it, or even show evidence of it on his face. But as Roman's muscular frame fought with all of its might to deflect steady shots by Vladris, he began to grow tired. His hatred for Vampires had fueled his fight so far by rage. However, the rage had began to die out, losing ground to a body that longed for a deep breath and a moment's rest.\n\nVladris continued to strike with unrelenting fury, each angling of his blade similar to that of a serpent's strike. And though silver flashes of his blade were visible to everyone else, Vladris only saw one thing. The face of his love lost, Amelia.\n\nHis rage on the battlefield seemed to slow everything down around him, as it did each time he went to war. Literally a lion with sword in hand, the figure of a ghost nearby, her magnificent body shrouded within a satin-blue dress.\n\nRoman quickly came to understand the warrior he fought against as tears began falling from the eyes of Vladris. Roman was good. Damn good. Yet Vladris struck as though he were a God, piercing shots sapping the life from Roman, not from wounds, but from the simple defense against them.\n\nThe trunk of Vladris' blade hit like a perfectly-forged hammer, taking with it the will of Roman Raines, as he began to understand. Vladris longed to die.\n\nHe had prayed that Roman was the warrior that growing legend spoke of. Perhaps, just maybe, the warrior who was destined to end him; and end his personal suffering in doing so.\n\nHe is not the one. Vladris, you must continue your journey among mortals. For our day will come.\n\nWords which escaped the lips of Amelia's ghost, standing only feet away from the dying battle before his eyes.\n\n\"Yes my love.\" Vladris replied, speaking to a figure which only his eyes saw, leading Roman to think him mad. Not that it would matter as he lay on the ground, sword raised, with only the ability to deflect continuing shots.\n\nRoman Raines had been bested. And while he lay there, sword lifted and shaking roughly from the trauma of steel exchanged, he considered throwing his weapon and allowing Vladris a chance to plunge bitter-cold steel into him. It would be the perfect punishment for the Vampiric warrior who had so easily defeated him. But it was not to be.\n\nHe was falling close to the end, evident to both Tunak and Four as they rode swiftly to the fight. Their horses covered the open ground at alarming speeds, rushing to aid Roman and his plans to slay Vladris.\n\n\"Riders approach!\" a Hunter proclaimed loudly as a dozen or more archers pulled to take aim, the rest of their ranks quickly making way to ground level and, with any luck, the castle gates.\n\nBoth of the warriors who approached on horseback held shields high, arrows meant to end them instead biting into banded leather.\n\nVladris had placed himself outside of the castle's gates in order to prove his abilities, purposely keeping any help out of reach. Both Tunak and Four had depended on his confidence as the tool to slay him. And as they rode within feet of the Vampire Elite, both warriors quickly left mount in order to stand on the same sacred ground shared by Vladris and Roman.\n\nTunak came in, charging with full-rage as Four quickly hoisted Roman to one of the steeds. A quick slap to the animal sent it sprinting for the nearby wooded area.\n\nThe plan was, Four and Tunak would fight Vladris with the man advantage. Overpower the demon, or at least die trying.\n\nHowever, their plan was swiftly cut short as, without the slightest of warning, Vladris thrust his sword forward with incredible speed. Its bite found a mark on the vitals of Tunak, digging into the warrior's chest and pulling his soul out as Vladris jerked his blade loose.\n\nFour was a huge warrior, and his blade matched quite well. But even he saw no victory. Even if he somehow bested Vladris, dozens of Hunters had now made it to them.\n\n\"You have cost me the greatest moment of my finest victory. For that, your death will not come swiftly.\" Vladris said as he walked a small circle around Four, eventually plunging his sword into the ground.\n\nFour had began to ask if Vladris intended a fight without blade. However, the Hunter Elite was quickly on him, grabbing wrist first, and then shoulder, on his way to the kill. And as Vladris sunk huge fangs into the face and upper-skull of Four, the warrior dropped his massive blade, body jerking uncontrollably from pain redefined.\n\n\"Run them down! Kill them...all of them!\" Sarah yelled from her spot nearby as she tended wounds, demanding her champion seek justice.\n\nMoments later, well over a dozen Hunter Elites thundered past the castle gates on steeds of nightmarish appearance, Vladris removing his sword from the damp ground and quickly grabbing the mount of an empty steed reserved for him.\n\n\"Go my champion, for this is your finest day. The Hunter Archives will long speak of your wrath against our enemies.\" Sarah said to herself, proudly watching Vladris and his finest chew up ground as their steeds rode hard into the forest.\n\n\"Help him from his mount, quickly!\" Troy said as both he and Gore gently pulled Roman from the steed.\n\n\"Is Vladris defeated?\" Gore asked, his Husk tone chilling to Troy's ears.\n\n\"Vladris cannot be defeated, this much I am sure of now. We must ride back at once. Inform the others that the Hunters are coming.\" Roman replied.\n\n\"But Four, Tunak?\" Gore asked.\n\n\"I saw Tunak cut down with my own eyes. Four could not have made it out of there with his life.\" Roman said with regret.\n\n\"But he fights like...\" Gore began to reply.\n\n\"Vladris stood before him! As did dozens of Hunters. He is not coming back, but the demons are. We must go now!\" Roman yelled.\n\nAnd with his words, Troy helped Roman back to his mount before joining Gore on their own steeds.\n\nMoments later they were gone. Riding hard toward the city which Hunters could not take. Marlock. Or so the legends claimed. A claim that would soon be put to the test as Vladris and his group of soul-reavers were not far behind.\n\nAnd as the rain slowly turned to snow, an ailing Roman, Troy and Gore raced toward Marlock as though their very lives depended on it, which they did.\n\nTroy wondered what the future held for him against such an immortal army. How a life of simplicity had stood before him until the early morning hours in which Vladris had snatched him, literally getting thrown into a world of warfare.\n\nGore thought of the same thing, every ride to and from battle. Death. He concentrated on what needed to be done in order for him to end up on the right side of the very word of death. On this day, he wondered how he could possibly escape his soul departing a world of mortals, glancing down to a slightly-rusted blade hanging by his side. Quickly remembering the same warriors who mocked it, would give their own lives for him.\n\nAnd as the snowfall began to intensify, large flakes flying into the face and peppered hair of Roman Raines, he thought of a second chance. His first attempt to slay Vladris had been a campaign of legacy building.\n\nAnd though Roman was a warrior of almost supernatural abilities, that only afforded him the equivalent of a puncher's chance in the grandest fight of all-time.\n\nHe was outmatched and knew it. But perhaps, just perhaps, he would be stronger this time. Fighting for the fallen and those who could not fight for themselves, rather than his own legacy. For he too was a lion, and he was wounded and desperate. A hellhound sprinting by his side all the while.\n\n\"Someone approaches!\" Bral yelled as the others came rushing.\n\n\"It's Roman, he has defeated Vladris!\" Anthony said loudly.\n\n\"They do not have the glow of victory upon their faces, and ride as though death follows closely behind.\" Ranthra replied.\n\n\"Quickly, help Roman from his mount!\" Gore yelled as both he and Troy joined the others on foot.\n\n\"What of Vladris? The others...Four?\" Anthony asked.\n\n\"I faced Vladris sword to sword, yet he still lives,\" Roman said with pause. \"I would not be alive now if not for Tunak and Four coming to my aid.\"\n\n\"And what of them?\" Ranthra asked blatantly.\n\nRoman answered his question with a stare, one of both remorse for the fallen and ill-intent toward Ranthra.\n\n\"Roman believes they are coming here to end us all, which means we need to dig in if we are to survive.\" Gore said.\n\n\"No,\" Roman replied, shaking his head with regret. \"You are to take Troy to the ship as planned.\"\n\n\"But Roman, I...\" Gore began.\n\n\"Troy is my son!\" Roman replied, stopping to look at the young man once more. \"If I am to face Vladris again, I cannot do so with the worry of Troy.\"\n\n\"But you said Vladris cannot be beaten.\" Troy replied, catching the attention of the entire group.\n\n\"He cannot. At least not by the hands of a single man. Together, however, we may be able to finally rid our world of the mightiest of demons.\" Roman replied.\n\n\"When will they come?\" Draden asked, the Dragonborn warrior's eyes skimming the tree line.\n\n\"I'm not sure, but it will be soon,\" Roman replied. \"And I cannot ask any of you to stay for this fight, not against such odds.\"\n\n\"We are with you to the end.\" Pica replied, pulling his freshly oiled bow to the ready.\n\n\"As am I,\" Ranthra said, glancing to the warrior in charge as he wielded a massive axe of razor-sharp iron. \"There is strength in numbers, and I will defend my home.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" Roman replied with a grin, nodding his respect to Ranthra. \"Gore. A word.\"\n\n\"Yes?\" Gore asked, approaching Roman so the two could talk without hinderance.\n\n\"I am asking you to take Troy because I believe we will fall. Perhaps we will be able to thin their ranks, or even slay Vladris. But I do feel as though my time has come.\"\n\n\"Then why stay behind? We can flee to my homeworld, regroup, and then arrive back in force?\" Gore asked.\n\n\"Because I don't flee. If it were not for the longing of seeing Troy one last time, I would have stayed behind with Tunak and Gore to meet my own demise.\"\n\n\"I am not used to you speaking such words of defeat.\" Gore said.\n\n\"Nor am I,\" Roman replied somberly. \"But I have seen into the eyes, the very soul of Vladris. He speaks with ghosts and fights as though he were already dead. He has nothing to live for, and because of that he fights as though he were a lion. I have a concern for Troy now. It has weakened me.\"\n\n\"I will take Troy to my homeworld, you need not worry for his safety. The Husk there, my own family, we will care for him as our own should you fall in battle. Only concern yourself with the fight that is coming and a moment of victory.\" Gore replied.\n\n\"Thank you my brother.\" Roman replied, shaking hands with his loyal friend before turning to Troy.\n\n\"Gore has promised to take you to safety. Await word of my battle, and always do by him as you would by me. Understand?\" Roman asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Troy said with tear-filled eyes, reaching into a long pocket on his leg. \"This blade belongs to you. You gave it to me when I was but a child. Take it, and you bury it into that big-fanged son of a bitch. If you care anything for me, you'll do that.\"\n\n\"Take care...son. No matter what happens from this moment forward, you are destined to live a warrior's path. Always.\" Roman replied, looking at the young man for a moment before hugging him.\n\nAs Gore and Troy walked away, the young man turned to look upon Roman one last time.\n\n\"They killed my family, your family, our friends, and most of all, tried forcing both you and Sarah into a life of servitude. You make them pay, do you hear me? YOU MAKE THEM PAY!\" Troy yelled, showing for the first time a warrior's rage in doing so.\n\nRoman gave no reply verbally, though his heart had already committed itself to Troy's words. And as Roman watched his son ride off with Gore, headed to the location of a small ship that would pull them from Ronica and place them into the safety of Huven, the large Husk homeworld, he felt as if the Hunters had taken from him once more.\n\n\"We approach my lord, should I have our warriors pull back and scout the area?\" one of the Hunter Elites asked, near-blizzard snow falling around them.\n\n\"No, ride harder. I grow sick of this cat and mouse game which holds my destiny in the balance. Ride hard and slay quickly!\" Vladris demanded as the small, but well-experienced band of undead warriors stormed toward Roman, who stood by himself at the edge of village.\n\nTurning from the entrance of a small building, Pica loosed an arrow that flew as quickly as it killed, hitting an elite in the forehead and fragmenting skull as the demon cried in misery.\n\n\"Run them down like cattle and slaughter them as such!\" Vladris commanded, jumping down from his mount as the horse remained in full-gallop.\n\n\"Now, coward, we finish your journey to the world of ghosts.\" Vladris said, his sword pointing at Roman Raines as warriors, both undead and living, fought in the background. Steel clashing against steel with a hellish-fury.\n\n\"One would ask which world you live in?\" Roman replied, pulling his own blade to the ready. \"I know why you fight; what makes you mighty in battle. For I fight for the same reason.\"\n\n\"All you know of me is what my legend speaks of. A legend which will grow volumes this very day as I sever your skull from its body.\" Vladris replied angrily, cleaving a blade strike down that narrowly missed its target.\n\n\"Perhaps. Or perhaps you fight for a slain family as I do. A woman maybe?\" Roman said, noticing the look in the eyes of Vladris as he spoke the words. \"So it is a woman.\"\n\nRoman's words were cut short as Vladris came in with a soul-damning flurry of sword strikes, each barely blocked by Roman's own blade, and taking with them respect.\n\n\"We are no different Vladris. The Hunters have also taken from me loved ones. It's that very emotional rage which has allowed me to fight the Hunter DNA which runs through my veins.\" Roman said, surprising everyone as he then sunk his sword into the ground beside him. \"Join us my brother.\"\n\nVladris watched with curiosity as Roman Raines stood unarmed, his hand extended to offer the demon of demons a chance to become brothers in arms.\n\nHe also watched the same figure appear, as it did every battle before. The ghost of Amelia walking among them, looking at her truest of champions.\n\n\"This warrior is one of truth. He fights for his loved ones, and protects those who cannot protect themselves. He is a very admirable man. Join him.\" Amelia's ghost whispered softly.\n\nVladris stood there, clashing steel becoming a slight background noise as the mighty warrior remained deep in thought. Both the past and the present weighed heavily as he contimplated the future.\n\n\"What does your gut tell you to do? Your lover?\" Roman asked.\n\n\"My lover speaks of you as an admirable warrior. Thinks I should fight beside you in battle,\" Vladris replied as Roman began to smile a bit. \"Unfortunately for the both of you, my heart has started to love another.\" he added.\n\nJust as quickly as Roman realized Sarah Blaine had the affections of Vladris, he pulled the dagger Troy had gifted him and spun low to the ground, a move which allowed him to escape Vladris' blade while plunging the dagger's steel into the demon's chest.\n\nVladris staggered back, dropping his sword and trying to pull the small blade from his chest. The shock upon his face told the tale of a demon who had never been struck in battle before. At least not until the day he was turned to the ranks of the immortal.\n\n\"You've had your chance and now you must fall, an act which your own legend will speak of.\" Roman said, approaching the wounded lion slowly, carrying his sword with a stone-hardened grip.\n\nAnd as Roman Raines hoisted his blade high, preparing to slay the mighty Vampire of legend, his senses alarmed him with pain. An arrow loosed from the bow of Pica digging through his thick armor and into flesh.\n\nAs Roman turned to speak of the misfire, Pica loosed another and another, both shots deliberately eating into the stomach of Roman Raines, who dropped his blade.\n\n\"Traitor!\" Draden yelled, sprinting over bodies of the dead with a long blade in hand.\n\nThe Dragonborn warrior fell quickly, an arrow of cold steel biting into his face, loosed from Pica's bow only feet away.\n\nAnd so the remaining warriors fell swiftly, leaving only Roman, who had fallen to a knee as life slowly left his body.\n\n\"As your soul departs, take with you this. You are by far the toughest warrior I have ever faced,\" Vladris said, finally ripping the dagger from his chest, then raising his own blade. \"The Hunter archives will speak of you as a legend. This I promise to you my brother.\"\n\nRoman nodded, accepting his ticket to the afterlife. He was done, knowing a life of only misery and killing, except for the brief period he spent with his friends, his family, aboard the Gunship crew.\n\nIt would be the very faces of that crew, the very personalities of those he had grown to love as family, which he would remain in thought about during his eternal rest.\n\nAnd the life of Roman Raines would end with a single strike, an arcing sword which severed his head from its body; just as Vladris had promised.\n\nAt the close of battle, Vladris placed the head of Roman Raines into a large bag of leather stitching, tightening the knot of rope as he glared to his Hunter soldiers, a single contact of eyes which would grow his legend as immortal.\n\n\"I have held my end of the bargain. Now I hope your intentions to hold your end remain true?\" Pica asked as he approached Vladris and the remaining Hunters, bow in hand.\n\n\"Indeed. You will soon be turned to the ranks of the immortal to fight alongside us as a brother. You have proven your loyalty.\"\n\n\"Take care warrior, and enjoy your reign of terror. Because it ends soon at the hands of another.\" Amelia's ghost said, her words blatently ignored by Vladris as he mounted his steed of hell once more.\n\n\"Now we return to our queen. There is a wedding to take place; a wedding which will unify our people.\" Vladris said with a stern voice, as if to dare any Hunter to speak.\n\n\"I don't want to leave him behind.\" Troy said as Gore began firing up Roman's shuttle, pressing dozens of necessary buttons which illuminated red.\n\n\"Roman did not survive. Otherwise, he would have made it back by now. I'm sorry,\" Gore said with regret. \"But you will be among friends on my homeworld, all of which hate the Hunters.\"\n\nTroy began to respond, but as the shuttle slowly lifted from the moist ground, Roman's ghost became visible to the boy.\n\n\"Avenge me son.\"\n\nAs Troy saw those words loose from the lips of such an honorable man, be it from the afterlife, he understood his destiny. Continue building Roman's Empire, and eventually strike against those who have been responsible for so much loss.\n\n\"It's alright. Even now, I feel as though Roman is with us.\" Troy replied with a smile.\n\nScucca remained by the side of Troy since their first encounter, just as he had done with Roman Raines. A sight that was rare among hounds of hell. Much more so than the snarling of teeth currently directed toward Gore.\n\n\"As do I young warrior. As do I.\" Gore replied, casting a stare of dare to the hound before pulling the flight stick harshly as the shuttle went into full-burn and made orbit.\n\nThe trees were crisped with rain, as were the blades of grass which led to such a beautiful place. And though their castle was one of murder, torture and devine obedience for the undead, on this very morning it looked perfect.\n\nSarah Blaine was to wed Vladris, and bring the idea of unity and strength to their people. Hundreds of years had passed since the Hunters were ruled by both king and queen, times spoken of in the archives as the very best among their race.\n\nBut the wedding had grown well beyond a simple gesture to unite their people. They both had grown fond of the other in such a short period of time.\n\nSarah was a compassionate queen, a trait which Vladris respected greatly. She was also both beautiful and comforting to him, bringing with her a soothing calm.\n\nVladris had become Sarah's champion. She had joined those who truly believed he could not be bested in combat, bringing to her the feeling of safety. She felt at peace around him, which made her transition from human to Vampire much more bearable.\n\nAnd as they locked eyes at the alter, hundreds of the best warriors the Hunters had looking on, Sarah grinned softly to her champion.\n\n\"And should any man or woman object to these two being locked in matrimony, let them speak now or forever hold...\" the minister said, stopping short as he joined the rest of the crowd, turning to look to the rear of the chapel.\n\nQuickly, both Sarah and Vladris turned as well, determined to end whoever had intruded on such a perfect ceremony.\n\nHowever, as a man stood to his feet, hooded robe of brown and while; Sarah quickly felt faint. Adam Michaels. Sarah's first true love and former Gunship Captain, removed the hood and smiled.\n\nIt was almost as if relative time stopped, the chatter around them non-existent. The only thing that seemed real to her was his glowing smile, the chisel of his chin; and to him, her undeniable beauty.\n\nAnd though Sarah Blaine was now queen of Vampires, her guards rushing to apprehend her first love, she knew it was only a matter of protocol. She had no intentions of harming him, but rather hearing him out. Why had he arrived, why now? And she wondered if his reasoning even mattered? Because, in the end, Sarah would have another chance to hear the strength of his voice. The ability to look upon him again, which is more than she could have ever dreamed of.\n\nShe cared not how he had managed to find his way into such a heavily protected castle, but rather the fact that her life of clarity had just become murky beyond explaination.\n\nAs Vladris tried to make sense of the man covered in brown satin, his attention quickly shifted to the ghost of Amelia, who stood at the rear of the chapel. She had never before appeared to him beyond the fields of battle.\n\nBut as her lips made out a single word, Vladris felt a chill run across all extremities.\n\nSoon.\n\nBook 5\n\nLegendary\n\n\"Adam,\" Sarah said with gentleness, approaching the smuggler as he stood, watching the rolling hills before them and feeling as content as ever. \"They're ready.\"\n\nFor seconds which seemed to bleed into eternity, Adam stood silent, pulling every crisp moment into his mind. The world of Ronica simply breathtaking.\n\n\"Have you ever just looked out onto the hills? Just to soak them into your memory?\" he asked, remaining mesmerized.\n\n\"More times than you could ever know. Many nights I have stood on my balcony, listening to the calm of rainfall.\" she replied with a hushed tone.\n\nThere was a period of several moments, each filled with the vivid of color and rush of cool breeze. As if the smuggler had never slowed to enjoy such things.\n\n\"I guess it is starting to sink in,\" he said, adjusting his head a bit to watch a small flock of birds soar overhead. \"This may be one of the last times I'm able to see such a view.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" she replied, studying the worry in his eyes. \"They're waiting for you.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Adam replied, slowly turning.\n\nHe did so, of course, as nearly a dozen colonial soldiers held guns onto the queen of vampires. Sarah. Though her personal escort was also nearby, their own weapons at the ready. Their conversation having taken place in the midst of so much nervous firepower.\n\n\"I want you to know that I've done all I can do as their queen,\" she said, the pair walking slowly into the direction of a large castle which the Hunters had called home for many years. \"I've managed to get you an audience with the eldest of vampires, but they will not easily be swayed.\" Sarah added.\n\nHe dreaded it. A meeting with the race of vampires whose acts were usually unspeakable. The Hunters were vampires in every respect, blood sucking monsters that enjoy feasting on human flesh. Though they often seemed to keep to themselves, it wasn't unknown for an occasional member of the race to stray from Ronica to begin his or her own agenda elsewhere, resulting in bloodshed among the human population, which only furthered their stereotype as a horrible race.\n\n\"I know, thank you,\" Adam replied, speaking from the heart to a woman he once loved. \"And I want you to know that I'm sorry for putting you into this position. Truly.\" he added.\n\n\"Just speak to them from the heart Adam, and fate will take care of the rest.\" Sarah replied, a warm smile upon the face of such a beautiful woman.\n\nThough she'd become a vampire, Sarah's beauty had remained intact. Even more so, depending on who you asked. She had the same elegant curves and angelic voice as before, though her skin appeared much whiter.\n\nShe had once been widely considered the most compassionate person alive. Daughter of the acting commander of the colonies, she was a true advocate of humanity.\n\nThe wrong type of Hunter had strayed from Ronica and soon their paths met, dragging Adam into things during the process. Stumbling onto true love during the worst of circumstances. Their love for one another had simply been storybook, though several events tested them.\n\nWhen he faced the decision of a lifetime, Adam walked away from the woman his heart loved so truly. Unknowingly handing her to the Hunters with his decision.\n\nThere were many regrets throughout his lifetime, but none of them greater. A bad call which spawned from pride and bitterness, leading to the death of a woman he truly loved. At least partial death.\n\nHe knew she was a vampire because of his inability to forgive. Still, he saw her just as beautifully as ever. Feeling butterflies while in her presence.\n\nAs Adam was led into the castle, a large security detail following behind, Sarah watched him walk away. Searching her own feelings for a man she once was prepared to marry.\n\nShe had loved him with everything not so long ago. From the pit of her stomach; her very soul. She loved the man who walked away once more \u2013 this time on business.\n\n\"Good luck Adam Michaels.\" she said with a dedicated, yet hushed, voice.\n\nAboard Colonial Star Triumph\n\n\"I am having trouble accepting this.\" Commander Ortega admitted, his emotions torn in half as he sat on a long couch of plush red, several advisers standing nearby.\n\n\"Sir, this decision is not on you.\" one of the advisers remarked.\n\n\"In fact, it is the only choice. We're left with no options.\" another adviser added.\n\n\"Sir, we have been crushed,\" a second adviser added. \"Our mightiest of bases, Glimmeria, fell as though it were a dying leaf in the fall of year. It is in my opinion that nothing can be gained from our situation outside of the greater good.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Ortega replied, standing to his feet. \"I understand the logic. My heart bleeds for every person we leave behind. Truly, it does.\" he added with sincerity.\n\n\"Sir, if we had time to gather more ships, perhaps we could save them all. We simply do not have the time. The realization of defeat came too late.\"\n\n\"Doctor Arness,\" Ortega said, turning to the high-ranking adviser. \"I wonder if you know what a burden this is, having to decide the fate of thousands by the stroke of a pen? I wonder if you feel for the same for these innocent people as I do?\"\n\n\"Sir, I understand you convictions,\" the doctor said, though his primary role throughout the fleet was political. \"But I also understand that we may not even have time to form the fleet, much less expand it. The horde cares not for our guilt or convictions. They simply come.\" Doctor Arness said.\n\n\"Yes. I'm painfully aware,\" Ortega replied. \"You have often been the voice of reason for me when my heart is worn too openly on my sleeve.\"\n\n\"Just doing my job sir,\" Doctor Arness commented. \"Someone has to be here to keep things in perspective. Sadly, innocent children will have to die in order for us to survive. The fleet needs us.\"\n\nWith the delivery of his statement, the two marines stationed by the door of their private quarters exchanged glances. Obviously shaken by Arness' ease when it came to loss of innocent life, though they understood the chain of command.\n\n\"In just a few moments, you'll be broadcast to every monitor in the Skyla System. Everyone needs to hear strength in your voice and indecision in your heart. Even if it is not entirely there, our citizens need to hear it.\" one of his advisers said.\n\n\"Now more than ever, they need to hear it.\" Ortega replied, agreeing with the logic of his advisers.\n\n\"As soon as we deliver the speech, what remains of our government can begin the process of supplying for the journey to come.\" Doctor Arness said.\n\n\"We have enough ships to make this type of journey?\" Ortega questioned, turning to the men.\n\n\"Yes sir,\" one of them responded. \"Some of them are a bit older, but certainly capable of deep space travel. We can make any necessary repairs once we're on our way.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Ortega nodded. \"Supplies?\"\n\n\"That is our main concern at the moment,\" the adviser admitted. \"Fuel, water, food and ammunition will all be in short supply. Especially after being sacked so many times by the Priests.\" he added, stitching truth into his statement.\n\n\"As will hope. I cannot leave people behind without a fighting chance,\" Ortega said. \"I will not leave them here without at least a small chance of survival.\"\n\n\"Sir, we've selected the location for several reasons. It is the furthest away from the Priest's main force, but it is also one of the resource-richest planets of our system. Full of minerals to fuel a civilization and plenty of land to grow crops. Our survivors would have a good chance to rebuild, should they somehow find a way to turn the Priests away.\"\n\n\"I wonder if your confidence would be as firm if you were to be left behind?\" Ortega asked.\n\n\"Sir?\" the adviser replied, both men with a look of shock.\n\n\"That is the way of a politician, is it not? Save his own skin by sacrificing the skin of others?\"\n\n\"Sir, I assure you. We've done the best job possible given our circumstances. For both sides involved.\" the adviser replied.\n\n\"Indeed,\" Ortega commented, seeming to take a moment to breathe and focus on the task at hand. \"Let's just get it over with,\" he added, scooping up several papers and heading for the door to his quarters, surrounded by the bustling of suits and ties. \"Let's doom nearly half of our race to certain death. For the sake of politics.\"\n\nDrift Planet - Sandila\n\n\"Your card skills are as bad as your Priest-hunting skills!\" a man proclaimed, erupting laughter throughout the small bar setting.\n\nThe boasting man was very much on the chubby side, an unshaven beard masking most of his face as he began reaching for the pot of gold. Or, in this case, three packs of fresh cigars and a near-full bottle of whiskey.\n\n\"Not so fast you cocksucker,\" Dalton replied sharply, slamming his own cards onto the table. \"Three gems and two zips \u2013 now give me my damn winnings.\"\n\n\"That's impossible!\" the large man claimed, grabbing Dalton by the wrist in an attempt to stop him from collecting his winnings.\n\n\"As will be your attempt to eat solid food with a wired-up jaw,\" Dalton warned. \"Which it will be, if you don't unhand me. Friend.\"\n\n\"Let it be Daniel.\" one of the other players commented, the small table holding four players total.\n\n\"Well, alright then.\" the chubby man calmly replied, releasing his grip of the smuggler's wrist.\n\n\"Besides boys, hell, plenty enough to go around.\" Dalton said with a grin, hinting of pouring everyone a shot; a suggestion that immediately brought cheers throughout the sunlight-poor room.\n\nAs his shaky hand began to pour the first shot of whiskey, Dalton's attention followed everyone else to the only door of the sad dwelling. Embers of filth highlighting such a dank pub as rays of light poured in. Its walls held together with nails, while cracks of sunlight bled in through mismatched wooden boards.\n\nDalton had a good idea who was entering. She had a way of showing up each time he was preparing to embark into the land of no good, and it really would have pissed him off \u2013 if not for the fact that she was so incredibly easy on the eyes.\n\nHis captain, Cambria Sims.\n\nCambria slowly entered, her vivid blue hair standing out among the pack of thieves and self-admitted outlaws. And though she eased the door closed once more as if to enter the room unnoticed, the bar had become silent enough to hear the aging of wood. Nearly.\n\n\"Better hide the whiskey mate, your boss lady is here.\" one of the players taunted, chuckling a bit.\n\n\"Dalton James don't have to hide a damn thing.\" he commented proudly, though he casually corked the bottle of whiskey and eased it into the inner of his brown coat.\n\n\"Yea,\" another player mocked with laughter. \"Sure he don't.\"\n\n\"She says jump and the man asks how high.\" the chubby card game loser said.\n\n\"How about I jump across this table and pistol-whip the shit out of you? How about that?\" Dalton asked with a scowl, lips cutting though a beard of brown.\n\n\"Relax boys, she is sitting up there with the monitor.\" one of the men commented, noticing Cambria sitting to the front of the building; her seat at the bar directly in front of the news monitor.\n\n\"Another round?\" a man asked, having scooped up the deck of cards in an attempt to shuffle.\n\n\"Nope,\" Dalton said, though he wanted nothing more than to blister the men once more at a man's game. \"Gotta go check in with my captain.\"\n\nThough laughter ensued, the smuggler shrugged it off, locking eyes onto a man who had eased his way onto a stool beside Cambria.\n\n_So much for honor among thieves._ Dalton thought, casting a hard glance to the man. \"Cocksucker.\"\n\nPausing for a moment, Dalton turned his attention to the pub's door. Believing he'd heard a distant scream, though no others among them heard it. Either they were all too drunk to have heard the bone-chilling cry for help, or Dalton was drunk enough to imagine it.\n\nFinally shrugging it off, he once again focused on his walk to the bar.\n\n\"Hey Cambria,\" Dalton said with a grin, one that was quickly returned by the young lady of impeccable beauty. \"Hey guy with no chance of getting into Cambria's pants.\"\n\nBoth the blue-haired beauty and local patron developed strange looks across their faces, for different reasons, of course.\n\n\"I wasn't going to...\" the man began to reply.\n\n\"Save your shit Mahone, I've known you long enough. Probably using the same damn lines as always on this young specimen of insatiable beauty.\"\n\nIt was the first time he'd openly hit on a woman while warning off another man without at least a pause for breath. A fact that made the smuggler grin a bit.\n\n\"Dalton, really. He was just being nice. That's all.\" Cambria proclaimed.\n\n_Yea right, and I'm the fucking commander of the colonies. That silver-tongued son of a bitch is a bigger booty-chaser than I am, and that's saying something._ Dalton thought.\n\n\"What takes up 12 docking spaces...six women pilots,\" Dalton spouted off, striking home with Cambria, who had heard the joke only moments before. \"Or maybe he hit you with the old...What do you call a woman who can't make sandwiches?\" Dalton asked, knowing he'd exposed the panty-snatcher. \"Single.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll take my leave.\" Mahone stated, knowing he'd been given away by the man who would have been his wingman on any other occasion. This was different though. This was love. Though neither Dalton nor Cambria would admit it.\n\nDalton was careful to watch the man walk away too, as though he were a mighty dog protecting its master.\n\n\"Wow, I feel like an idiot.\" Cambria confessed.\n\n\"Don't,\" Dalton replied, though his eyes cautiously watched Mahone walk away. \"Most of the skanks that come through here would have been in bed with him after the first line,\" he added, quickly realizing the damage of his own words. \"Not to say you're a skank.\"\n\nCambria answered his confession with a laugh.\n\n\"Wow, and I thought his lines were bad.\"\n\nA short moment of silence fell between them, making each a bit uncomfortable.\n\n\"I don't know, I just feel a need to watch out for you. That's all. Places like this, they're in my blood. I know what's going through most of these people's heads before they do. It's like I'm a psychic or something.\"\n\n\"A psychic with whiskey on his breath.\" Cambria replied.\n\n_Ah fuck!_ Dalton thought, though he broadcast a look of confusion.\n\n\"It's alright, this is a bar. I expect it. Besides, it kind of feels good knowing I can come into a place like this and be safe.\" Cambria admitted.\n\n\"Yea,\" Dalton said, his mind wandering to distant places as he thought of her statement. \"I understand that.\"\n\n\"Can I ask you a question? A serious one?\" Cambria asked.\n\n\"Technically you just did,\" Dalton replied with a smile. \"Sure you can, you know that.\"\n\n\"How come you never let anyone close? I see through the whole comedic front you put up, I just don't understand why? Why can't you just be open about what's on your mind? In your heart?\" Cambria asked.\n\nIt was a damn good question, and Dalton knew it. His silent reaction for several moments only confirmed it to her.\n\n\"Not sure really. I reckon I'm just afraid of losing people,\" he admitted, becoming as serious as Cambria had ever seen him before. \"Each time I open up to someone, I lose 'em. One way or another, I lose 'em. Be it in a gunfight or to the undead,\" he added. \"I hate the fucking undead.\"\n\n\"Fair enough.\" Cambria replied, accepting his answer at face value.\n\n\"Now let me ask you something.\" Dalton said.\n\n\"Shoot,\" Cambria replied with a grin. \"Though not literally.\"\n\n\"How come we talk about anything and everything but the obvious? Each time we get close to talking about us, you shy away from it. I don't know what to think?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"Us?\" she asked.\n\n\"Ah, never mind then. I suppose my idiot brain just conjured that up. Won't happen again.\" Dalton replied, standing to his feet, upset by her lack of feelings for him.\n\nCambria offered no reply, simply turning her head away from him. Though she did so in order to mask her emotions.\n\nA part of her wanted to grab the smuggler and unload her own feelings onto him. Be with him. But her reservations prevented her from it, not seeing how a relationship with him would ever work out for the best.\n\nCambria had a way of over-thinking things, usually for the worse. She was confused, and the tears which began to swell in her eyes were proof of it, eventually beading softly down her cheeks a bit.\n\n\"Dalton, wait.\" she asked, turning to him.\n\n\"What?\" he demanded to know. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Commander Ortega is on the monitor.\" Cambria said, deflating all of Dalton's hopes for love with her reply.\n\nThe smuggler offered no reply, instead walking to the bar as he joined dozens of others, all preparing themselves for a rare speech by the commander.\n\n\"First off, I would like to confirm the rumors of Glimmeria falling. They are unfortunate, but true. Our army has fought valiantly in the face of this plague of man, but we are steadily losing ground.\n\nMy fair people, this is not a decision that has come easily for me. Though I fear it is our very last option and the window of opportunity is quickly closing.\n\nI have signed an order that will fund an exodus fleet. A fleet of ships that will take us away from this threat once and for all, as we journey into uncharted space to search for a new home.\n\nAgain, I would like to reiterate that my decision has not come lightly, and will forever burden my dreams as I know we simply do not have room for every last survivor.\"\n\nCommander Ortega stopped for a moment as the sound of cameras snapping throughout his conference room seemed to echo the fact that it was an historic moment.\n\n\"My advisory panel confirms that we will have room to house less than half of our survivors. I have personally overseen a lottery system in which we will select those who will accompany us into the stars.\n\nOne-third of the exodus from this plague will be comprised of those with extensive military experience. Their service and zeal will lend in the survival of our race. One-third of our exodus will be comprised of those who are deemed too important to leave behind. Among these people, doctors, scientists and teachers. Our race will not survive without the above mentioned. I truly believe that.\n\nFinally, the remaining one-third will be randomly selected through an exodus lottery. This will provide everyone with a glimmer of hope for the future, and I assure you, the lottery will be random.\n\nIn fact,\" Ortega said, pausing as he carefully planned his next words. \"I have personally decided to stay behind, as I could not live my life knowing I left a single person behind.\"\n\nPausing once more, the commander listened to the deafening sound of camera shutters.\n\n\"Any politician or military person who wishes to remain behind with me, may do so, and in turn free up a spot for a defenseless woman or child. That is a personal decision that I leave to each person listening.\n\nAs for myself, I will deem a commander for the exodus flight and then remain behind to coordinate one final stand against the enemies who approach our doorstep.\n\nI would ask that everyone pray. Not only for your own fate, but for the fate of those around you. Live every single day for the moments contained within it, and prepare for the next chapter in the history of our race. Thank you, and may God find it within his heart to grant us mercy in such troubled times.\"\n\nRather than take questions, Commander Ortega quickly exited from the podium, obviously shaken by his own announcement.\n\n\"Sir, you must reconsider your decision to stay.\" one of Ortega's advisers pleaded, while the other quickly raced out to the group of reporters who seemed as though they were a mob. Readying himself to field questions and assure the people of hope.\n\n\"I've no intention of staying behind,\" Ortega replied, still visibly shaken. \"I simply told the people what they needed to hear. They need hope at a time like this, and I gave it to them. When the plague arrives, none of us will be any wiser as to who is staying and who is leaving. I owe these people hope, but I also owe the exodus fleet stability in leadership.\" he replied.\n\n\"Yes sir, of course.\" his adviser replied.\n\nMoments later, Ortega found himself inside the sanctity of his personal quarters. Deafening silence leading him into even deeper thought.\n\nHe wondered of Adam Michaels' progress, though he also wondered if their exodus flight was the solution to the plague of man, or a prolonging of their own deaths. Knowing such large numbers could easily lead to a lack of fuel, starvation or struggle for power.\n\n_Survivors?_ He thought, feeling pity for them as well. _Survivors for what?_\n\nRonica\n\nAs Adam walked slowly into the Hunters' castle, leather boots striking easily against the stone flooring, his eyes skimmed the immediate surroundings.\n\nCall it a smuggler's intuition.\n\nA large room, vaulted ceiling of multicolored glass, though most of it seemed to refract shades of dark red; surrounded by dozens of vampires.\n\nEach of them wore attire of seemingly the utmost of importance. Most draped in a hooded coat of black, while a handful stood in the decorated armor of a warrior. Among them, Vladris.\n\nHe was the Hunters' champion; having survived hundreds of years while slaying hero after hero, as well as anyone else who opposed the rule of vampires.\n\nA great-sword laced to his back with leather straps, its trunk as wide as a small tree, though its bite was far more deadly. A sword in which only the mightiest could wield; Vladris did so with a single hand, at times swinging it as though it were the weight of a feather. A testament to his brute strength.\n\n\"Speak clearly and choose your words wisely, as our elders have granted you the gift of an audience; one they do not normally grant.\" Vladris said with authority.\n\nHe was right. It was rare for a human to enter the chamber of elders, and unheard of while wearing the Benzan uniform. The mark of a clan of warriors which had waged slaughter against the vampires for centuries, and the vampires likewise slaughtered the Benzans.\n\nNevertheless, Adam Michaels was a Benzan, and having found the lost tribe of Benzans had given him something he was never in short supply of. Confidence.\n\nMost importantly, he understood his job. He was there by the personal request of Commander Ortega. Ronica was the ideal planet to stage their exodus fleet, in fact, it was the only planet. Anything else was too close to the plague of man and would have been too quickly overrun.\n\nAs Adam entered the large chamber, reminding him of a very Gothic-styled judge's chamber, five vampires sat atop their own thrones, each one made of stone and trimmed in the sparkle of jewels.\n\nHe could tell from the look of them that each was hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years old, though he dared not question it.\n\nBowing low to the floor, a sight never before seen by someone bearing the mark of a Benzan, Adam stood slowly, preparing himself for such important negotiations.\n\n\"I thank you all for the opportunity to speak,\" Adam said, pausing for a moment. \"And I have come before you to ask for help. To build a bridge between our people.\"\n\n\"Build a bridge? Your PEOPLE burned that bridge when they began genocide against our race!\" Vladris yelled in response.\n\n\"You said I had been given the gift of an audience with elders, did you not?\" Adam asked with confidence. \"Then let me speak.\"\n\nThough no reply followed, Vladris cut eyes onto the Benzan smuggler that would have intimidated most among mortals.\n\n\"The Benzan family in which I am allied; we have no quarrel with you. With any of you. Just as you do, these Benzans have lived on their own in peace.\" Adam said.\n\n\"Why is it that you would come here during one of our most ceremonious days, as an intruder, and expect help?\" one of the elders asked.\n\n\"I had no idea I was arriving during such a time,\" Adam replied, turning to return a stare of dare onto Vladris. \"For that I apologize,\" he added. \"But I do so out of desperation. We face a new menace now. One that is much greater than any before this day.\"\n\n\"Let them wipe you out! What business is it of ours?\" Vladris demanded to know.\n\n\"Vladris \u2013 let him speak!\" one of the elders warned.\n\nThe Hunters' champion warrior simply bowed with obedience.\n\n\"The human race is only the beginning. Our new threat, the Priests, are after the entire system. Everything we know, everything we love. Including the precious rock we currently stand on; no matter how hidden you believe it to be.\" Adam said.\n\n\"We do not believe it hidden, because we do not hide. We do not cower from an enemy. Any enemy.\" one of the elders proudly stated.\n\n\"And I commend you for that. It is admirable. And though your hatred for the Benzans runs deep, we can all agree that they are a formidable opponent,\" Adam replied, watching the reactions of those in the room. One that spoke of the Benzans being a formidable adversary indeed. \"I saw with my own eyes, hundreds of our best warriors fall within an hour to the Priests,\" Adam stated, doing his best to chide his tears. \"Among them my wife.\"\n\nIt was an admission that struck home with Vladris, having lost the love of his life as well, though the wars were of a different manner. Loss of love feels one in the same.\n\n\"Now I'm asking you,\" Adam said, taking a moment to clear the emotional-cobwebs from his speech. \"I'm begging you,\" he added, kneeling to the elders; something that had never been heard of prior to Adam's gesture, at least by a Benzan. \"You have long been the mightiest warriors of the Skyla System; now I'm asking that you defend those who cannot defend themselves.\"\n\n\"I must admit Benzan, your gesture and statement seem true enough. How are we to know that you indeed speak the truth?\" one of the elders asked, this time an elder of military background.\n\n\"He speaks the truth,\" Sarah Blaine replied, walking into the chamber, her mere presence instilling faith into everyone who lay witness. \"I have known this man for a long time,\" she added, her voice turning to a softer tone. \"Even loved him. He speaks from the heart. I can personally validate that.\"\n\nIt was a statement that struck Vladris by surprise \u2013 though it made sense. He had picked up on Adam and Sarah's uneasiness around him.\n\n\"Very well. Speak to us of your plans Benzan.\" one of the elders insisted.\n\n\"Have you all gone mad? Can you not see that this is a colonial trap?\" Vladris yelled.\n\n\"Silence champion!\" Sarah demanded, showing her status as queen for all to see. \"Your caution as a warrior is welcome but your insubordination to your elders is not!\"\n\n\"Apologies my queen.\" Vladris replied, kneeling a bit though he did so reluctantly.\n\n\"The colonials plan an exodus voyage into the stars. This star system is lost,\" Adam said, thinking of a war they had no chance of winning. \"Of the few remaining planets that are uninfected, Ronica is the only one large enough to use as a staging ground for our journey. We will need time to prep such massive ships and pull resources together.\"\n\n\"You are running away?\" one of the elders asked, the entire chamber taken by surprise.\n\n\"We are beaten. Though it may be honorable to fight to the death, many of those who survive are simply women and children. There is no honor in that.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"Has it really come to this Adam?\" Sarah asked, a concern for those in the Skyla System deeply embedded into her.\n\n\"Yes, it has,\" Adam replied. \"We are overrun by a species that acts as though it is a virus. One for which we do not have the cure.\"\n\n\"And tell me Benzan. What would be the benefit of an alliance between us? What would my people have to gain?\" an elder asked, impatiently waiting for an answer.\n\nAs he thought the coming moments through carefully, Adam reached around his neck slowly, removing his Benzan amulet and throwing it to the floor.\n\n\"The benefit of becoming a single people \u2013 rather than nations divided by race.\" the Benzan replied.\n\nA gesture that sent even the eldest of vampires into deep thought for a moment.\n\n\"Please, I am asking you,\" Adam pleaded. \"I'm asking you to view me as a person in need, not a Benzan. Not anymore. We are all simply people who have been overwhelmed with grief and loss for loved ones,\" he added. \"It is my understanding that you protect the humans of Ronica because they could not protect themselves from war.\"\n\n\"We protect the humans on this planet because they fought us with courage. Our champion was once theirs. His courage earned their freedom.\" one of the elders stated.\n\n\"Our soldiers have died by the thousands, each of them with courage. Though I'm no champion, I am willing to risk my life against your own champion, if need be. My own race at stake.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"It would be a foolish move human. For your own sake.\" Vladris commented with a grin.\n\n\"I know,\" Adam admitted, turning to the large vampire. \"But I'm willing to sacrifice my own life to save those who cannot fight. Women...children. Are you? Are your warriors?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"Silence,\" one of the elders demanded. \"There is no need for our champion to prove himself. Vladris has done so before, countless times. Though we do respect your courage. Tell us of your intentions?\"\n\n\"Our fleet will be comprised of as many ships as possible, but every world in our system will be represented by a capital ship. That ship will receive a vote in whatever our future holds, and if you extend help to us, I can promise your people a vote to call your own.\"\n\n\"Permission to speak?\" Vladris asked, though he did so with great displeasure.\n\n\"Granted champion.\" and elder replied.\n\n\"We have seen threats like this before. When they arrive, we will cut them down, just as we always have.\" Vladris said.\n\n\"I guarantee you \u2013 you've seen no threats like this before.\" Adam stated.\n\n\"Speak to us of this threat.\" an elder insisted.\n\n\"The ability to infect a body, living or dead, by attaching to the spinal cord. Once they have infected, they can use the body just as the warrior was always of their race, bringing with it the battle-prowess of the warrior.\" Adam stated.\n\n\"In other words...\" one of the elders began.\n\n\"In other words, every time a vampire falls, he will join the fight against you. Your own abilities in battle will be your undoing.\" Adam quickly replied.\n\n\"Can the enemy be killed?\" Vladris asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Adam replied. \"But we've found that the only sure way is by burning the small creature. Or by finding enough luck to strike it in half with bullet or blade.\"\n\n\"Then the trunk of my blade will feast indeed.\" the Hunters' champion said with a smile.\n\n\"Any final words before we begin our own deliberations Benzan?\" an elder asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Adam replied. \"I would ask that you not consider the history of our two races, but the future. For every warrior here that is willing to die with the honor of battle, there must be a group of people that love him. A family worth saving. I ask that you consider preserving the proud history of your race by becoming part of a larger society. One that is prepared to accept you with open arms. Thank you.\" Adam added, bowing a final time as he began to exit the chamber slowly.\n\n\"Benzan,\" one of the elders announced. \"Your amulet.\"\n\n\"I've no further need for it,\" Adam replied, though his back remained turned. \"I'm just a survivor now.\"\n\nAs his body began to hit the light of day, which draped down from the peaceful Ronican skies above, a group of nearly twenty soldiers awaited him.\n\n\"Did it go well?\" a colonial soldier asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Adam replied. \"I don't know.\"\n\nDrift Planet \u2013 Sandila\n\n\"What do you make of it?\" Cambria asked, easing herself down beside Dalton as his concentrated stare into the distant continued.\n\n\"I think if I would have bluffed a bit more I'd have won every hand.\" he replied, using the quick wit of a smuggler.\n\n\"I mean the lottery you meathead!\" she said with a grin, slapping him across the arm playfully.\n\n\"Honestly, hell, I don't know what to think,\" Dalton said as he took a pause for the cause; the swig of whiskey burning its way to his stomach. \"Guess they are gonna do whatever they want to anyway. It's the political way. No sense in getting torn up over something you have no control over. I've never trusted the jack-jawed sumbitches and ain't about to start now.\"\n\n\"Dalton, I don't want you to hate me. I don't want that kind of awkwardness between us.\" Cambria said, her words falling as soft as drizzle.\n\n\"Hate you?\" he asked. \"We live in a world where the dead stalk the living and the living still can't be honest about their feelings. That's what I hate. Not you.\"\n\n\"I know there's something there. Something between us. I just don't know what, I guess I need time. That's all.\" she replied, her statement very candid and honest. \"There, I said it. Aren't you proud?\" she added with a soft smile.\n\n\"Oh. Good. I thought you were about to tell me I wasn't going to get paid or something.\" he remarked as they both began to laugh without hesitation.\n\n\"Well about that, it may be a little late. The whole zombie thing and all.\" Cambria added, causing them to laugh a bit louder.\n\n\"Darling, I hadn't been paid in so damn long that it doesn't even concern me anymore. I figure if I'm alive, got a pillow to lay my head on at night, a bottle of hootch in my hand and people around me that I care about,\" he said, pausing on that statement to glance to Cambria with strong intent. \"I got everything I need.\"\n\nA candid statement as well. One that led to Cambria leaning to the smuggler for a kiss.\n\nShe had thought he'd be completely happy with it, their lips finally having a chance to meet on good terms. However, as she leaned in, feeling a bit awkward, Cambria quickly pulled away and wondered what his hangup was.\n\n\"Dalton, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have.\" Cambria admitted as the smuggler sat there, eyes focused on a small window that was caked with the residue of cigar smoke aplenty.\n\n\"Dalton? Are you OK?\"\n\n\"Zombies! Get outside, quick, otherwise they'll swarm us and trap us in this fucking rat shack!\" he yelled, quickly turning to usher his love interest to the safest possible spot.\n\nRobbing me of my kiss \u2013 'ya undead fucks!\n\nGunshots began to snap out, dozens of survivors firing into a small group that sprinted toward their location.\n\nThey had banded together with others, nearly fifty total, and taken up residence in a very small village on the remote planet. It had been long-abandoned, which served the group just fine.\n\nEach of them knew that eventually their hideaway would be found by the horde they feared, but each had secretly hoped that somehow, by some grand miracle, they would be left alone once and for all.\n\n\"Dalton, what are you doing?\" Cambria yelled, slowing her run to watch the smuggler do a complete turnaround as he began heading into the direction of the vacated bar.\n\n\"Son of a bitches done took everything else from me,\" he responded with a yell of his own. \"I'll be damned if they are getting my whiskey too!\" he added, snatching up a half-empty bottle of rock whiskey before turning to sprint from the door once more.\n\n_Are you kidding me!_ She thought, ready to shoot him herself if he didn't realize the urgency of zombies approaching.\n\n\"He's got balls.\" one of the taunting bar patrons yelled, each of them slowing their sprint of desperation long enough to watch the slightly-tipsy smuggler risk his own neck for a bottle of bargain bin man-drink.\n\n\"Bunch of nasty bastards!\" he yelled, sending two rounds from his magnum-style pistol before turning and beginning the quickest sprint of his life.\n\nThe survivors had dug into the small group of dwellings which was built within a thick nestle of countryside, though they knew that eventually it would come to this. Still, it had been their home for weeks. Each of them growing to appreciate it for what it was. Quiet.\n\nIron Grove \u2013 at least the name of it prior to the plague of man. Most of its citizens had long abandoned the sad excuse for a village, heading out on any available transport they could.\n\nSome stayed. Choosing instead to defend their homes to the death, which looked to be beating down their door like an unwelcome salesman. One that peddled agonizing mortality.\n\nWhat they didn't expect, however, was literally hundreds of Priest-controlled zombies that began filling the nearby hillside, as if it were certified death pouring into a tub of survivors.\n\n_Oh shit._ Dalton thought, his mouth hanging down a bit as even he couldn't fathom an escape from such an ill-fate.\n\nAs quickly as his alcoholic buzz seemed to fade, Dalton realized that the survivors were backed into a corner. A bad thing considering their opponents. He understood the vile tendencies of a zombie, priest, or as he called them, nasty fucks.\n\nDalton understood the survivors were outnumbered ten to one, and had no strategic advantage. His military wisdom finally coming into play.\n\nThey had weapons, sure, but they were about to be swarmed and had the low ground. A snowball's chance in hell. Or, even worse, a rock whiskey bottle's chance in a Glimmerian bar. Zero.\n\n\"Keep running,\" Dalton yelled to Cambria. \"Past our outpost. Get our boy and tell him to elbow to asshole up into the hillside as fast as he can!\"\n\n\"But we would be safer indoors? Nightfall is coming. We don't even have supplies ready?\" she replied.\n\n\"Cambria,\" he shouted, grabbing the woman firmly by both of her arms as gunshots rang throughout the encampment. \"These people are already dead. In a couple of minutes, that horde will be here. A couple of minutes later, everything in this settlement will be dead. Just ain't no way these sad-ass wooden walls are going to hold them back. Get Skulls and head to that brushy part of the hill. Trust me.\"\n\n\"OK...I do.\" she replied with shock.\n\n\"Go.\" he added, the blue-haired bombshell turning to relay the message to their friend.\n\nThere are things in a man's life that he can never shake. Events that plague his dreams, night after night, for the remainder of his life \u2013 and this was one such moment.\n\nAs Dalton readied himself for the forced run ahead, his eyes were witness to survivors, many of them women and children, heading inside to escape the coming horde. He knew they would not last inside of a handful of minutes, and though he wanted to help them escape, it simply wasn't possible.\n\nIt was the first time in many years that Dalton James began to cry aloud. His tough image being overcome by his heartfelt sadness for those who would soon fall victim to the plague of man. The Priests.\n\n\"Dalton,\" Cambria yelled loudly, pausing her wording as she began to watch him, tears falling steady. \"Dalton, we need to go. You said so yourself.\"\n\nSkulls had joined her, the sniper also understanding the need for a quick escape. The settlement was beginning to flood with zombies and would soon be nothing but.\n\n\"Dalton please.\" Cambria said, grabbing his arm and captivating his thoughts for a single moment. Long enough to break him from sadness and throw him back into the military frame of mind.\n\n\"Yea,\" he admitted, quickly drying up his tears. \"Haul ass, I'm right behind you.\"\n\nThe small group of three quickly slipped out through the side of Iron Grove which had not been slammed by zombies yet. Using the cover of a casting nightfall to mask their escape, though they would need to find cover only a few hundred yards from the deafening sound of painful murder.\n\n\"Are you alright?\" Cambria whispered.\n\n\"Yea, I,\" Dalton began to reply, all three survivors nestled snugly into the thick of brush near enough by to witness the genocide unfold. \"I'm sorry you had to see me like that. I don't know what came over me.\"\n\n\"I do.\" Cambria replied, easing her hand onto his, their fingers clasping together as she tried to comfort him.\n\n\"It's one thing when my own ass is on the line, or even soldiers around me,\" he admitted, trying to block the last remaining screams from his mind. \"This is something different altogether. These people ain't equipped for this...they ain't soldiers.\" he added, thinking of the women and children he'd witnessed only minutes before. Each of them butchered by such a vile species.\n\n\"No,\" Cambria replied. \"They don't deserve a fate like this.\"\n\n\"We just have to make sure they did not die in vain. Avenge each of them by the smooth grain of a bullet.\" Skulls added, his right eye pressed firm to the large scope which mounted onto his bolt-action rifle.\n\n\"You can bet your ass on that,\" Dalton responded, nodding his head with purpose. \"Each one of these rank sumbitches are gonna pay.\"\n\nFor nearly an hour, Dalton, Cambria and Skulls had to remain patient. Hiding from plain sight as the walking dead scavenged over those freshly-slain. Eventually raising them from the dead and increasing their army's numbers.\n\nDalton had heard rumors of it, but never seen the turning with his own eyes. The Priests were a small creature, hard shell around it as though it were a sea crab, though it also had eight stringy legs and a rather long tail.\n\nFor the first time, the three survivors watched with horror \u2013 the way of the Priests.\n\nThey slowly attached to the back of a skull of the dead, wrapping clingy legs around to the victim's mouth. Then, as the creature gripped the mouth of the dead, it drove the long tail into the upper spine of the lifeless body, snaking the tale down. Finally covering the entire length of the spine from its inner most spot.\n\nThen, seconds later, the fallen host began to stand. Becoming a soldier for their cause, completely under the control of the Priest which embedded into it.\n\nThe perfect army. The Priests would lose soldiers in battle, but as they fell the small creature would simply detach and then assume control of another body. The entire process taking less than sixty-seconds, depending on how close the body of a fallen host was.\n\nFrom the perspective of a man who put in countless years of military experience, Dalton quickly understood why the populated worlds had fallen so swiftly. Why the colonials were getting their asses kicked. You could kill the Priests, but they would continue to come, using your own fallen soldiers against you.\n\n\"I've never seen anything like it.\" Cambria admitted, though she did so in a whisper as they watched.\n\n\"No,\" Dalton replied, pausing to swig deeply from his bottle of whiskey. \"I've seen a lot of shit before, but I ain't never seen anything like that.\"\n\nRonica\n\n\"He looks just like you.\" Sarah admitted.\n\nA true statement \u2013 the small child looking just as Adam did at the age. The queen of vampires even began to, for a moment, imagine the infant with a duster to its back and a revolver on his hip. A smuggler in training.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Adam replied warmly. \"Many nights, Avery has pushed me forward when I didn't think it was possible. My son has been a godsend when dealing with emotions.\"\n\n\"The loss of your lover?\" Sarah asked.\n\n\"Yes, among other things.\" he admitted.\n\n\"Other things?\" the queen asked.\n\n\"Guilt,\" Adam said, his tone of voice changing to one of true sorrow. \"My group first discovered the Priests. They came back to the Skyla System by way of our ship.\"\n\n\"The Benzans?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes. Though we didn't realize it at the time.\"\n\n\"Does anyone else know this?\"\n\n\"No,\" he replied. \"And I would really appreciate if you kept it that way. I'm sure the blame of the lost lives would be thrown into my lap.\"\n\n\"Your secret is safe with me Adam.\"\n\n\"I've come to the point where I feel I should let them know. Let them throw the blame for all of this on me. I already harbor the guilt for it.\" Adam responded.\n\n\"Yes, but you did not mean to bring the Priests back? Correct?\" Sarah asked.\n\n\"Of course not,\" he replied. \"We set out in search of a Benzan colony. One that was logged into their history \u2013 its location secret to all but the highest-ranking.\"\n\n\"And you found them?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he replied. \"Yes we did. It explains the ships and the weapons. The robe even. As we pleaded for their help, finally getting them to agree, we began stocking resources for the return trip.\"\n\n\"Their help in what?\" she asked.\n\n\"Destroying the Hunters.\"\n\n\"You meant to destroy us?\" Sarah asked, taken back a bit by the Benzan's confessions.\n\n\"Well to be fair, I had no idea you were here. When I last saw you Sarah, you were the pinnacle of hope for the colonials,\" he pleaded. \"We were coming back to destroy a race that had taken so much from the Benzans. A race that has taken so much from you.\" he added.\n\n\"They've taken my father, this much is true,\" Sarah countered. \"But they've given me so much more.\"\n\n\"What? What could they possibly have given you that could replace the loss of your father?\"\n\n\"A true understanding of things around me. A true understanding of life.\" she replied.\n\n\"I'm not going to pretend to understand that. I'm just going to say that you seemed to have a good understanding of life before all of this. You had a big heart and a love for your people.\" Adam responded, patting his small son on the back a bit.\n\n\"I'm not the woman I once was Adam.\" she replied.\n\n\"Yea, I'm getting that,\" he responded, looking to her with a great deal of emotion. \"And I harbor the blame for that as well.\"\n\n\"This is not your doing Adam, and it's certainly not a bad thing.\" the queen said with a smile.\n\n\"Yes it is. It is directly my fault. Had I just forgiven you, we would have walked away together and been married. I know that to the very pit of my soul.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"I can still remember you flying away. I remember watching your ship hit full-burn through the glass window of my colonial shuttle.\"\n\n\"Sarah, I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Don't be. Vladris was too strong and remains so. Had you stayed behind he would have killed you and I would still be here as I am now.\" Sarah remarked.\n\n\"Perhaps. I guess we'll see,\" Adam replied. \"Sarah, I will save you from all of this.\"\n\n\"Adam, it's alright. I'm content with my life now.\"\n\nCutting his eyes to her to reaffirm his statement, the Benzan smuggler told her once more.\n\n\"Sarah, I WILL save you.\"\n\nAboard Colonial Star Triumph\n\nCommander Ortega remained standing, hands behind his back and clasped together while his eyes soaked in the view. The Drift planets seemed so peaceful from above. So relatively unscathed by the zombie plague, though only on the surface.\n\nAs his ship orbited the heavens above, coasting through the stars with a manner of technological beauty, the commander knew that the calm of dusty brown and pale red below was anything but unscathed.\n\nHe'd gotten reports for the past few months of zombies overrunning the planets. The local armies immediately falling to the mercy of such a threat while its citizens were no doubt in hiding and praying for a ship such as the colonial vessel Ortega stood aboard.\n\nHe had never quite understood their desire for such a primitive lifestyle. Blatantly shunning readily-available technology at every opportunity.\n\nThe Drifts had earned a reputation for being primitive, yet beautiful. Spaceships replaced with airships of glass and steel, crafted in a Victorian-style that had long been the signature of the planets below.\n\nA vacation spot, if nothing else, for the people of the system that wished to escape the harsh work schedules which seemed to drag most down. Busy flight schedules by cramped shuttles, flying them to the surface of mundane planets and even worse, to unexciting routine jobs behind desks.\n\nThe Drift planets were of a different sort. They allowed only the essential technology, which meant two things. If you didn't work hard, you didn't eat. Their food came by way of farms across the lands of each planet, trading among themselves and priding themselves on being self-sufficient. The other, of course, is that it was the place to be rowdy. If you had it in you.\n\nThroughout the Skyla System, fighting was heavily frowned upon and usually punishable with jail time. The more advanced society became, the more restrictions governments seemed to place on 'free' people.\n\nThe Drifts settled their arguments in the same manner. Fist to cuff. If a disagreement was had, fighting tended to ensue. Of course when the parties involved were done, they'd usually patch things up over a cold pitcher of beer.\n\nTheir shunning of technology, however, had placed them at a huge disadvantage when it came to the zombie outbreak. They received no warning, nor could they radio for help. Not that they would have regardless.\n\nCommander Ortega knew the rules. He was forced under colonial code, even under such trying times, to make every attempt possible to contact their governments first.\n\nThe Drifts fell under colonial rule, but did not adhere to the same rules. That had been agreed upon many years before Ortega came to power, and though he did not agree with their primitive way of thinking, the commander did respect it.\n\n\"Ready and awaiting your orders sir.\" a high-ranking soldier said, firmly standing in the doorway of command center aboard the Colonial Star Triumph.\n\n\"You've attempted to hail the governments?\" Commander Ortega asked.\n\n\"Yes sir,\" the soldier replied. \"We've made several efforts to reach each of them. Our grid shows no airborne traffic and we cannot reach them through our com systems,\" the soldier added. \"However, we have picked up droves of heat signatures on the surface. All of them consistent with what we've seen across the Skyla System. The Priests are indeed here.\"\n\n\"Very well. Begin taking the fight to them, and advise our soldiers to fire only if they can confirm their targets. These people may live simple lives, but they are still people. Our people. Let's protect the innocent and exterminate the guilty.\" Ortega said.\n\n\"Yes sir, at once.\" the soldier replied, turning to execute his direct orders.\n\nCommander Ortega glanced from a large window that looked across the stars once more. He had always been taught to think of the Drifts as a sanctuary, though he had never personally visited. Many times he'd found himself understanding what must drive people to live here, among the fringe planets of deep space. Family, love, a man's word and the benefit of hard work.\n\nThings the rest of the Skyla System had long forgotten.\n\nThe commander had taken a personal interest in protecting the most innocent civilians he could think of, and though the colonials were losing a war on all fronts, he'd be damned if he would allow such a peaceful people to fall victim to the Priests.\n\nHis thoughts were backed with the remaining might of their fleet, evidenced by dozens of smaller ships, each full of soldiers who were armed to the teeth, descending to the planets below.\n\nThey would confirm their targets and then begin to string napalm in the areas affected. A second wave would provide colonial boots to the ground in an attempt to break the spine of such a large zombie force and finally, his diminishing fleet would deliver supplies to those who were in need. Providing hope to those who wished to remain with their homes, while offering to bring any survivors aboard his ship for protection.\n\nAssuming they had arrived in time and his men were swift when taking the fight to the undead army.\n\nGodspeed.\n\nRonica\n\n\"They must think us fools!\" one of the largest Husk stated firmly.\n\n\"Relax Rylak. We must bide our time and strike when it is meant to be.\" Troy responded.\n\n\"If we take out the head of the snake, the rest of it will fall with swiftness.\" Rylak replied.\n\n\"I agree,\" Troy stated. \"But I have seen firsthand the abilities of the head of the snake. Vladris is not to be taken lightly. We must strike when it is least-expected. That is our only chance of winning.\"\n\n\"Then we will bide our time.\" Rylak agreed, each of the men bowing their heads slightly. A common sight among the might Orc-like Husk.\n\nAs Rylak and several of the muscle-heavy warriors walked away, each of them keeping their plans of deceit closely guarded, Troy began to think of a lot of times gone by.\n\nA man who was like a father to him, not to mention the greatest warrior he'd ever known. Roman Raines. Cut down by Vladris following one of the most epic battles recorded.\n\nTroy began to wonder if Roman would approve of his plan. If Roman would encourage the act of revenge or warn Troy off for his own safety. The young man had been trained in the arts of Husk war, and had excelled during each and every turn.\n\nHe had become one of the best warriors among his people, even if he was human at the core. What he lacked genetically, Troy made up for with speed and wit, becoming one of the most respected warriors in Husk armor.\n\nStill, he knew of Vladris in battle. For many years the mighty Husk had tried to end the champion vampire. By all accounts, Vladris was responsible for hundreds of slain Husk, which provided extra incentive for the young man. Not that he needed an extra push.\n\nWatching a man who had been like a father to him, a man that had first trained him with a combat blade \u2013 watching him fall in battle was push enough.\n\nTroy knew that their time for battle was coming. He planned to strike the lion by surprise and then earn his right among Husk royalty by ending the reign of terror that was Vladris.\n\nAs Vladris approached Adam and his escort which was comprised of colonial soldiers and Benzan warriors, the man stood to his feet.\n\nA former ship's captain, colonial lieutenant and admitted smuggler, Adam had walked many paths in life. Though he understood the most important path was the one which lay beneath Vladris' feet as the vampiric warrior approached.\n\n\"Our elders place great faith in you Adam Michaels. They will allow your fleet to land on Ronica and use our far side as a staging ground under the terms that you proposed,\" the vampire said, his words firm. \"However.\"\n\n\"I'm listening.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"Should I even suspect this is a ploy; a trap to overtake our fine planet,\" Vladris remarked, leaning in closely. \"I won't hesitate to have my finest run you and your precious survivors down like fleeing cattle.\"\n\n\"That's not going to happen.\" Adam said clearly, though it remained unclear as to which part of Vladris' statement he was referring.\n\nThe champion vampire started at him for several moments, both of them unrelenting in eye contact; making it feel as though it were an eternity.\n\n\"Should I find out you're here for Sarah,\" the vampire warned. \"You'll suffer a far-worse fate than death.\"\n\n\"I'm just here to help my people.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"We'll see.\" Vladris warned, turning to begin a long journey back into the castle.\n\n\"A bit of a prick, yes?\" one of the colonial soldiers asked.\n\n\"Yea,\" Adam replied. \"I would be too if this were my home.\" he added.\n\n\"Vladris!\" Adam yelled aloud, jogging slowly as he caught back up to the seasoned warrior. \"Thank you, truly.\"\n\nAs he finished his words, Adam extended his hand to the warrior of vampires, a gesture that was unheard of.\n\n\"Are you sure you want to shake the hand of the warrior who cut your friend Roman Raines to his grave?\" Vladris taunted.\n\nIt was stunning news to Adam Michaels, a confession that mustered up a lot of hatred for Vladris as the smuggler considered drawing his revolver.\n\n\"Yes,\" he finally admitted, hand still extended. \"The fighting has to stop somewhere for trust to begin.\"\n\n\"Interesting,\" Vladris replied, studying Adam a bit. \"Prove your integrity to me Adam Michaels.\" the vampire added, shunning a handshake as he turned to head back into the castle, passing his queen on the way.\n\n\"My lady, you should be under guard at such times.\" Vladris said gently with a bow.\n\n\"I trust Adam and his group. Perhaps you would be wise to do the same?\"\n\n\"My queen, I mean no disrespect,\" Vladris replied, biting a tongue that was growing ever-sharper for Adam Michaels. \"It is in my nature to question the intentions of a race which has hunted us down for centuries.\"\n\n\"I understand your reservations,\" Sarah responded. \"And you are a better champion for it. I have known Adam for a long time. I could easily see through his story if it were not indeed the truth.\" she added.\n\n\"Of course my queen.\"\n\n\"Gather some men and begin to clear enough area for what I understand to be a large grid of ships landing,\" she ordered. \"And Vladris,\" she added, keening the champion's focus on their conversation a bit. \"Keep our warriors posted within the staging area at all times. As a precaution.\"\n\n\"Of course my lady.\" Vladris replied with a grin, knowing Sarah's human side trusted Adam thoroughly, though her vampiric side trusted no one.\n\n\"May we speak Adam?\" Sarah asked, approaching the embattled smuggler as he motioned his small group away.\n\nThere was a time when they communicated with the simplicity of a glance, the emotion of a kiss. But those times had become politically incorrect, which saddened the man throughout his heart.\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nHe listened, though he wanted to talk. Scoop her up and take her away, just to talk for hours. His heart, his very soul, having missed her so badly that it physically hurt.\n\n\"I wanted to say I'm sorry,\" she admitted. \"About Sasha I mean. I had no idea.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, is that sarcasm?\" he asked, truly questioning her display of emotions for a woman he'd left with.\n\n\"No, no. I am truly sorry. Becoming a Hunter has heightened my senses greatly and I can see the sadness in your heart. For that I am very sorry.\" Sarah responded.\n\nBreaking down just a bit, Adam refrained from tears, though it seemed nearly impossible.\n\n\"Part of that is indeed for Sasha. Her loss has been unbearable. But much of the sadness you pick up on is for you. Seeing you here, knowing it's because of a choice I made.\"\n\n\"Don't be silly, I'm fine with being here. They have accepted me and their race is truly remarkable.\" Sarah replied.\n\n\"When I look at you, I don't see sadness. I just have the eyes of a smuggler.\" he said with a grin, bringing a grin to her face as well.\n\n\"You always had wit. I'll give you that much.\" Sarah replied, her face warming with an extended grin.\n\n\"I see a woman who I was ready to marry and call my wife. I see war after war, each of them having pulled apart what was once my sole reason for living. I see what should have been.\"\n\nHis confession hit like a blindside of truth, stirring up many emotions that Sarah had dealt with as a human.\n\n\"Now if that complicates matters, I'm sorry. I thought the loss of Sasha was unbearable, and at times it seems that way. But looking at you and not admitting my continuing feelings for you, that's unbearable. I'd rather be cut down by Vladris' blade than pretend I don't still care for you.\" he added.\n\nSarah was shocked by his statement, turning to retreat from such truth into her castle, stopping long enough to ask one final question.\n\n\"Do you mind if I ask how Sasha died?\"\n\nIt was a very blunt question, though such an attitude was not uncommon among the Hunters.\n\n\"She died protecting our son,\" Adam replied, choking back tears. \"The Priests took our ship and there was a single lifeboat left. Two man vessel,\" he added. \"I insisted on staying behind to provide them both time to escape, but Sasha pleaded with me, said I would be Avery's best chance of survival. That I would be able to protect him in the long run,\" Adam said, a single tear beginning to trickle from his eye. \"Sarah, I have to protect my son.\"\n\nTo avoid tears on her own end, Sarah nodded her understanding before turning to enter the castle. Adam's confession of a child and his helplessness in defending the young boy leading her to a single conclusion.\n\nAdam's son would be protected, even if it meant the death of every soul within the Hunter race.\n\nDrift Planet \u2013 Sandilia\n\n\"I don't understand why we don't stay put now that they're gone. We have walls around us and a roof over our heads?\" Cambria asked.\n\n\"Best I can tell, these things are like stray dogs. They seem to move all over the place with no real direction, but I've learned enough about the son of a bitches to know that they do move with direction. They jump from place to place, each one a familiar spot,\" Dalton replied. \"I just think it's best if we scavenge what we can from the village and then hike our asses back up a bit. Find some well-hidden high ground.\"\n\n\"I don't know if I can,\" Cambria admitted. \"Not after getting to know these people.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Dalton replied. \"You stay put here and cover our asses. Besides, there's a good chance the fuckers dropped ailing bodies for fresh ones.\"\n\nCambria nodded, letting Dalton know she understood. Though she appeared shaken.\n\n\"We'll be done in fifteen, just keep your eyes open,\" Dalton said, comforting the woman with a meaningful hold of her upper-arm. \"Come on worker bee, we got shit to do.\" he added, turning to Skulls with a smile.\n\n\"What if I don't want to be worker bee? What if I want to be something else?\" the sniper replied with sarcasm.\n\n\"Carry your ass.\" Dalton replied, cutting through the chase as the two men walked slowly from the cover of brush. Entering a freshly-fallen camp under the cover of darkness.\n\n\"Looking for anything we might need for survival. Guns and grub, obviously, but anything that can make it more comfortable too. Blankets...\" Dalton whispered, the two men having made it back to the deathly-quiet camp.\n\n\"Whiskey?\" Skulls asked with a sarcastic eye roll.\n\n\"Well if the shoe fits.\"\n\n\"I figured as much.\" the sniper replied.\n\n\"Hey, don't knock my way of getting through things,\" Dalton scolded, though he continued to whisper in doing so. \"We all deal with shit in different ways, and I've been through enough for the both of us.\"\n\n\"It's cool, I get it.\" Skulls admitted.\n\n\"How about you then? How do you deal with shit like this?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"Me? I just block it out. It plays out in front of my eyes, but I don't store it to memory.\" Skulls replied, rolling the body of a grown man over in search of weapons, instead finding a slain toddler in which the grown man had tried to protect from the horde of undead.\"\n\n\"Yea. Good luck blocking that shit out.\" Dalton said.\n\nAboard Colonial Star Triumph\n\n\"Sir,\" Doctor Arness said as he slowly entered the private quarters of Commander Ortega. \"Preliminary reports show mostly wasteland down below. We've found a few pockets of survivors, but mostly just rolling hordes of Priests.\"\n\n\"Keep the search efforts going.\" Ortega replied.\n\n\"Sir, if I may,\" Arness replied. \"These search choppers are using fuel that will eventually need. The tradeoff for only a handful of lives may not be worth it in the end. It may be in our own best interest to suspend the searches and focus on supplying our exodus fleet.\"\n\n\"I'm not in the business of doing what's in my own person interest. I'm in the business of doing what's best for my people. We don't know how many survivors are down there, but we know they are down there and in need. I won't leave them behind. You have my answer doctor. Continue the searches.\" Ortega said.\n\n\"As you wish sir.\" Doctor Arness replied with a nod.\n\nWalking from the room, the doctor slowly closed the thick door of the commander's quarters.\n\n\"Well?\" a second adviser asked as they both walked from the commander's quarters and into the bustling interior of the large colonial ship.\n\n\"Our commander has lost his way,\" Arness said without hesitation. \"He puts the survival of our fleet in great danger by continuing this pointless search for survivors.\"\n\n\"Perhaps now is our time to strike?\" the adviser asked. \"I have the support of several, many within the commander's own military ranks.\"\n\n\"No,\" Arness replied. \"At least not yet. Our move to power hinges on timing and execution,\" he added. \"If we jump too soon, Ortega will look as though he is a victim, and will have the sympathy of the fleet. However, if we wait for opportunity, eventually one will present itself. At the first overstep of his power, we can strike and look as though we are heroes in removing him from power.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" the adviser replied with a smile. \"It is a solid plan indeed.\"\n\n\"It hinges on your ability to gain support for our cause,\" Arness said, staring onto the slim man of fine clothing. \"We must have a good portion of military with us, otherwise those who back our great commander will stall our efforts quickly.\"\n\n\"Understood,\" the adviser replied. \"I'll get right on that.\"\n\n\"Cautiously,\" Arness warned, pausing his conspiracy partner's walk. \"Be weary of including someone who may not share our vision of the fleet.\"\n\n\"Consider it done.\"\n\nDrift Planet \u2013 Sandila\n\n\"Best be getting some sleep.\" Dalton remarked, turning to welcome Cambria, who eased into a sitting position beside him; both of them sponging in the serenity of a cold \u2013 but clear night.\n\n\"Hard for me to sleep, considering.\" she replied.\n\n\"Yea. I get that way with these stank-undead fucks roaming around here too.\" he said with a grin.\n\n\"Actually, I meant that,\" she replied with a smile of her own. \"Stank-undead fucks aside; it's a beautiful night. A bit chilled with a slight breeze. Quiet. Almost seems like a normal moment. At least what I can remember of normality.\"\n\n\"Yea I,\" Dalton said with pause, eventually removing his brown duster and offering it to the welcoming hands of Cambria. \"I can't get away from leaving those people behind. If there would have been any other way...\"\n\n\"I know,\" the beautiful woman replied, snuggling into the oversized coat and feeling more secure than she had in a long time. \"You didn't do anything wrong back there. If you hadn't of acted so quickly, Skulls and I wouldn't be here.\"\n\n\"I reckon.\" Dalton said, turning for a moment to watch the sniper rest, a deep sleep to be envied.\n\n\"I also have to admit,\" Cambria said, her smile turning a bit more serious. \"There's something to this brown coat. When I first met you, I was skeptical, but now I get it. You're a complex man Dalton James.\"\n\n\"Not by choice, I'll guarantee you that,\" he replied with truth. \"I've just been on the move so damn much I figure I'll bring the comforts of home with me. That usually means whiskey and a coat that doubles as a blanket.\"\n\n\"Sorry I've dragged you into all of this. Truly.\" she admitted.\n\n\"Ah, no need for that. I've been running with the undead at my heels for a long time now. Got nothing to do with you pretty lady.\" he responded.\n\n\"Also sorry for not seizing the moment. With you, I mean. I have this stupid way of not letting anyone get close to me. Even those I love.\" Cambria confessed. Her eyes seeming to gaze onto him with a sky-blue truth.\n\nAs Dalton began to lean in for a kiss, one that both had longed for; the smuggler froze. Staring into her eyes, though seemingly distracted.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have...\" Cambria mumbled with regret.\n\n\"Shh.\" Dalton replied, holding the rough feel of his finger to her soft lips.\n\nThough it seemed an awkward situation, Dalton remained silent, his finger pressed to her lip. Partly because of his attention focused elsewhere, and partly because of her lip feeling so tender. So desirable.\n\nAt that moment, loud blasts streaked across the sky. Each of them trailing from colonial ships traveling at high speeds.\n\n\"Well I'll be a son of a bitch!\" Dalton yelled, understanding their chances of survival had just increased drastically.\n\n\"Does this mean we're safe?\" Cambria asked, turning to Skulls who had snapped immediately from his dream world, battle-hardened grasp onto rifle.\n\n\"Only if we figure out a way to flag 'em down.\" Dalton replied, scrambling around and thinking the situation through.\n\nFinally, he began pouring what remained of his whiskey onto the ground. The dense soil soaking in both alcohol and curse words as Dalton felt bittersweet over the sacrifice. Striking his favorite cigar lighter, he then lit the alcohol and began grabbing any patch of desolate timber he could find.\n\n\"I knew I did the right thing by bringing you in. I knew your experience would eventually save our lives!\" Cambria said with a yell, vibrantly smiling as she thanked the Gods above.\n\n\"Yea, well, you haven't paid me yet.\" Dalton replied, his joking a sure sign of relief as the sounds of thrusters neared their makeshift bonfire, while others streaked across the night sky and slapped burning napalm to the ground.\n\nA moment later, Dalton was paid in full as her lips locked onto his; her statement one of truth. She was committed to the man who had earned her trust, and stolen her heart. Even if he reeked of cheap tobacco and tainted whiskey.\n\nRonica\n\nIt was a moment in which history would never forget. The colonials had begun staging their fleet on the surface of Ronica; large ships undergoing upgrades as they were stocked with supplies and munitions.\n\nHowever, the historic moment before them was much more. As the Husk began to land, topped off eventually with a glimmer-green shuttle that was carrying their leaders, Hunters awaited.\n\nFor many years, thousands upon thousands, the Hunters and Husk had been at war. They had slain one another at every chance for as long as time could remember. The mighty Orc-like Husk clashing with the Hunters, a vampiric community which had remained shrouded in mystery.\n\nAs the shuttle began to open, however, their mightiest warrior was quick to walk onto Ronican soil. A sign that caution had been thrown into the wind during such perilous times.\n\nGore, the musclebound Husk, quickly approached the Hunters' welcoming party; which included several of vampiric society, among them Sarah and Vladris.\n\nSuch an historic event turned heads, and rightfully so, as everyone seemed to pause and watch the exchange. Both curiosity and caution to blame.\n\n\"My people appreciate your help. If I, or any of my kind can be of assistance, please let me know.\" Gore said, extending his arm for a handshake.\n\n\"What would our ancestors think if they saw their two finest shaking hands?\" Vladris questioned, staring directly into the eyes of such a mighty Husk.\n\n\"They would know that we are at the end of times. Yes, I truly believe they would want their finest to band together and write history against such an unbeatable foe.\" Gore replied, his hand remaining extended.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Vladris replied with authority. \"And if you fight them with as much tenacity as you have fought us, together perhaps,\" Vladris added. \"We can prove them beatable.\" the mighty vampire replied, finally offering his hand.\n\nIt was merely a handshake, though both warriors knew it would be talked about for centuries to come. Perhaps longer, if anyone survived to speak of it.\n\nThough each warrior had fought for a different cause, they knew of the others ability in battle. Each becoming a legend to his own race while remaining a menace to the other. For them, the handshake symbolized a show of respect among warriors, nothing more.\n\nThough it was a sight that most remained locked onto, Sarah quickly pulled her eyes away from the warriors.\n\nHer attention fell to the shuttle as a familiar face exited, accompanied by one of the Hunter's own hellhounds.\n\n\"Troy?\" the queen said in disbelief, walking from her own group's protection in order to greet the boy who had turned into a young man, wrapped tightly in the leather of a Husk warrior.\n\n\"Cookie!\" the young man yelled, scolding the hell hound for baring its teeth as she approached.\n\n\"Cookie?\" she asked with a grin.\n\n\"Couldn't come up with anything better at the time.\" he replied, still possessing a child-like innocence.\n\n\"I feel as though I owe you an apology.\" Sarah admitted, sincerity in her voice.\n\n\"You owe nothing. What is in the past, remains in the past. I just thank you for providing us safety as we try to save as many as we can.\" Troy replied, the large sword of a Husk tied to his back with leather strapping.\n\n\"Of course,\" Sarah replied, looking to him with so many memories. \"You've grown into a strong young man, and, from the looks of it, a mighty warrior. This makes me proud.\"\n\n\"The Husk have shown me the path of a warrior. They have accepted me as one of their own, and for that I am truly grateful,\" Troy admitted. \"Though I continue to wish the best for my old friends.\"\n\nShe answered his statement with a smile, though his mention of Adam sent her attention elsewhere; eyes scanning the background as they finally locked onto Adam Michaels.\n\nOne of the system's most notorious smugglers, not to mention a ranking member of the Benzan Mafia \u2013 at least what remained of it. Yet there he stood. Off to himself a bit and holding a child, no more than a year old, in an attempt to calm his son.\n\nSo many ships around, their massive cargo holds being filled, and colonials briefing others on the flight to come. Hulking vessels being welded for the trip to come. Firming their exterior for a trip that may indeed prove to be one way.\n\nOthers tested thrusters, short bursts of flame firing from engines as pilots gauged their controls; watching as swordfish fighters were loaded into the landing bays.\n\nFor all of the commotion, as though a small city had quickly formed by way of connected ships, there seemed to be a calmness in Adam Michaels. As if he held a son and thought nothing of the turmoil around him.\n\n\"You still love him, don't you?\" Troy asked.\n\n\"Of course not, things are different now. Complicated.\" Sarah responded. Taken off-guard a bit by the young man's direct question.\n\n\"The world complicates things, but the heart doesn't,\" Troy said, nodding his head a bit. \"Just some advice from a Husk-raised human with a dog I can't get rid of.\" he added with a smile.\n\nSarah laughed a bit, though her mind did begin to think of any possibility of a future with Adam.\n\n\"All joking aside, you should tell him. Especially now that all face the certainty of death. No telling how many days we have left to make things right.\" Troy remarked.\n\nShe began to wonder what he had meant about certain death, knowing the exodus fleet was supposed to be their solution for survival.\n\nAboard Colonial Star Triumph\n\n\"I must admit Dalton James,\" Commander Ortega remarked. \"Your ability to survive time after time amazes me.\"\n\nThe commander sat behind a large military-grade desk in his personal chamber, reviewing a file of the brown coat laden survivor who sat directly in front of him.\n\n\"Timing really. I can't take all of the credit.\" Dalton replied, feeling a bit out of place.\n\n\"Well, be that as it may, good timing seems to follow you,\" the commander said. \"Two major wars on Glimmeria, skirmishes with the Hunters and now this? Some would consider you to be a beacon of good luck.\"\n\nDalton thought of that statement. All of the near death encounters with Hunters. The hordes of zombies giving chase. He couldn't understand being a beacon of good luck, having always considered himself the exact opposite.\n\n\"How would you feel about swearing in as a colonial soldier once more?\" the commander asked.\n\nIt was a right hook to Dalton's expectations, stumbling through a list of responses. He had expected to be given a steak dinner, slapped on the ass and dumped off at the next available planet. Not even remotely considering the possibility of enlisting once more.\n\n\"Well sir, I haven't even given it thought to be honest. I haven't showered in a week, and just yesterday saw a lot of innocent people butchered by the undead. I just,\" he replied, taking a moment to emotionally collect himself. \"I just need a few moments to wind down and get past what I've seen. What I've lived through.\"\n\n\"I understand, and your concern for the innocent is both obvious and admirable. The exodus fleet will need people just like you if it is to survive. So you think on it Dalton James. I've signed off on fast-tracking you into the fleet,\" Ortega said. \"It's now a matter of paper that needs your signature.\"\n\n\"I don't understand?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"It means your record speaks for itself. I'm deeming you too important to leave behind,\" the commander said, grinning a bit. \"And too lucky.\" he added. \"Now, go get some rest and sort your priorities out a bit. Then come back and let me know what you decide on becoming a colonial officer.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Dalton replied.\n\n_Officer? Just yesterday I was drinking the cheapest of hand me down whiskey?_ The good-fortune patterned smuggler thought.\n\n\"May I ask you one question sir?\" Dalton asked, standing to his feet.\n\n\"Of course.\" Ortega replied willingly.\n\n\"I saw you on the com stating you were staying behind when the exodus leaves. Just want to know why?\" he asked.\n\n\"Well,\" the commander began to reply, softly laying the Dalton's folder onto his desk. \"I believe that if humanity is going to survive, it will need faith in its government,\" he added. \"It's in my own personal opinion that people will restore their faith in government if its leader sacrifices first.\"\n\n\"But there is no chance of survival if you stay behind. You must know that?\" Dalton asked. \"I've seen these things up close for far too long. There's no winning this one.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. But throughout history, people have fought against insurmountable odds a lot more willingly when doing so behind a leader who showed no fear. If I accompanied the exodus flight into the stars, those left behind would have no hope. Though it may be true that we have no chance of winning, if I remain here to lead a final stand, those who remain behind with me will at least have hope.\"\n\n\"Forgive me commander, but I don't understand the reasoning. It seems as though you would be of more service leaving and keeping the fleet in order.\" Dalton admitted.\n\n\"Think of those innocent faces you saw yesterday Dalton. Think of how they must have felt with no hope. Thinking of certain death before it came. By choosing to sacrifice my own life in staying behind, I save thousands of innocent faces that same fate. They may perish, but will do so with the hope of survival,\" the commander said. \"The sacrifice of self for the better of those in need is the mark of a true leader. Remember those words Dalton James.\" Ortega added.\n\n\"Thank you sir.\" Dalton replied, nodding as he turned to exit the commander's quarters and return to the loving arms of a woman he was meant to be with.\n\nRonica\n\n\"I must admit Adam Michaels,\" Sarah remarked as she approached the man under a perfect Ronican nightfall. \"I never thought I'd see the system's most notorious smuggler comforting a child.\n\n\"Yea,\" he replied with a smile, holding his son close and walking through a small area of tall grass in order to sooth the infant. \"Honestly though, it's what I have always wanted.\"\n\n\"A child?\" Sarah asked, seeming a bit taken back by his confession.\n\n\"A child. The calm a child brings. The innocence of the moment.\" he replied.\n\nHis words were true, and that was obvious to the queen of vampires. Many times she had looked into his eyes as a lover, but this moment was different. Sarah saw a spark of importance, as though he lived for a higher purpose.\n\n\"When nothing else in life seems to be going right, I just hold my son. It's a temporary fix, I know, but when I have him in my arms the world just feels right.\" Adam stated.\n\n\"May I hold him?\" Sarah asked.\n\nFor anyone unfamiliar with their history, it would have seemed odd. Unheard of, even, for the queen of vampires to hold Adam's son.\n\nHowever their history was deeply intertwined. They had loved one another, and thought of the each other as their sole reason for living. Each had made mistakes along the way, and each had harbored both guilt and anger toward the other.\n\nBut times were different. Adam had left Sarah standing alone, choosing another lover during a moment of extremes, and it had led her to the walk of a vampire. Likewise, Adam had suffered the loss of his lover, and both felt it was God's way of punishing him for his mistake.\n\nBoth Adam and Sarah had matured beyond resentment. They had agreed, though unspoken, that the heart-wrenching mistakes of their past would remain in the past, while the good memories would remain.\n\n\"Of course.\" Adam replied, easing the baby over to the shoulders of such a mighty queen.\n\nImmediately, Sarah felt the calm. She understood how something as innocent and precious as a child could eliminate all else. The war, the hatred; all of it.\n\nThough she was now queen of vampires, there was still a piece of her that remained human. A small part of her that remembered her love for Adam and their dream of having a child together. Though Sarah realized it was a life that was no longer possible to her, the Hunter DNA to blame, still she felt comfort in knowing that Adam had found his peace.\n\n\"He seems to take to you.\" Adam remarked, surprised at Avery's snuggling to the queen of vampires.\n\n\"And his father?\" Sarah asked.\n\n\"Well,\" Adam began to reply, finding himself thrown into a very uneasy moment of conversation. \"You must know I still have feelings for you Sarah?\"\n\n\"I do.\" she replied with a smile.\n\n\"I have only two things in this world that push me from the bed each morning. The need to keep my son safe and the belief that I can save you from all of this. I know there must be a way, I just haven't thought it through hard enough. There has to be something I'm missing, because my mind and heart are in so many different places right now.\" Adam said.\n\n\"I'm sorry, I did not mean to overstep.\" she admitted.\n\n\"No, please don't be,\" Adam replied. \"It's just,\" he added, seeming to prepare for the worst. \"I'm still not over Sasha. I'm truly not. Her death has taken its toll on me.\"\n\n\"I understand.\" she replied.\n\n\"No, you truly don't,\" Adam said, his tone changing to one of desperation. \"I love you.\"\n\nHis confession turned both lovers as quiet as the babe whom snuggled to her.\n\n\"Sarah, I love you. I always have. When I left with Sasha, I did it because I was pissed off. I held a grudge against you for holding us at gunpoint, and I just couldn't let that go. You have to understand, I thought a few weeks would pass and you and I would have another showdown. I didn't know this was going to happen. Sasha was a good woman, she truly was. But you and I were meant to be together. We were supposed to end up together, and because of my stupidity, my bad judgment...we're not.\"\n\n\"I,\" Sarah began to say, her emotions getting the best of her. \"I'm not sure what to say?\"\n\n\"There's nothing you can say. Every single night I lay down and think of three things Sarah, three. My son, the mother who died to protect him and the woman I should have married. I love you to the pit of my soul and feel guilty because of it. I hate myself for leaving you there, but I love my son. I live every day in a prison that I created. This, all of this, is on me.\"\n\n\"It's not all on you Adam. We've both had a hand in this. I cannot help but think that perhaps fate has crossed our paths once more for a reason.\" Sarah commented, handing the small child back to the arms that used to hold her so lovingly.\n\n\"If we somehow make it through this...if we somehow survive,\" Adam said. \"I will make everything up to you. I will love you again.\"\n\nSarah responded to his promise with a warm smile, though no words were to follow. She walked away as silently as Vladris had stood, watching their conversation from a distance.\n\nThough the champion vampire felt sudden anger, Vladris also felt the truth in Adam's confession. He too had once loved, only to lose his lover in times of war. Vladris wanted to hate Adam Michaels, but also found a bit of common ground with the smuggler as his stare of concentration continued.\n\nAboard Colonial Star Triumph\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Cambria asked, walking from her rack.\n\n\"Just can't sleep, that's all.\" Dalton replied, sitting at a small table near the cabin door, though he did so in the dark.\n\n\"You should try. We land on Ronica within hours, you'll need your sleep,\" she commented softly, placing a hand on Dalton's back in comforting fashion. \"Our government was unorganized before all of this. You can imagine the hell we'll have to go through now.\" she added, smiling wide.\n\n\"You know, under any other circumstances, I'd be trying to bed you down right about now.\" he said with a bit of a grin.\n\n\"Well you wouldn't have to try all that hard I'm afraid,\" Cambria replied, changing her voice to that of a pure-western girl. \"It seems I've taken to this mysterious cowboy draped in brown and masked in whiskers.\" she added, holding her hand to her forehead.\n\nAs Dalton sat silently, Cambria's own demeanor changed to a more serious one.\n\n\"Well, if my damsel in distress routine didn't get you it must be serious. What's going on?\" she asked.\n\n\"Been thinking a lot about those people we left behind yesterday. Their faces.\"\n\n\"Dalton, it is not your fault. Worlds full of people just like that have fallen all across the Skyla System. The Priests are to blame, not you. We had no choice.\"\n\n\"I was the one who had the experience among them. I should have stayed. Should have stayed behind to give those people hope \u2013 not left 'em to die with fear.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't have made it out alive. None of us would have.\" she replied.\n\n\"Maybe I wasn't supposed to.\" Dalton said.\n\n\"Don't talk like that. Not after I've fallen for you,\" Cambria said, pausing to look deep into his eyes. \"I've fallen for you Dalton James.\"\n\nWith her statement came a kiss. Followed soon after by a bonding of souls' only feet from the door that separated them from their resident sniper. All without the use of whiskey, which, perhaps, was a first for the man known as Dalton James.\n\n\"Wake up my friend,\" Skulls pleaded, doing his best to usher the brown coated smuggler from a foggy world of dreams. \"We're landing on Ronica.\"\n\n\"Damn,\" Dalton was slow to acknowledge. \"My head is splitting. Feel like I've been hit by a train. Almost like a hangover?\"\n\n\"Something like that.\" Cambria replied, covertly eluding to their session of lovemaking.\n\nOf course, Skulls never caught on. He was quick to sway his eye to the scope and fetch a guaranteed kill, that much was a fact. However, his ability to catch onto an inside joke, or, in this case, an inside conversation \u2013 was lacking.\n\n\"Hadn't felt this rough since I got hold of some tainted rock whiskey back on Phinamore.\" Dalton said tauntingly.\n\n\"Oh really?\" Cambria said, playing along. \"You sort of have the look of a long night of binge-drinking alright. Just seems like you've been laid up with the finest of liquor.\"\n\n\"Liquor? You mean hootch?\" Dalton asked, his question changing her facial complexion drastically.\n\n\"No, I mean liquor. As in fine wine. The kind that's been on the shelf for a mighty long time collecting dust. They say it gets better with age.\" Cambria insisted.\n\n\"Well, I'd say as a long time connoisseur...and I mean long...I'd have to admit that it seems like the wine that's been sitting so long is most likely the best I've ever had.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Most likely?\" she asked.\n\n\"What about you? Walking a bit rough this morning?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"So am I, this space travel will do it.\" Skulls added.\n\n\"Wow, you too Skulls? I'm impressed. There are only so many hours in a single night?\" Cambria asked playfully.\n\n\"Oh hell no,\" Dalton insisted. \"There is a select list of consumable wines in my book. That's it, if you know what I'm saying?\"\n\n\"I do,\" she replied, checking her pistol before snugging the oversized revolver into its hip-holster. \"I just feel a little stiff, that's all. I need to get out and stretch my legs a bit. I need some exercise.\"\n\n_If Skulls wasn't here, I'd stretch your legs and give you some damn exercise._ Dalton thought, though he did his best not to moisten his lips with the tip of his tongue. A habit he found hard to break.\n\nAs Skulls prepared his own rifle, Dalton and Cambria continued to stare onto each other. It had been a long time since she'd felt this way about someone. In fact, it had been years. She'd once planned to marry the most notorious gunslinger in the Drifts, but it simply wasn't meant to be.\n\nCambria had a thirst for the stars. A life filled with adventure beyond compare. Her then lover, Johnny, wanted a simple life. He'd always made the claim that he'd both live and die in the Drifts, and the gunslinger wasn't bluffing.\n\nHe had chosen to stay behind. Chosen to do his best in waiting out the plague of men from the rocky cliffs of his home planet, doing so with a small gang of friends and co-criminals.\n\nCambria was saddened by his decision, of course, but it was his to make. She would always have feelings for the man that remained behind, but love is what she had come to feel for Dalton. True love.\n\nShe'd greatly misjudged the smuggler during their first meeting. He seemed as though he was old and broken down. Cambria soon learned, however, that he was quite the opposite. He was alive, and full of the kind of life she thirsted for. Adventure.\n\nHe'd been a part of every major event during his lifetime. Every war, every skirmish. He'd ran with convicts, fought vampires, ran from zombies and even co-existed with the mighty Husk race for a short time.\n\nMost importantly, however, he had a good heart. She could see the hurt in him, a sign of compassion. Her time in the adventurous line of work, smuggling, had been short. Still, she felt safe around the man who reeked of cheap whiskey and cigar smoke.\n\nHe was the closest to a cowboy as Cambria could have imagined. Tough, rugged, experienced, and behind closed doors, sensitive. There was a good man behind that rough patch of whiskers; an honorable man beneath that tattered brown coat.\n\n\"Fuck,\" the honorable man shouted, seeming to break Cambria from her imaginative spell. \"These fucking landings. Every single time, these landings.\" he added loudly, grabbing a steel shelf which was bolted to the ship's wall, as the large vessel descended on Ronica.\n\n\"Such language.\" Cambria replied with a smile, bracing herself as well.\n\n\"Hey, I got liquor or I got language. Right now, I'm fresh out of the good stuff.\"\n\nAs the ship began its harsh descent into the atmosphere of Ronica, forcing everyone aboard to brace themselves while hushing to a quiet calm, Dalton began to think.\n\nHe'd been in so many ships; so many descents. Still, he remembered every single one. His early days during the first Glimmerian War, the smuggler counted nineteen drops altogether. Most had come after a Legion ass-whipping and colonial retreat.\n\nHe also remembered the countless drops from space that he and his former crew had undergone. Most of them successful, while a few were...not so much.\n\nDalton had successfully survived two crash landings under such conditions, and remembered the day he walked away from his first. Promising himself on that very day that his boots would never again touch the inside of a spaceship.\n\nYet here he stood, leaned over and holding onto the frame of a door as if his life depended upon it.\n\nStupid! You are one stupid son of a bitch!\n\n\"Are you alright?\" Cambria yelled with a smile, her lover having grown as quiet as a church mouse, though his thoughts would have scarred said church mouse for life.\n\n\"Fine,\" Dalton said, lying through his teeth in the process. \"About to fall asleep actually.\"\n\n_As long as I live, my damn boots will never touch the inside of another ship. Not for this shit._ He thought.\n\nRoncia\n\nShips had been coming in for days on end, the sound of thrusters seemingly commonplace to those already assigned to Ronica. However, the larger colonial star ships were a different story. Earthquake loud and nearly large enough to blacken the sky, two traits that demanded everyone's full attention.\n\nEspecially Adam, who did his best to calm his son as the shiny armada of the sky slowly touched ground.\n\nThe Hunters called Ronica home. The Husk had arrived, as had the Benzans and every smaller, yet organized, force throughout the Skyla System. Finally the colonials had come. Their commander just moments away from unifying the people who had arrived under his direction.\n\n\"Now my queen,\" Vladris said with a sharp tongue. \"Now we will see with our own eyes. Now we discover the truth of our place among this fleet.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" she replied, her attention on the recently-landed ship. \"Though I believe they will welcome us. I have a long history with Commander Ortega.\"\n\n\"Does your history include his eyes catching sight of you as a Hunter?\" Vladris asked.\n\nIt was a legitimate question, at least from Sarah's perspective as they joined everyone in watching the large group of soldiers exit, escorting Ortega.\n\n\"People have a way of viewing our race negatively based on our looks. Though our intentions may be true.\" Vladris added.\n\nNear the rear of the group, which consisted of hundreds of lives, Dalton, Skulls and Cambria exited the large ship. Their lungs welcoming the fresh air, though Dalton's craved the smoke of a cigar.\n\nThe fact was, Sarah first caught sight of the small group. Dalton's brown coat a beacon of smuggling among the colonial blue. That said, Dalton immediately caught sight of Adam Michaels a mere moment later.\n\n\"Well fuck me raw.\" Dalton exclaimed loudly.\n\n\"Here? In front of hundreds, even thousands? Well it sounds crazy, but we can try it.\" Cambria replied, motioning for her belt buckle as a gesture, though she had no intentions of going through with it.\n\nWithout an answer, Dalton blew off her advance, immediately walking toward a man who was like his own brother. A hasty strut quickly closing the gap of several hundred yards.\n\n\"Well who'd you go and knock up?\" Dalton asked, the crisp of his voice immediately grabbing Adam's attention.\n\nTurning, Adam's face told of relief. A welcomed reunion among old friends.\n\n\"Dalton James.\" Adam said, doing so after finding himself without words. Happiness in no short supply.\n\n\"Why is it every damn time I run from the undead, you show up? I'm starting to put two and two together.\" the smuggler replied, hugging his old friend firmly, their reunion conjuring up a lot of great memories.\n\n\"I wondered about you. Hoped you had made it out, but had started to worry.\" Adam admitted.\n\n\"Nearly didn't, bunch of half-dead fucks. Didn't know they was up against the old smuggler extraordinaire.\"\n\n\"And who are these good people?\" Adam asked, both Cambria and Skulls approaching.\n\n\"This here is Skulls, the finest sniper around,\" Dalton said, turning to Cambria and quickly finding himself at a loss as to how he should introduce her. Cambria slowly locking her hand into his and squeezing tight. \"This here is my girl. Cambria.\"\n\n\"Your girl?\" Adam said with a grin. \"I thought love was for suckers? What happened to the three women on...\"\n\n\"Hey man.\" Dalton warned.\n\n\"I'm only kidding, glad to meet you,\" Adam said, shaking hands with both the sniper and Dalton's eye candy. \"Any friend of Dalton's is a friend of mine.\"\n\n\"So man, you never gave me an answer. Who'd you knock up?\" Dalton asked.\n\nHesitant to answer, Adam simply began to walk away as Sarah approached. Her champion by her side.\n\n\"What's his problem?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"Adam is still grieving with the loss of Sasha. His son reminds him of her very much, I think.\" Sarah replied.\n\nBoth Skulls and Cambria seemed intimidated by the idea of Hunters standing before them. Particularly Vladris, who was both hulking in appearance and scarred from battle.\n\n\"You need not fear us,\" Sarah admitted, extending her hand to the blue-haired beauty. \"Dalton is an old friend of mine, and Vladris is a great warrior no doubt, but he fights for your cause. For the defense of the innocent.\"\n\nThough she seemed to be shaken a bit, Cambria indeed shook hands with Sarah, a queen among the race of fear.\n\n\"Ah shit.\" Dalton said.\n\nSaying nothing, Sarah turned to listen to the smuggler.\n\n\"Didn't know he had lost someone important. Put my foot in my mouth, as usual.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Sarah replied. \"Should you need anything, any of you...don't hesitate to ask.\"\n\n\"Thanks Sarah. I appreciate you taking this old hound dog in.\" Dalton replied with a wily grin.\n\nWith hundreds of bodies bustling around in preparation for the exodus launch, Dalton's group watched the queen and her champion walk away. Heading back to the sanctuary of castle walls.\n\n\"She seems a little strange.\" Cambria confessed.\n\n\"The bitch has always been crazy, no doubt about it,\" Dalton replied. \"But the good kind of crazy I guess.\"\n\n\"Wait, were you and her a thing?\" Cambria asked, feeling a bit awkward.\n\n\"Oh hell no!\" Dalton insisted. \"Though I'm sure she's wanted to jump on my Glimmerian stick a time or two. Who hasn't?\"\n\nSmacking the man across his arm as a stern warning, their sniper finally began to make a clear picture of the situation.\n\n\"So you guys are together?\" Skulls asked, the large bolt-action rifle hanging from his shoulder by a thick nylon strap.\n\n\"Um yea, hello?\" Cambria replied.\n\n\"Oh dear God,\" Skulls admitted. \"I thought I dreamed those noises last night. They were so vivid. Some things cannot be undone.\" the sniper confessed with shame, head hanging a bit in doing so.\n\n\"Just start worrying less about my sex life and more on keeping an eye on that hulking sumbitch,\" Dalton said, motioning to Vladris as the champion and his queen made their way through the settlement of survivors. \"He's tried to kill me more than once.\"\n\n\"He didn't? Wow,\" Cambria replied. \"I'm impressed. He's like twice your size.\"\n\n\"Fuck 'em,\" Dalton barked. \"I guess I showed him that size doesn't matter. It's the amount of fight inside.\"\n\n\"Oh, he looks like he has plenty of fight inside of him.\" Cambria said, taunting her lover a bit.\n\n\"What the fuck?\" Dalton questioned, turning to the woman who openly joked about wanting to bed the champion vampire.\n\n\"Oh Dalton James,\" Cambria said, portraying her damsel in distress act once more. \"You know you're the only one for me.\" she added with a snicker.\n\n\"Yea, yea. I hear 'ya,\" Dalton replied, continuing to stare down the vampire's back. \"Bet I could drink that sumbitch under the table.\"\n\n\"Sarah Blaine, it has been a long time. Too long,\" Commander Ortega remarked, surrounded by colonial soldiers as he approached the queen. \"I humbly thank you and your people for providing us a safe haven.\"\n\n\"It was not an easy sell. My people agreed to it with the belief that they will be treated equally.\" Sarah replied, shaking hands with the commander.\n\nShe was surrounded by a group of guards. Though numbering less, their armor spoke of true ability in battle.\n\n\"That will be the case, I assure you. Your people have my word.\"\n\n\"Thank you commander. We should talk in detail on this as soon as possible.\" Sarah pushed.\n\n\"Sooner than I had hoped, I'm afraid. My scouts have confirmed a large armada making course for Ronica. Presumably the Priests. We will need to call a meeting quickly to discuss the future of our people as one, and, unfortunately, devise a plan to defend the invaders long enough to stage our exodus into the stars.\" Ortega responded.\n\n\"We need no plan when it comes to defense. My people are masters when it comes to defending their homes against those who would take it from us.\" Vladris replied swiftly.\n\n\"I do not doubt your ability in combat warrior. For I have heard stories of your ability on the battlefield, you are truly a hero among your people,\" Ortega replied, soothing Vladris a bit. \"But the threat which comes is too large. They have the bodies to simply overrun this planet, growing their numbers as they shorten ours.\"\n\n\"We understand your urgency commander.\" Sarah replied, while casting a stare of scold onto her champion.\n\n\"Sarah, I do think it best if your hero were to lead the defensive efforts. He knows the layout of Ronica as well as any. That is if he is willing?\" Ortega asked.\n\n\"I am willing to go wherever my queen commands \u2013 defending her, along with my home, to the death.\"\n\n\"I agree commander. Vladris should lead our spearhead of defense.\" Sarah replied.\n\n\"Fine. Vladris, you will command your finest, as well as the finest of the colonials, Benzans and Husk. Place them strategically and stagger them in a way that makes it possible to fall back. Eventually, when your force falls back to the fleet ships, you'll board and we'll begin our flight into the stars.\" Ortega said.\n\n\"Understood. If the Benzans or Husk are unwilling to follow the lead of a vampire?\" Vladris asked.\n\n\"Then they will be left behind as our fleet sails into the stars of night. I will brief them myself. You and your people are no longer the enemy,\" Ortega said, his eyes turning to the champion vampire. \"You are a part of this fleet now, I am a man of my word, and you will be treated as such. I'll see to it personally.\"\n\n\"You are an honorable leader. Thank you.\" Vladris replied with a nod.\n\nIt was a scene for the archives of man. A large meeting hall nestled inside the stone of castle walls, heavily guarded by dozens of soldiers of all nations and creed.\n\n\"We must first decide the government that will continue as our exodus begins.\" Commander Ortega said.\n\nHe sat at a large table of polished wood, as did nineteen other leaders, all of them in agreement. So many powerful leaders confined to the meeting hall.\n\n\"I'm not exactly sure how we are supposed to do that during such times of chaos?\" Cherlon, the Theron leader replied in question.\n\n\"We must remain a democracy. If the people have no voice, they have no hope.\" Gore added, proudly representing the Husk.\n\n\"I agree,\" Commander Ortega replied. \"At final count we have forty-seven ships that can make such a voyage. Four of them colonial Stars. It is in my opinion that they should remain to the corners of our fleet. Military buffers against any and all would-be threats.\"\n\nThe room seemed to easily agree with his statement, essentially turning the colonial stars into the backbone of their military.\n\n\"The ships we assign for government should remain to the center and must remain a mixture of our races. Everyone is to be represented. It will make my job a lot easier up there.\"\n\n\"So you are not staying behind?\" Sarah asked.\n\nIndeed she was right, her question followed by an unnerving silence throughout the room.\n\n\"Of course not,\" he replied, chatter begin to spread throughout the room, even among the posted guards. \"Though I do feel it important to have two leaders in place. A civilian leader and a military leader, both equal in terms of power over our future.\" he added.\n\n\"I disagree!\" Gore said with conviction. \"I feel as though a single leader of strong military background is needed if we are to survive.\"\n\nGore's statement caused the whispers to grow louder, finally pushing Commander Ortega to acknowledge them.\n\n\"I do not,\" Ortega confessed. \"Our military should be strong enough to keep our people safe, but our ultimate goal is to find another home. To start over. Rebuild our civilization elsewhere. It is therefore important to retain a leader who will handle everything non-military.\"\n\nWith that, the whispers seemed to calm a bit. Sarah finding herself proud of Ortega, who she'd personally selected as her own successor once upon a time. When she was a Colonial leader, though it seemed so long ago.\n\n\"I think,\" Adam Michaels said, representing the Benzans at the meeting, though very few remained. \"I think it is important to integrate those aboard our ships as well. Force them to respect others from the start so that we may put our past hatred behind us.\" he added.\n\n\"Absolutely not!\" Gore refused. \"My people will not allow Hunters to board their ships and consider them home.\"\n\n\"Yet your people run here to our home, only to be welcomed by the Hunters?\" Sarah replied.\n\n\"Enough!\" General Ortega demanded, silencing the bickering.\n\nA very eerie quiet fell across the room, as if decades of fighting were about to resume.\n\n\"We are a single people now,\" Ortega said, this time a bit calmer. \"The Hunters are to be treated the same as Husk or even my very own race,\" Ortega added. \"I will oversee the exodus lottery in less than one hour. After which, I will personally see to it that each ship's manifest is integrated. Starting with yours,\" he said, looking directly to Gore. \"You will captain a Hunter-built ship as the exodus pulls out, and a Hunter will captain your own. If you, or any among your people disagree, you are free to go your own way. Perhaps leave the luxury of your ships to journey into the nearby hills to defend us, as so many Hunters do this very moment.\"\n\nGore offered no reply, though he cutting stare could be counted as such.\n\n\"And of your mighty colonial star ships? Will they too be integrated, or are your people above your own laws?\" the Theron representative lashed out.\n\n\"Every ship, including my own, will be staffed accordingly. Captains, their executive officers and even the soldiers aboard will be assigned based on their military experience. Fairly and equally.\" Ortega defended.\n\n\"Very well then. You have the blessing of the Therons on this, as well as everyone else I believe.\"\n\n\"Gore? Do the Husk agree to these terms?\" Ortega asked with authority.\n\n\"Yes,\" the mighty Orc-like Husk replied. \"Though I wish to personally see the manifests before they go into effect.\" adding suspicion to his arsenal.\n\n\"Very well.\" Commander Ortega responded, proving to the room he had nothing to hide.\n\n\"The exodus lottery seems to be all that remains?\" A leader of the Drifts commented; his rough beard testament to a life lived simply.\n\n\"Indeed. Now it is time for our computers to decide who is allowed to join us on our exodus into the stars.\" Ortega replied. His statement effectively ending the meeting of leaders among what remained of the Skyla System.\n\n\"How will the moment of our launch play out?\" a leader asked, representing the small moon of Novak, which neighbored Glimmeria.\n\n\"That is a very good question, I'm afraid,\" Commander Ortega replied. \"I don't think anyone has the answer. I do know that those who are in the hills to defend us have been promised a spot on the fleet, should they make it back alive. As they become overwhelmed, I've instructed them to fall back. Several lines of soldiers lay in wait, though they do so in a staggered position.\" Ortega added.\n\n\"You mean to slow them down?\" Gore asked.\n\n\"Precisely,\" Ortega replied. \"Rather than having the horde land and begin a sprint to our fleet, they will be forced to attack the soldiers at each staggered position, which has been strategically placed as far apart as possible. It will force the horde to zig-zag to us, rather than giving them a straight line of advancement.\"\n\n\"That's a good plan.\" Adam commented.\n\n\"It's a good start,\" Ortega replied. \"But I fear as they bear down on us, even the best of plans will begin to fall apart,\" he added. \"Our people will begin to panic. We must do our best to maintain order and provide those who have earned their passage a way through, while keeping those who are to be left behind at bay.\"\n\n\"How do we do that? Begin shooting our own people?\" the Theron representative demanded to know.\n\n\"Of course not,\" Ortega replied. \"If it came to that, we'd be no better than the horde that approaches,\" he added, doing his best to calm the fears of other leaders who carried the same concern. \"We will have to launch our fleet at a different time than announced.\"\n\n\"We are going to do what?\" Adam Michaels asked.\n\n\"We need to give our people a set time in which we will launch. Allow them to drill it into their minds. Then, when the time is right, launch before they have time to respond.\" Ortega replied.\n\n\"You mean lie to them?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"I mean do what's necessary in order to give our people a chance to thrive once more. If that means lie to them, so be it.\" Ortega admitted.\n\nAdam was a lot of things. Smuggler, solider...and even compassionate at times. At this moment, however, his skills at the card table came into play. An ability to read the faces.\n\nHe's bluffing.\n\nSomething told Adam that Commander Ortega was not being honest. At least not completely.\n\n\"Sarah, may we speak?\" Adam asked, catching up to her and her escort team as they left the meeting chamber. As did the other leaders who survived.\n\n\"Of course.\" she replied, turning to face her former lover.\n\n\"My intuition,\" he said, pausing on those words as he carefully mulled his next. \"Something is going on.\"\n\n\"I agree Adam Michaels,\" Sarah replied, having pulled the same feeling away from the meeting. \"Though I'm not sure what.\"\n\n\"Sarah, you need to consider pulling your warriors back.\" Adam suggested.\n\n\"Pull them back?\" Sarah asked.\n\n\"I can't put my finger on it, but I came away with bad vibes about our man in charge. I feel as though he may have suggested Vladris to lead the defenses in order to thin your ranks,\" Adam said, pausing for a moment. \"I think he means to kill you.\"\n\nAs the words left Adam's lips, Sarah's guards firmed up; their muscles tightening as if they were preparing for battle.\n\n\"No,\" Sarah warned them. \"Remain calm as if nothing is suspected. Wait for them to clear out, and then we will all decide on this in private.\"\n\n\"Sarah,\" Adam replied, turning to her with true concern. \"Where is the safest place inside of these walls?\"\n\n\"The keep, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Please,\" Adam replied, turning to her armed escort. \"I need you to escort Sarah there and keep her there. Do not let anyone in, no matter their request.\"\n\nThe soldiers looked onto him for a moment, before turning to their queen.\n\n\"Sarah please.\" Adam said.\n\n\"Alright,\" Sarah replied. \"Only if you agree to join us.\"\n\n\"Huh?\" he asked.\n\n\"If something truly is going on, I want people around me that I can trust,\" she replied. \"I trust you Adam.\"\n\nSeveral moments of silence were strung together by a look of two past lovers.\n\n\"I need to get my son.\" Adam finally replied.\n\n\"Azan,\" Sarah commanded, turning to one of her six escort warriors. \"Go with Adam and make sure he is able to do so unharmed. Protect him as though you were protecting your queen.\" she added.\n\n\"Yes my lady.\" Azan replied, bowing low to the ground.\n\n\"Someone please recall Vladris and his warriors. It would seem as though the enemy is not at the gates \u2013 but already among us.\" Sarah commanded.\n\n\"Please be careful.\" Sarah said.\n\n\"Scout's honor.\" Adam replied with a grin.\n\n\"Gonna be a bittersweet thing,\" Adam remarked, walking through the large hallway of the Colonial Star Destiny. One of hundreds which connected the most vital parts of the large ship. \"Leaving the Skyla System I mean. So many memories.\"\n\n\"Yes sir, I'd have to agree,\" Dalton replied. \"Been locked up on half of the colonized planets. Now we gotta leave 'em behind.\" he added with a chuckle.\n\n\"It's strange. I'm even going to miss that part of it. The shitty food, iron bars and hard labor.\" Adam said.\n\n\"Gonna be different up there. Months, maybe even years before we find something in need of colonization.\" Dalton hinted.\n\n\"Take plenty of booze.\" Adam replied as both men began to laugh aloud.\n\n\"Already covered,\" Dalton replied. \"Didn't mean that earlier today. About knocking someone up,\" the smuggler added, both of the men watching Adam's son at peace in Cambria's arms. A large pane of shatterproof glass separating them as the blue-haired beauty stood outside. \"I honestly didn't know.\"\n\n\"I know that,\" Adam replied with respect, patting his longtime friend on the arm. \"Really hurt me to lose her,\" he added. \"We've lost so many.\"\n\n\"Gonna lose more before this shit is over too.\" Dalton proclaimed.\n\n\"I'm afraid of that.\" Adam admitted.\n\n\"Sarah?\" Dalton asked, though he did so in a casual manner to avoid prying.\n\n\"Seeing her again brought up a swirl of emotions. Things I thought were dead inside of me,\" Adam admitted, turning to his friend. \"I think I still love her.\"\n\n\"Shit son, love is for idiots.\" Dalton boasted.\n\n\"And Cambria?\"\n\n\"Well that's a little different. I mean, the girl is fine looking and has a good heart, but I don't know if we've made it to love just yet.\"\n\n\"Better work quickly my friend,\" Adam replied with a smile. \"Because she is damn fine looking and appears to be real good with my son. I won't back-off forever.\"\n\n\"Like hell!\" Dalton replied, both men laughing.\n\n\"In all seriousness though Dalton, if you feel for the girl at all, you should tell her. Don't wait on it too long. I think of all the time I wasted with Sarah. I let my stubbornness stand between my true feelings and what could have been.\" Adam remarked with seriousness.\n\n\"And the bitch held us at gunpoint. Don't forget that small detail.\" Dalton lashed out.\n\n\"You get what I'm saying?\" Adam asked, staying the course of serious.\n\n\"Unfortunately, yes. It's killing my whiskey buzz actually.\" the smuggler replied.\n\nAs they both laughed aloud, Adam turned to his friend for a heartfelt nod.\n\n\"Dalton, we need to talk.\" Adam said.\n\n\"I thought that's what we were doing. You know, I open my mouth and words begin to come out?\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"I don't think we're safe here.\" Adam suggested.\n\n\"What the fuck are you talking about? We're aboard a military ship.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"I can't get into details, at least not yet,\" Adam replied. \"I just need you to trust me.\"\n\n\"I do trust you Adam, you know that.\"\n\n\"I just have a really bad hunch that this arrangement between races is going to take a nosedive south very soon,\" Adam said, continuing to speak in a whisper. \"Just be ready to move if that happens.\"\n\n\"Who are you talking to?\" Dalton asked, boasting a bit. \"I'm always ready to move.\"\n\n_Or drink. Or, well, you know._ Dalton thought.\n\nAdam answered his longtime friend with a firm pat on the shoulder.\n\n\"Well, gonna go collect my son from the hottest girl you've ever had a chance with.\"\n\n\"Shit son, I've been with the cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me when it comes to women,\" Dalton boasted. \"She's in my top five though.\"\n\n\"She's in MY top five,\" Adam replied, though he continued a walk away from his friend. \"Which definitely makes her your number one.\"\n\n_Yea, yea. You cheeky bastard._ Dalton thought. Feeling at peace as he was surrounded by his friends once more. Though his mind began to wonder about the alliance of races.\n\nAs the day slowly turned to night, a shadow of moonlight crisping onto the shiny hulls of so many ships, a sense of urgency set in.\n\nUrgency for a fleet which worked night and day in an attempt to stock their ships for a one-way flight into the tapestry of stars, and urgency for Dalton James. The word love having played heavily onto his mind since hearing it earlier.\n\n\"Tell her,\" he said, pouring a shot of rock whiskey and downing it with haste. \"Tell her not.\" he added, pouring yet another.\n\nAs he sat alone, off from the bustling crowd of so many who remained hard at work, Dalton wrestled with the obvious. There was only enough for one more shot.\n\nHe would have to tell Cambria he loved her. The smuggler had feared nothing as much as he feared admitting that to her. Terrified of rejection.\n\n_Fuck it._ He thought, though his mind remained locked onto every word of his coming confession. That he had truly fallen for the woman who was nothing like him. Yet made him complete.\n\nSo as the smuggler draped in his security blanket of brown leather marched on, as if he were marching into the teeth of an execution, he thought of those around him.\n\nWomen and children, who greatly resembled those he'd been forced to leave behind in the Drifts. He saw the faces of desperation and worry. Faces of survivors who seemed bewildered as they worried about their immediate futures.\n\nSuch a sight firmed Dalton up a bit. Realizing the admission of love wasn't the worst fate. Still he stopped in his tracks for a moment. Not for the thought of his admission of love that would soon follow; but for those around him. A group of survivors who had been collected from all parts of the Skyla System. A group that had lost so much, yet continued with hope. He thought of the sacrifice Commander Ortega had made for those very people, and it made him both sad, and proud as hell to be a colonial.\n\n\"Cambria Sims, I have something I...\" Dalton announced proudly as he burst through the small door of their two-room shelter.\n\nStopping his statement however, Dalton saw a girl broken, her crying one of true sadness.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" he asked, immediately grabbing her into his cowboy-strong arms and consoling her.\n\nWith her crying so heavy, no response would follow, just the gut-wrenching somber of a deep cry. Though he would soon discover the reason behind her sadness as he picked up an official colonial memo which lay near.\n\nThe colonial government regrets to inform you that you have been selected to remain behind. Our exodus launch is scheduled in forty-eight hours at the stroke of midnight. You have been assigned to the ground party, led by Commander Ortega. You will report tomorrow at sunrise to your assigned unit, led by Lieutenant James Locke of the colonial army.\n\nPlease know that your denial of flight does not ensure your fate. We are planning a very strategic defense against coming forces and remain confident that we will be victorious.\n\nThank you.\n\nBenton Sanders.\n\nAs Dalton finished reading the death sentence of Cambria Sims, he crunched the official papers into a ball, as if it were designed for ass-wiping, his other arm still firmly wrapped around the woman of his dreams.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" Cambria asked as Dalton pulled away, heading back to the door that had brought him to her.\n\n\"To fix this,\" he replied, angered by the development. \"First though,\" he added, walking back to her arms. \"I love you Cambria Sims.\"\n\nHis statement brought more tears, though it was a mixture of happiness and grief, the woman trembling as she had never trembled before.\n\n\"I love you too.\"\n\n\"I will fix this, I promise you.\" Dalton replied, leaving her grasp as he walked for the door once more.\n\n\"I made the flight!\" Skulls announced, entering the small shelter as the sniper smiled wide.\n\n\"The fuck out of my way.\" Dalton demanded, shoving the sniper and good friend to the side, readying for a showdown with the horde of pencil-necks that would surely follow.\n\n\"Have you recalled our warriors?\" Sarah asked.\n\nThe queen of vampires sat firmly on her throne, which shimmered with both jewels and gothic inscriptions formed into bronze plating.\n\n\"We have sent word, but it will take time,\" one of her soldiers replied. \"Depending on their circumstances, I'm sure we can expect the return of Vladris soon enough.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" Sarah replied, looking onto the group which had gathered. Nearly thirty total. \"We must begin to think of the survival of our own race, nothing more.\"\n\n\"Is it true? Do those who seek out protection plan to eliminate us?\" one of the elders asked.\n\n\"We,\" Adam Michaels replied. \"We don't know. Right now, we're just being cautious.\"\n\n\"You brought this onto us!\" a second elder replied.\n\n\"I didn't know, I swear,\" Adam replied, raising his hand to face level in an attempt to reason with those who had gathered. \"Even now, the commander lies to his own people. He's lost his way, and I fear that he lies to your people as well.\"\n\n\"Adam had no part in this,\" the queen warned. \"In fact, he was the one who warned me.\"\n\n\"What proof do you have?\" one of the elders asked.\n\n\"At the moment, none,\" Adam replied. \"Just a gut feeling.\" he added with regret.\n\n\"A gut feeling?\" the elder replied in mocking fashion. \"You wish us to recall our soldiers and risk annihilation based on a gut feeling?\"\n\n\"Send every soldier you have to face the coming horde, that's not my concern. Nor will it matter. They are coming, and nothing you have can stop that,\" Adam replied, this time with a bit of zeal on his words. \"My only concern is for the queen. YOUR queen.\" he added.\n\n\"He believes they requested our champion lead the defense in order to separate us. Divide our ranks.\" Sarah added.\n\n\"If Commander Ortega has no intention of leaving as scheduled; no intention of remaining behind as promised, why would he send a defense in the first place? Would he not just raise the ships as soon as the horde got close?\" Adam asked.\n\nThe room seemed to be in deep thought, each of them pondering the smuggler's questions.\n\n\"I've been a military man long enough to know that there is only one reason behind his decision,\" Adam said, pausing to look to Sarah. \"He means to thin you out. Either to exterminate your race, or leave you behind to die.\"\n\n\"Was it not you that brought this to our doorstep?\" one of the elders asked.\n\n\"I have no part in this. In fact, if I find out he is indeed trying to kill your queen,\" Adam said, pausing for just a moment. \"I'll gun him down myself.\"\n\n\"He is with us!\" Sarah yelled, commanding her elders back in line. \"He fights with us and is committed to dying with us, if need be. We must begin a plan to counter such colonial treachery.\"\n\n\"Your plans my queen?\" one of the higher ranking warriors asked.\n\n\"They believe they hold the advantage through surprise. Their downfall will be their arrogance and stupidity,\" Sarah replied, grinning a bit. \"We will act as though we are none the wiser. All while slowly putting our own plan into place. When this fleet launches, we will be in control of it.\"\n\n\"A bit late to be out and around isn't it soldier?\" a man asked, decked out in a colonial uniform as he sat behind the desk of an otherwise empty room.\n\n\"Ain't no solider. I'm here to see Commander Ortega.\" Dalton replied, already eying a single door which most-likely led to the commander.\n\n\"Who isn't? Had nearly a hundred of requests today. You'll have to wait your turn. Come back tomorrow and try your luck.\" the colonial soldier replied.\n\n\"I'm sorry, what was that?\" Dalton asked politely, approaching the seated man.\n\n\"I said you'll have to...\" he began to reply, stopping short as he was pulled from his seat by the front of his shirt; clean-jerked directly into a grasp which held him inches from the floor.\n\n\"Now you listen to me, you little puny sumbitch,\" Dalton scolded. \"I was fighting wars and dodging bullets when you were still shitting baby green,\" he added. \"And I've killed men twice your size over nothing more than sales rack whiskey. So believe me when I say it. You're gonna be on that com to inform Ortega that I'm here.\"\n\n\"They'll throw you in the brig for this!\" the smaller man yelled, his only defense.\n\n\"Nowhere I haven't been before. Countless times. Now be smart about it.\" Dalton replied, turning his eyes back to a heavy revolver which hung by his side.\n\n\"Sir,\" the colonial soldier timidly said, \"Hate to disturb you at such an hour,\" the man added, pressing a button on the com in front of him. \"Someone here to see you. A Dalton?\" he said, feeling a firming grip on the front of his shirt. \"He's pretty persistent.\"\n\n\"Of course, send him in.\" Ortega replied through the digital com system.\n\n\"Yes sir, at once.\" the man said, finally removing his finger from the com.\n\n\"See there buddy, nobody even had to die.\" Dalton proclaimed, lowering the man to the ground and slapping his shoulder in good sport.\n\nImmediately, the smaller man pulled away with anger.\n\n\"Of course, I do have to come back through here when I leave.\" Dalton reminded, taunting the man who cast a look of intimidation back.\n\n\"Dalton James,\" Commander Ortega said, welcoming the smuggler into his personal quarters. \"I had hoped to see you again soon. Though I didn't think it would be after hours.\"\n\n\"Something came up.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Of course, of course,\" the commander said, motioning to his desk. \"Have a seat.\"\n\n\"Been thinking a lot about what you said before. Most importantly, about the sacrifice you've made for your love of these people.\" Dalton said.\n\n\"You've decided to take up my offer on joining the fleet?\" Ortega asked.\n\n\"No sir, as a matter of fact I'm going to have to respectfully decline,\" Dalton said, his reply shocking the man in charge. \"Though I am going to ask for a favor.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Ortega replied with a hint of disappointment. \"Go on.\" he added.\n\n\"You chose to stay behind and give hope to these people out of love. What I feel is the mark of a true leader; a true man. I also love someone. A girl that I couldn't imagine life without living. I refuse to leave into the stars and leave her behind, knowing it would be a death sentence.\"\n\n\"Perhaps not.\" Commander Ortega injected.\n\n\"Perhaps, but the odds of surviving are the slimmest imaginable,\" Dalton quickly replied, setting the tone of the meeting. \"I wish to give her my spot on the exodus fleet, and I would like to remain behind with you, answering to your command.\"\n\n\"Dalton, I understand your passion. Truly I do. But you could serve these people best by remaining with them in the future. Your experience would be a great asset...\"\n\n\"No,\" Dalton stated firmly. \"My experience means nothing if I fight with an empty heart. I'm as good as dead if I know in my heart that the woman I love is doomed.\"\n\n\"Alright,\" Ortega replied. \"I'll see that it's done.\"\n\n\"I also have one final request.\" Dalton stated.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"The woman is very, very important to me. I simply ask that she be allowed onto the ship of my own choosing, surrounded by our friends.\" Dalton said.\n\n\"Very well. You have my word.\" Ortega replied.\n\n\"Sir, thank you,' Dalton replied with gratitude. \"I feel at peace with this, and trust me, I'll give you everything I have when it comes time for slinging shells.\"\n\n\"I know you will son.\" Ortega replied, acknowledging the truth of his statement, though his own was riddled with lies.\n\n\"Well,\" Dalton said, standing to his feet and saluting his new superior. \"I'll let you get back to it. Sorry for bothering you at such an hour.\"\n\n\"Dalton, I want you to know something,\" Ortega said, causing the sworn smuggler to pause his walk. \"If our cause had more soldiers like you, we may just be winning this damn war.\"\n\n\"Not a big deal,\" Dalton replied calmly. \"All of these years I've ran from death. But I've ran my course. Now I plan to run to it, guns a blazing.\"\n\n\"You're a model soldier Dalton James.\"\n\n\"Apparently you haven't read my file jacket hard enough.\" the smuggler replied with a grin as Ortega handed him a signed paper. One that would allow Cambria's future to exist on the exodus flight.\n\n\"I'm sorry for the breakdown earlier,\" Cambria admitted, approaching the man of her dreams as he entered their shelter once more.\n\n\"No worries,\" Dalton replied. \"Told you I would fix it.\" he said, handing her the signed paper.\n\n\"What? How?\" Cambria asked with a mountain of emotions running through her.\n\n\"I just did. Got a long history with the man in charge.\" he boasted, cut short by a clinging hug from the woman he loved to the bones inside of his body.\n\n\"This means we'll be together when the flight launches?\" Cambria asked probingly.\n\n\"Of course,\" the smuggler replied, thinking himself a bastard for lying to a woman he loved. \"Just focus on packing enough for the two of us.\"\n\nAs they held one another for several moments, Cambria's arms squeezing the man of her dreams tight, he felt sadness. Not for his coming death, but for the pain which he knew Cambria would eventually feel.\n\nHe also knew that a lie was necessary to get her aboard a ship. If she knew of his deal with Ortega, she'd never agree to it. He only hoped she would recover in time and live a long, happy life in the stars above.\n\n\"Skulls,\" Dalton said, his body still engulfed by the grasp of a love-struck woman. \"Sorry about earlier, I wasn't thinking straight.\" he added.\n\n\"Think nothing of it brother,\" the sniper replied. \"I understand what you must have been going through.\n\nNo, you don't. You truly don't.\n\nWhen the first explosion rocked the surface of Ronica, everyone with a heartbeat knew what was to follow. An invasion. Panic set in throughout the large encampment as daybreak had only begun.\n\nSitting up as though he'd been awake for hours, Dalton immediately grabbed his revolver and readied for a fight.\n\n\"It's alright,\" Cambria said. \"Far off, but it means we're on very limited time now.\"\n\nBolting to the door of their shelter, Dalton stood with revolver in hand and shirtless, watching the sprint of many colonial soldiers and civilians alike. Each of them expediting the process of their plans for the given day.\n\n\"I need to go find Adam. Have to talk to him before they get closer. You finish packing all of the essentials,\" Dalton said, throwing a green shirt on with haste and looking back to his lover. \"Remember, it's a one-way flight.\"\n\n\"Be careful, please.\" Cambria replied, kissing Dalton passionately before turning to finish packing the needed supplies.\n\n\"Hey,\" Dalton insisted, staring at their sniper. \"Keep her close and safe until I get back.\"\n\n\"You got it brother.\" Skulls replied.\n\nAs the smuggler began his own sprint from their shelter, the ground seemed to tremble beneath him, nearly a dozen more explosions landing within a few miles of their basecamp.\n\nThe Priests had arrived.\n\nEvery time they launched an invasion, it began with explosions from warheads that rained down from the stars. Immediately followed by ships filled tight with soldiers of the undead. Infected. Zombies. Priests. Or, as Dalton usually called them, half-dead fuckers.\n\nEither way, Dalton knew he was on borrowed time as he continued a sprint to the Benzan ship where Adam Michaels had been staying.\n\nJust before arriving, his longtime friend exited the large ship, just as so many other Benzans had done only moments before.\n\n\"Adam, we need to talk!\" Dalton yelled, doing what he could to become louder than the increasing explosions.\n\n\"What is it?\" Adam replied, his voice also forced into a very loud tone.\n\n\"Cambria. I volunteered to give up my spot for her.\" Dalton said, though he did so with a heavy heart.\n\n\"What?\" Adam asked, stunned by the admission. \"You did what?\"\n\n\"I'm staying behind so she can live through this. Ortega signed off on it. She's to be put on your ship, and I need your word that you will watch over her?\" Dalton asked with near-desperation. \"Please.\"\n\n\"Dalton, there has to be some other way?\" Adam questioned.\n\nAt the moment he did so, a large explosion rocked through the settlement, destroying a large ship that had been assigned to Glimmerian survivors. One of two. Though it wasn't filled with bodies at the moment, he understood that many people who had been promised a ride into the stars would now be without one.\n\n\"There is no other way Adam, trust me. I don't want to die, I just don't want her to die a little more.\"\n\nAdam was pressed into a tough spot, having been sworn to silence by the Hunters, though failure to speak may have cost his best friend his life.\n\n\"Dalton, listen,\" Adam said, smaller explosions tearing up the countryside around their base camp. \"The Hunters and colonials are about to come to a head. There's going to be war, and you need to be on this side of the fence.\"\n\n\"What?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"Commander Ortega is lying about a lot of things. He has no intention of staying behind, and he's lying to his people. I also suspect he plans to strike at the Hunters when the time is right.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"What the hell are you talking about? I just talked to Ortega hours ago, he assured me.\"\n\n\"Dalton, he is lying to you.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"Is he? Or have you lost your way?\" Dalton questioned.\n\n\"What?\" Adam asked, shock in his voice.\n\n\"You and Sarah are in love, you always have been, and I get it. I truly do. But she's not one of us anymore.\" Dalton stated.\n\n\"A lot has changed, sure...\" Adam began to reply.\n\n\"A lot has changed, starting with the fact that she's a fucking vampire.\"\n\n\"Dalton, you said you trusted me. I need you to trust me.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"I need you to trust me when I say there's no way I'm putting my life into the hands of a race that's been trying to end it for years now!\" Dalton yelled in response.\n\n\"The colonials will leave you behind the first chance they get Dalton.\"\n\n\"The Hunters won't? You'll be lucky to survive a month with those blood-sucking stiffs!\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Well,\" Adam replied, nodding his head. \"The answer to your question is yes. Sasha has a place on my ship, as do you. So long as you know it's going to be a Hunter ship.\"\n\n\"Pass.\" Dalton replied with spite.\n\n\"Well, that's your choice to make. Either way old friend, I hope you make it off this rock in one piece.\" Adam replied, turning to walk away from a man he once considered a brother.\n\n\"Hold your positions!\" Vladris yelled. \"The cowards fight with explosives for now, but soon they will test us on the battlefield. A test in which we will pass with the edge of blades!\"\n\nThe champion vampire sat tall, a solid black steed beneath him as nearly two-hundred soldiers looked on. Many of them on horseback as well, though most would fight the good fight. On foot with a single weapon.\n\n\"Those of you who I consider brothers know of our ability on the battlefield,\" Vladris yelled, the thunder of explosions crackling around him as he looked onto the crowd of warriors. Many vampiric, though the sleek armor of Benzan, solid blue of colonials and green tint of Husk were in no short supply. \"The rest of you will learn of it with your own eyes on this day, after which we will become immortal brothers, be it through life or death.\"\n\nThough they awaited the worst enemy the system had ever known, preparing to face odds that were landslide in the favor of their invaders, the warriors cheered loudly. Readying themselves to follow the most-notorious warrior in recorded history into battle.\n\nThough Troy readied for a different battle altogether.\n\nThe colonials and Husk had indeed been conspiring from day one. A plan to rid their departing fleet of anyone deemed a threat to future survival. Which included the Hunters.\n\nTroy could still remember the day Roman was cut down by Vladris' blade. The man, who for so long had been like a father-figure to him, butchered before his very eyes.\n\nAt the time, Troy was too young of a man to strike back. Though he had begun the path of a warrior, he was weak.\n\nThat was long ago.\n\nAfter escaping into the welcoming embrace of the Husk, Troy had learned the art of combat. He had perfected the art, in fact, as though he was meant to swing a sword.\n\nHis own sword not nearly as massive as those of his Husk family, but he had countered the absence of Husk-might with cunning. Troy had learned that timing was just as important as ability when it came to battle. And as the timing became right; Troy would have his revenge.\n\nAdam Michaels glanced throughout the colonial star, standing on a large catwalk above the landing bay as he watched machines load several more Swordfish fighters inside.\n\nHe knew in the pit of his heart that it could be his last look inside of a colonial star, or any colonial ship for that matter.\n\nThe soldier turned smuggler began to think of so many many battles before. Many of which, he wore the colonial patch on his chest.\n\nAdam seemed a million miles away, grabbing hold of several large tubes that would be responsible for pushing steam throughout the ship once it began flight. The primary heating system.\n\nThe former soldier tugged a bit, as if he were testing the integrity of such a mighty ship. Though he broke away to stare to those around him, Adam began looking to their background, focusing his attention to the ship's setting behind them.\n\nHe understood it would be the people's home for the foreseeable future, if not for the remainder of their lives. Their entire lives spent between the beautiful landscapes of planets, each with their own rich history and scenery. Traded now, for an eternity of looking to steel draping around them.\n\nWhat choice did they have? Adam understood that no victory could be had in a war that had become a fight for their own survival. Their only chance of continuing the walk of humanity would be to do so by launching into uncharted space. Planets that had never before been explored.\n\nHe also knew in his heart that no peace would be had until either Commander Ortega and those who sided with him were taken from power, or the Hunters were wiped clean from their massive exodus fleet.\n\nAdam Michaels understood that before their voyage was over, be it by natural death or the discovery of inhabitable soil, these people would come to know every nook, every cranny, of this massive armada of the stars. Perhaps even their children.\n\nA fleet that was near fifty ships, though many of the larger ships included an array of small ones. Each in search of a new home, though politics would play as heavily as before. Every ship with its own agenda.\n\nEach had its own responsibility in the grand scheme of things. The Florentine was responsible for keeping their food in storage, which could prove to be the most important asset to all, depending on how long their journey played out.\n\nThe fleet's mechanics were scattered throughout, though their resources were aboard the Iron Maiden. For lack of better terms, an airborne tugboat full of spare parts, along with every tool imaginable.\n\nFour military ships were assigned, including the one Adam currently stood aboard. All colonial star vessels. The Triumph, God of War, Silver Hammer and Stalwart; though the God of War was designated as a troop ship and housed no smaller aircraft outside of dropships. The remaining three were to be used in protection of the fleet while in flight, relying on the skills of their pilots and housing many ship-to-ship fighters. Glimmerian designed Swordfish, though their design had been altered a bit to better fit deep space.\n\nThey were massive in comparison to the remaining ships of the fleet, even to their former models of colonial star ships. While the original ships stretched for thousands of yards and contained plenty of the Goliath model soldiers within its hull, the newly-designed colonial stars were much larger.\n\nThey were in a sense, small cities with thick armor around them and thrusters to their back. Capable of quartering tens of thousands, though supplies to furnish them would be limited.\n\nThe current model of colonial star ships were also stocked with hundreds of Goliath model soldiers, which was fancy talk for ass-kicking robots. The Goliath model aboard, however, were the recently upgraded V2 versions, which lent them a tougher exoskeleton of steel, along with the standard chain guns and anti-aircraft missiles.\n\nThe colonials had no idea what may lay waiting for them once the fleet made deep space. Be it fruitful planets that were ripe for the picking, or militarized civilizations that would swing at them with might; the colonials had to be prepared for anything.\n\nWhich they were.\n\nAfter catching sight of a four-man colonial marine team, Adam began to think of their job among the fleet. Protecting those in need, while keeping order and carrying out the instructions of the politicians who would lead them. A tall order considering the Magellan.\n\nIt was their political ship, not to mention the one ship that was sure to be the highest priority. Every important political figure surviving, every recognized planet, was to be housed aboard the Magellan. That included the Husk, among others; which was sure to include trouble.\n\nThe decisions that would affect everyone in the fleet would have to be made aboard the Magellan \u2013 a ship that mixed shatterproof glass and steel as if it were a work of art. Several protruding spheres of glass giving it the look of importance.\n\nThe Magellan also had the distinct honor of being the only ship in the fleet, outside of military cruisers, to remain under constant escort. Two Glimmerian-designed swordfish fighters, though more could be scrambled within minutes if needed be.\n\nThe Glimmerians had originally designed the swordfish fighter as a ship-to-ship fighter, which had the ability to hug low to the ground and fly at incredible speeds. In working with the colonial design teams, a newer model was eventually released, making it deep space worthy while retaining all of its original signatures of perfection.\n\nAll of the military marvel housed within the mighty ships of the fleet. It was impressive. Still, Adam found his mind wrapped around a single thought.\n\nSo many races under the same roof. Races that had been slaughtering one another for as long as time could remember, now expected to shake hands and play nice.\n\nAdam wondered how long such a mighty race would bow to the commands of a human leader. He knew it would only be a matter of time before the Orc-like race began its own plans to assume control of the fleet, if it had not already done so.\n\nOf course, the Hunters were now in the mix as well. Vampires in every sense of the word, though they were unhindered by daylight, garlic or religious symbols. That's just a silly assumption to begin with. They are, however, hindered by the burst of a gun and the blade of a sword, when in capable hands. That much had been proven throughout the years. A very important fact that shouldn't soon be forgotten.\n\nAdam wondered if the vampires could be trusted.\n\nThe fleet would make its important decisions aboard the Magellan, shaping humanity's future in the process. That said, their leaders would eventually disagree, and that could be disastrous considering the bloody past between their races.\n\nAdam Michaels realized as he stood firm, watching the bustle of soldiers around him prepping their ship, the most vital part of their fleet. Those around him. Adam promised himself at that very moment that he would never forget that fact. Watching such a wounded people push forward, finding courage in the face of the inevitable loss of their homes. It made Adam feel honored to be a part of such a special group, though his allegiance to the vampires meant his time among the colonials was limited at best.\n\n\"It's amazing to see people continue on. To survive during such times.\" Sarah remarked, approaching Adam slowly.\n\n\"I agree,\" Adam replied, turning to the woman he once loved. \"I was just thinking the same thing. Not to mention how daunting of a task it is going to be when it comes to keeping the peace between such storied races. What are you doing here? You should be in the keep under guard.\"\n\n\"I now know it is our race that will be persecuted at some point. If the others among us have any common ground, it is the hate for my people.\" Sarah replied.\n\n\"Yea, I know,\" Adam replied, turning to the bustle of his ship for a moment and noticing several among his crew staring to a Sarah a bit roughly. \"It isn't going to make my job any easier. You know I'm with you until the end Sarah, as long as my son is safe.\"\n\n\"He shall be.\" Sarah replied, also picking up on the animosity of the crew's glances.\n\nMoments later, several gunshots rang throughout the ship, causing an immediate reaction of panic from everyone. Including Adam.\n\n\"Remain calm Adam. Those are our shots.\" Sarah replied.\n\nBefore questioning her, Adam saw dozens of highly-armed Hunters entering the colonial star.\n\n\"What is this?\" he asked.\n\n\"These people have taken from our race for so long. You didn't expect us to just shake hands and play nice, did you?\"\n\n\"Actually...\" he began to respond as the gunfire intensified.\n\n\"Adam,\" the queen said, pausing to stare onto him. \"You have also taken from us,\" she added with a glare. \"From me.\"\n\n\"Sarah, that's not fair. You know I feel guilt for this.\" Adam replied.\n\n\"As well you should,\" the queen replied with a snap. \"But it does nothing to ease my pain.\"\n\n\"Sarah, I had no idea they would do this to you.\" he replied with a bit of zest on his own part.\n\n\"You left me standing alone Adam, what difference did it make to you where I ended up!\" Sarah shouted.\n\n\"It makes a lot of difference. We've all made mistakes here.\" Adam admitted.\n\n\"Your biggest mistake was trusting our people with your safety,\" she replied. \"The safety of your son.\"\n\n\"Sarah, you better not harm...\" Adam began to reply with desperation, though his words cut short by the end of a rifle. Its stock held by one of several Hunter Elites who arrived to protect their queen.\n\n\"He's safe and will remain that way Adam, as long as you cooperate.\"\n\n\"Cooperate? With what?\" the smuggler demanded to know.\n\n\"My men will escort you to our ship, at which time I will explain your punishment in further detail.\"\n\n_My punishment? You bitch!_ He thought, doing everything in his power not to strike at the woman \u2013 thinking for the safety of his son.\n\n\"I don't understand?\" Adam admitted.\n\n\"Adam, when you first showed up here my heart exploded,\" Sarah replied. \"I wanted to relive our love together,\" she added. \"But as I continued to think about it, I remembered the moment you left me for dead.\"\n\n\"I didn't know, Sarah.\"\n\n\"SILENCE! I've had enough of your excuses! I see the love you still have for Sasha on your face. I know that you left me behind because you loved her, and your love cost me everything.\"\n\nAdam didn't reply. Simply offering a look of disappointment and regret.\n\n\"Soon enough you will know my pain.\" the queen sternly promised, turning to walk away under heavy escort. Adam following slowly behind as well, surrounded by armed soldiers among the vampire race.\n\n\"The explosions seem to be getting closer,\" Skulls claimed. \"A good sign we are losing the fight.\"\n\n\"And you're surprised?\" Dalton asked, pausing to drink a healthy swig from an even healthier bottle of whiskey. \"Been getting our asses kicked up one side and down another for the better part of a year now.\"\n\n\"I just meant we should consider readying ourselves quicker than we had planned.\" Skulls admitted.\n\n\"I was born ready son,\" Dalton confessed. \"I once had a watch with no hands.\"\n\n\"Huh?\" Skulls asked, confused by the smuggler's statement.\n\n\"In other words, it's always go time.\"\n\n\"I don't get it?\" Skulls confessed.\n\n\"Ah fuck, this is killing my buzz,\" Dalton replied as his lover entered the shelter. \"A watch, no hands...always go time. I'm always ready, no matter what time it is.\"\n\n\"That's hilarious.\" Cambria admitted, laughing aloud as Dalton explained himself as though he were on trial.\n\n\"Thank you. I worked hard on that.\" the smuggler replied with a grin.\n\n\"I still don't get it?\" Skulls replied.\n\n\"Fuck sakes man, you need to get out more often.\" Dalton scolded, the taint of whiskey on his breath.\n\n\"Now that, friend, I get.\" Skulls replied, openly acknowledging the truth of Dalton's statement.\n\nIt was at that moment, words rolling from his tongue, that a large explosion took place merely feet from their shelter; slamming into the thick crust of ground near the center of the fleet staging ground.\n\n\"Holy shit!\" Dalton yelled, rushing to the window as alarms sounded only dozens of feet from their shelter's door.\n\n\"Told you they were getting closer,\" Skulls said, turning to make sure both of his friends were unharmed. \"Now what's that watch saying?\"\n\n\"Saying we need to get the hell out of here.\" Dalton replied, forcing their door open as the scramble of desperation had already led hundreds of people outdoors.\n\nIt was the sound of small arms fire, however, that drew Dalton's attention.\n\n\"That's gunfire within the camp!\"\n\n\"You mean the horde has made it in?\" Cambria asked with panic.\n\n\"Not unless the dead sumbitches dyed their hair white and took a liking to leather trench coats.\" he replied.\n\n\"I don't understand?\" Skulls replied.\n\n\"Ah shit man.\" Dalton nodded, preparing himself to explain in detail.\n\n\"He means the Hunters are firing on colonials,\" Cambria interjected, as if to bust up the smuggler's punchline. \"Question is, which side are we on?\"\n\n\"The side that ain't notorious for feasting on human flesh,\" Dalton replied. \"Not to mention being a thorn in my fucking side.\" he added, pushing his brown coat back a bit as his hand slowly pulled the heavy revolver to the ready.\n\n\"I cannot believe this shit,\" Skulls complained. \"I get a winning lottery ticket and now I have to try and find a ship that's safe. People are falling dead all over a camp that's now overrun with vampires \u2013 and zombies are on the way. I do not feel like a fucking winner!\"\n\n\"Winners don't whine,\" Dalton said with a grin, glancing back to the sniper. \"They win.\"\n\n\"How are we supposed to do that?\" Cambria asked, all three of them looking from the shelter door which remained cracked.\n\n\"Just stay close,\" Dalton responded, turning to smile at his lover. \"In case I get the urge for some fine wine.\"\n\n\"I don't get it?\" Skulls admitted.\n\n\"I can still remember seeing you burn away \u2013 your ship screaming into the ocean of stars. I felt helpless. I've lived with the loss every single night, knowing you'd never know my pain,\" the queen said. \"Now you will.\"\n\n\"Sarah, I don't know what you intend to do here, but Avery has nothing to do with this. You need to let him go and deal with me how you see fit.\"\n\n\"I am!\" the queen shouted.\n\nThe group had boarded a large hunter carrier, one of several that was being stocked for the fleet's voyage. At least that's what had been thought, though Adam knew immediately upon entering that it was being stocked for another reason altogether.\n\nWar.\n\n\"You've no intention of joining the fleet.\" Adam stated.\n\n\"We'll join them in the sky, if that's what you mean,\" she replied as their group walked deeper into the heart of the large battleship. \"Of course when we arrive my people will rip the colonial ships to shreds.\"\n\n\"Sarah, these people have done nothing to you!\" Adam argued.\n\n\"Nothing? These people have done nothing to me? For centuries the colonials have hunted my people down and systematically slaughtered them!\"\n\n\"The soldiers, maybe, but the people aboard those ships include a lot of innocent faces. Women and children that have no part in that!\" Adam replied.\n\n\"\"Victims of war,\" she replied without emotion. \"Just as my father was.\"\n\n\"Your father was a good man,\" Adam stated. \"He would not have any part in this,\" he added. \"You're lost to him. To the world that matters. Do what you will to me, I'm done playing games. The Sarah I fell in love with is obviously gone and the, thing, that stands in front of me \u2013 I have no use for.\"\n\nHis words stung her to the bone. Sarah had promised to forget the pain he'd caused her once upon a time, and now he had gashed the wound back open completely.\n\n\"You will remain in this room until I return. If you try to escape, my soldiers will gun you down. If I decide to take your words to heart, my soldiers will gun you down,\" she replied. \"If you value the sight of your son EVER again \u2013 you should pray I continue to feel for you long enough.\"\n\nAdam gave no words; no plea. He simply walked into a small room by gunpoint \u2013 its door slamming shut and bolting from the outside.\n\nThe walls seamless, the sheen of aluminum glaring around him with only a single chair inside. No windows. Nothing. Though it was evident that the ship's thrusters had begun to fire up to a burn.\n\n\"Dalton, we must keep moving.\" Cambria pleaded, helping the distraught smuggler from the colonial star.\n\n\"I cannot keep going. These people need help,\" Dalton responded, his eyes having dried but his heart still gaping wide. \"I can't live with leaving more innocent people behind to die.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Cambria agreed. \"But one of those innocent people is Adam's son. We need to go get Avery and get him to safety.\"\n\n\"I know that,\" Dalton admitted. \"I just don't know if I can.\" he added.\n\n\"Dalton James, listen to me,\" Cambria shouted, grabbing the man by his coat as gunfire rang out throughout their encampment. \"I need you!\"\n\nHis soldiering began to kick in a bit, knowing deep down that if he could push such great loss aside, at least for the moment, it could save the lives of many. Including Sasha and Avery.\n\n\"Alright,\" he finally responded. \"You've got Skulls' ticket. Now we have to get Adam's son and get to that ship before it leaves us on this damn rock. The rest we can figure out from the sky.\"\n\n\"And you?\" she asked.\n\n\"I've been a soldier most of my natural life. I know a lot of these guys, and they respect what I've done for the old colonial blue. I'll be fine.\"\n\n\"Alright, well, we need to get this done quickly. The horde will be at our front door in only minutes, and that's if our own don't kill us first.\" Cambria said.\n\nIt was a scene of total chaos. Soldiers clad in blue gunning down the vampire nation, and vice versa. Brother against brother, race against race, as everyone seemed to be staking their claim for a spot in the exodus fleet.\n\n\"Samuel. Dirsin. Twylan. All great great warriors who have fallen by your sword.\" Troy said,\n\n\"What is this you speak of human?\" Vladris asked with a demanding voice, though his answer came swiftly.\n\nThe thrust of sword, its tip biting into the lower half of Vladris' torso and sending the mighty champion to a knee.\n\n\"All of them great friends of mine,\" Troy said with a grin, their small group of surviving soldiers feeling as though the end was approaching by way of chaos in their leadership \"But none of them respected by me as was Roman Raines.\"\n\nThe remaining Hunters immediately went for their blades, though the firepower of colonial rifles soon tipped the scales. The humans and Orc-like warriors executing a plan of deception, and a well-executed plan at that.\n\n\"They say you fight as though you are a wounded lion. So wounded lion, what do you think of your chances now?\" Troy mocked.\n\nReaching down with a grimace of pain across his face, lips curling from hurt around jagged teeth, Vladris slowly wrapped a hand around the gushing wound as it drained him of blood.\n\n\"I would say you will fall just as your pathetic army did but moments ago.\" Vladris replied, squeezing pale flesh together in an attempt to slow the bleeding. Extreme duration of pain his biggest hurdle.\n\n\"Then you would be wrong,\" Troy said with a chuckle. \"Do you not see only a handful of vampires, each of them surrounded by Husk steel and colonial weaponry?\"\n\n\"I see only the coward spines of sheep. Such is the way of a lion.\" Vladris replied, looking onto the Husk-raised man with eyes fueled of revenge.\n\n\"Of course Vladris,\" Troy said, snatching an ax from the air, tossed to him by a Husk ally and awaiting the wounded champion to pull his own sword. \"I am up for the task of ending your legend. I will be the one who strikes you down.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Vladris replied, his face speaking of pain as he reached overhead to unsheathe his large sword, pulling flesh away from such a deep wound all the while. \"Or perhaps you will fall just like the list of cowards you so easily name. All who thought they too were up to the task.\"\n\nThe Hunters had never seen their champion injured as badly, blood gushing from wound as though he were a stuck pig. Yet he circled a waiting human as though he were stalking.\n\n\"Your overconfidence will be your demise champion.\" Troy taunted, beginning a circle as well, readying himself for combat against the most legendary of foes.\n\n\"My confidence is earned through battle, while yours is earned through the shouting of retreat.\" Vladris stated, his words striking a nerve with the young man.\n\nWith a commanding leap, Troy slammed down to the ground, his ax biting into the crust of planet only inches from Vladris. Though a bit slower than normal, the champion Hunter arced a glancing shot of sword toward the skilled warrior, who easily parried it away with the thick armor plating of his forearm.\n\n\"Even wounded I expected better.\" Troy said, chuckling a bit as he recovered his ax and readied it.\n\n\"Yet you thrust steel into me from behind. Walking the path of a coward.\" Vladris replied, beginning to feel the effects of a sword shot which would spell his demise.\n\nWasting no additional time, Troy began hammering away by way of his ax, releasing swipe after swipe with the weapon which aimed for the Hunter champion with unrelenting power. At least by human standards.\n\nVladris felt himself weakening, as he continued to parry the ax with defensive blade strikes, finally dropping to a knee once more. His only defense becoming one of desperation as the mighty champion held his blade above him in an attempt to absorb the striking ax.\n\nHe had seen it before. Countless times. When he had an opponent beaten, their last defense before falling was the same.\n\nVladris had no intentions of dying like a wailing pup, opting instead to throw his sword to the ground and let his body absorb the next swing of ax. Something that was worthy of his legend on the battlefield.\n\nFor even the mightiest fall.\n\n\"A final word before I end you?\" Troy asked with a smile pasted to his face.\n\n\"Yes,\" Vladris nodded with defeat. \"Almost.\"\n\n_Almost?_ Troy thought.\n\nWithin the instant, Vladris had pulled a large dagger from his belt, carving into the boy's chest as the entire length of the foot-sized blade dug in. Troy immediately dropping his ax.\n\n\"You almost ended the reign of Vladris,\" the vampire said, slowly rising to his feet. \"But not quite. That feat will one day be reserved for a true hero.\"\n\n\"Are you sure you can make the shot?\" one of the colonials asked. Their ride bumpy to say the least.\n\nDalton James didn't offer a verbal reply. Just a single shot from his revolver which hummed through the thick-air of several hundred feet before striking directly to the forehead of Vladris, shattering the contents inside.\n\nThat's for Roman you son of a bitch.\n\n\"That was one hell of a shot!\" one of the soldiers announced, several more agreeing.\n\n\"I have my days.\" Dalton boasted proudly, though his revolver remained in-hand.\n\nHe knew the very moment he fired his shot, which would become legendary by many eye-witness accounts; the love of his life was boarding a colonial star with Adam's babe in-hand, or so he thought.\n\nDalton also knew that his shot, the single bullet which had turned the tide of civil war, had cemented his seat on the exodus fleet.\n\nHe had Adam Michaels to thank. So many times before, Adam had forced him into practicing with a heavy revolver. Dalton could remember fighting it; even bitching about it more times than not. Still, he remembered Adam lecturing him on a man's sidearm being the most powerful piece of weaponry.\n\nElegance among smugglers.\n\nAll of these years he'd bitched. Growled about his shotguns and coveted the grenades. Yet his best friend, a man who had taught the smuggler so many things over the years, had preached the art of the revolver as if it were a religion.\n\nDalton knew with certainty that Adam had played a big part in slaying the Hunter. A thought which brought a large smile to the brushy-faced man.\n\n\"We'll be there shortly, but it's going to be a bumpy ride from here on out.\" the pilot warned, turning to deliver the warning to Dalton and crew.\n\nBumpy?\n\nBefore he could ask, however, Dalton began to see the horde. So many dead that they literally blacked out the ground below the shuttle with their bodies.\n\n\"Holy shit.\" Dalton admitted, laying witness to tens of thousands of warriors turned from the dead. All of them sprinting toward the colonial encampment.\n\nThe shuttle rocked heavily \u2013 caused by one of many mortar strikes. The colonials were leaning on the explosive rounds; their attempt to thin out the coming horde as the exodus fleet began to launch.\n\nJust as the ground was blackened by the bodies of infected, the sky began to blacken with the shadows of ships lifting into the heavens.\n\nIt had become a non-stop ride of turbulence, with mortar being strung together with desperation. Yet Dalton could gather his bearings well enough to see nearly a dozen colonial ships yet to launch.\n\n\"The Legend of Stars is reporting engine malfunction!\" the pilot yelled, taking a moment to point to the craft.\n\nIt was mid-sized and reserved as the home for survivors of Alowin. A large planet of peaceful, yet tech dependent citizens.\n\n\"At least four-thousand souls aboard that rig!\" one of the soldiers yelled in response.\n\n\"What of the God of War?\" Dalton asked.\n\n\"The rest of 'em are reporting in with green lights. They're good to go. Just waiting for their shuttles to reel back in.\" the pilot replied.\n\nLiterally hundreds of shuttles, small choppers and merchant freighters made their way toward the large craft that were grounded and laying in wait.\n\nThe Legend of Stars seemed the focal point, however, as dozens of engineers worked on its exterior. Each checking the guts of the ship in an attempt to fix it.\n\n\"God of War this is Red Hound Fourteen, requesting landing grid position.\" the pilot said, speaking into his helmet's mic.\n\n\"We have you Red Hound 14, proceed to landing bay Seventy-One.\"\n\n\"Copy that.\"\n\nUpon landing, Dalton's first reaction was to head to the observation deck. He knew his lover was aboard, and that she no doubt cared for Adam's son. His concern was for those innocent lives aboard the Legend of Stars.\n\nIt would seem the case for many others as well, Dalton discovered, as nearly a hundred had gathered on the observation deck to watch colonial engineers race against the coming horde.\n\n\"Dalton,\" Cambria said, her eyes filled with the truth of pain. \"Dalton, they took Adam's son.\"\n\n\"Who?\" he questioned, growling with anger. \"What the fuck?\" he demanded to know.\n\n\"Sarah.\"\n\n\"I don't understand?\" he questioned.\n\n\"Sarah showed up with a group of armed soldiers. Took Avery right from my arms at gunpoint.\"\n\nStanding for a moment \u2013 fighting the numbness that shivered through his extremities, Dalton searched for the reasoning. Searched for the motive.\n\nOh hell no.\n\n\"Someone get me on the damn horn with the commander \u2013 right now!\" he yelled.\n\nWith several of the survivors turning to stare at him with question, Dalton grabbed a nearby soldier by the front of his blue uniform.\n\n\"I said get me on the horn with the commander. Otherwise, I'm gonna start cracking skulls.\" he growled.\n\n\"I can get him,\" a soldier shouted across the large room filled with people. \"What should I tell him?\"\n\n\"Tell him the vampires fucked us. You tell him to be ready for war by the time we top the clouds.\"\n\nSensing the urgency, the soldier began fumbling with his com system \u2013 finally reaching one of the soldiers who answered directly to Ortega.\n\n\"Launch squadron A.\" a voice announced over the com system, each person taking note.\n\nMoments later, the onlookers could see dozens of Swordfish fighters launching from their own ship. Each blazing for the coming horde.\n\nThough it looked impressive, Dalton knew it would not be enough. He had seen the horde with his own eyes. There was simply no stopping it.\n\nEven as the Swordfish began to stream down napalm, bringing death to anything it fell onto, there were just too many Priests coming. Having busted their way through the mighty colonial staggered defenses in the process.\n\n\"Legend of Stars is operational.\" the com announced, bringing cheers to everyone on the observation deck. As their ships began to lift into the heavens, however, their excitement turned to horror as several engineering boxes on the Legend of Stars began sparking with fury.\n\nMoments later, it had lost its altitude of just a dozen feet. Falling back to the surface in the process.\n\nThe survivors on the observation deck watched in horror as the horde began to overrun the fallen ship. Ripping metal sheeting from its hull while others smashed their way through otherwise-shatterproof windows.\n\nDalton just stood in place, watching the horror of mass murder as the colonial star finally broke into the clouds and welcomed its survivors to the black of space.\n\n\"Do not cry for them,\" Dalton scolded, several people having broken down from such a horrific sight. \"Unless you also grieve for the millions we've lost up till now. Their death was no less tragic.\"\n\nWith his words, the smuggler began descending the catwalk steps which led back to C level, thrown a bit to the side as the massive ship shifted its bearing.\n\nAlways with these fucking ships!\n\nFinal Act\n\nDalton's gut had been right, just as it had been so many times before. The colonial stars had made the correct move by lifting to the sky \u2013 guns blazing.\n\nThe vampires awaited them in orbit doing the same.\n\nDalton clinched his lover tightly as she cried aloud, grieving both the young man gone missing and her fear of demise. The brown coated smuggler did what he could to console her, though he had also began to wonder the outcome.\n\nHe was military trained enough to know their ship was being hammered with gunfire. Dalton could hear explosions throughout the lower decks of his ship, which was consistent with approaching the end of the line. At least in a gunfight between sky galleons.\n\n\"You see Adam Michaels,\" Sarah gestured, having led him to the bridge of a vampire-loyal ship under escort. \"The mighty fleet is falling. So many innocent lives.\"\n\n\"What do you want Sarah?\" Adam demanded.\n\n\"For you to make a choice,\" she grinned, waving her soldiers to the ready. Moments later, a woman of Sarah's race carried Adam's son out to him \u2013 sound asleep. \"Tens of thousands of lives aboard the dying fleet. Many children just like this, you said so yourself.\"\n\n\"What Sarah, what?\" he angrily questioned.\n\n\"Either you leave with us as a vampire as you watch the fleet destroyed \u2013 or you watch your son leave with us, from the observation deck of a colonial ship which you helped save. Your choice.\"\n\n\"Sarah, I can't.\" he admitted.\n\n\"Either you make your choice, or I WILL have my soldiers execute you \u2013 at which time I will destroy the fleet anyway, keeping your son to boot.\" she replied.\n\nA broken mess, Adam began crying heavily \u2013 his lips trembling too hard to reply.\n\n\"Your friends are on those ships Adam Michaels. All of them. Are you ready to show your forgiveness to me by joining the nation of vampires and caring for your son? Or are you as committed as you claim to save the innocent? What will it be Adam Michaels, self or selfless?\"\n\nYet the smuggler continued to cry heavily, offering no response to his former lover.\n\nWith the incentive of a gun barrel pressing to his forehead, Adam continued to cry, though holding his hands up and slowing enough to eventually speak.\n\n\"How do I know you'll keep your word? How do I know you'll look after my son \u2013 allow the fleet to go safely?\"\n\n\"Adam Michaels, I hate you,\" she replied, edging closer to him. \"Even so, I loved you once. Because of that I promise you. You have my word as a former lover. As a queen to my people.\"\n\n\"Alright,\" he replied, calming his tears just a bit. \"I'll go.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" she said, ordering her guards to remove Avery from his broken father's sight. \"Now you will watch as your entire world pulls away in full-burn from the thick of glass windows.\" she replied without emotion.\n\nLeading Adam onto a small shuttle, the queen turned to those operating her capital ship.\n\n\"Hail the colonial fleet and let them know we intend to stand down. Tell them we are sending a colonial package to them by way of shuttle,\" the queen said. \"A broken one.\" Sarah added, turning to look onto Adam with disgust.\n\n\"Sarah Blaine,\" Adam said, doing his best to block the loss of his son from memory. \"I will be back for my son,\" he added with truth. \"When I do. I will end you.\"\n\nOffering no reply aside from a look of annoyance, Sarah pressed a sequence of buttons which ejected a thick slate of shatterproof glass, jolting between them.\n\nAs his shuttle began to depart from the vampire's largest battleship, Adam stared at his former lover, signaling her death as he used hand motions to aim at her as if it were a gun.\n\n\"Jump our people to the designated coordinates.\" the queen demanded.\n\n\"Right away.\" a vampire clad in solid black replied, beginning to enter information into their computer systems.\n\nAdam Michaels had never cried as hard as he did the moment the vampires began to fire their thrusters, leaving him helpless as his eyes watched them take his son away \u2013 breaking his heart in the process.\n\nAccepting the lone shuttle, though they suspected a trap, the soldiers aboard the badly-damaged colonial star approached the shuttle with caution.\n\nAs they opened the door, each of the trained protectors of peace expected the worst. Instead, they found Adam laying in the corner \u2013 sobbing without reserve.\n\n\"Everybody out of the way,\" Dalton growled. \"I know this man.\"\n\n\"Who is it?\" a soldier asked, gun still locked onto the broken man.\n\n\"My brother.\" Dalton replied, kneeling down to scoop his longtime friend from the shuttle.\n\nFitting, as Adam had did the same for him during the first Glimmerian war many years before.\n\n\"Cambria, we need to get him to the rack and let him rest for a bit.\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\" she replied.\n\nStanding to his feet moments later, Adam felt weak \u2013 as if his body was just learning to function as an adult.\n\n\"Adam,\" Cambria said, tearing up a bit.\" I'm so, so sorry.\" she added, feeling guilty of the entire event.\n\nStaring at her for a moment, Adam wrapped his arms around her and began crying once more.\n\n\"Nothing you could have done. Nothing I could have done.\" he responded.\n\n\"Alright, alright \u2013 damn. Break it up. My playground brother.\" Dalton yelled with sarcasm.\n\nCausing the broken man to grin just slightly, Adam finally turned to face his longtime friend, offering him the same embrace of a thick hug.\n\n\"Well this is uncomfortable.\" Cambria jested.\n\n\"Yea, no kidding,\" Dalton added. \"Don't start dry-humping my leg or anything.\"\n\nLaughing through the pain, Adam finally broke away and smiled. Though everyone knew what was on his mind. Avery. Revenge.\n\nTwenty-Three\n\nAs the primitive alarm sounded, waking Dalton from a world of dreams, he quietly cursed the Gods for not allowing a longer sleep.\n\n\"Already?\" Cambria asked, turning to her lover as they both lay in bed.\n\n\"Fuck yea.\" Dalton replied, his words loaded with regret.\n\n\"Speaking of.\" she replied with a smile.\n\n\"If I had time,\" Dalton said, grinning ear to ear. \"I'd certainly do the crime.\"\n\n\"Crime? Really?\"\n\n\"Well, you know,\" Dalton replied. \"One of those upscale crimes. You know...high class.\"\n\n\"Well in that case Dalton James,\" Cambria replied, her best damsel in distress now in full swing. \"I suppose I'll save myself for the next time.\"\n\nHe chuckled a bit, but seemed to be distant from the conversation.\n\n\"What is it? Adam?\" she asked.\n\n\"Well it is now!\" he replied with a bark.\n\n\"Oh, yea, it's day twenty-three. Big day, huh?\" Cambria said.\n\n\"Just another day,\" Dalton replied as he stood from their bed and began to drape himself in colonial blue. \"Except I'm without a bottle of scratch.\"\n\n\"I think you can function without it.\" Cambria said with a large grin.\n\nHe simply replied with a tough stare. The one-thousand yard variety.\n\n\"At least I guess you can.\"\n\n\"We'll know soon enough me suppose.\" he replied, though he did so with a bitching tone.\n\nTaking a moment to brush his hands through his whiskers, Dalton stared at himself for what seemed like an eternity. Glaring into the mirror which hung above the steel sink of their quarters.\n\n\"You look nice.\" Cambria remarked.\n\n\"That sucks,\" he replied. \"I was going for mean.\"\n\n\"Well you're one mean hunk of cowboy. That work?\" she playfully replied. Her body nude under the sheets of the large, overstuffed bed.\n\n\"You be sure you have your ass here when I get back. We have some things to,\" he said, glancing to her lower body. \"Work out.\" he added.\n\n\"Oh Dalton James, you simply take my breath away.\" Cambria replied in distress.\n\nPunching several numbers into a keypad by the door, reinforced steel quickly opened to expose a large hallway, well-lit with the white of halogen.\n\n\"Commander.\" one of the two stationed marines said, both men saluting.\n\n\"At ease boys, I ain't officially the commander until this afternoon,\" Dalton replied. \"As of now, I'm still just a guy they suckered into the job,\" he added. \"Take care of my girl.\"\n\n\"Yes sir.\" the marine replied, both men standing guard once more.\n\n_Just another sucker._ He thought as everyone seemed to turn to him, his walk throughout the busy ship one of history. _And a sober one at that._\n\nDuring the final assault between the Hunters and colonials, Ortega had been gunned down.\n\nSomething that did not fade, however, was his commander's log. Mandatory entries, though the last was anything but. He has spoken of both the grit and compassion of Dalton James; even going far enough to name him the man in charge should he ever perish.\n\nHis entry was logged less than twenty-minutes before the Hunters began their final push, and those who survived looked to Ortega as an honorable man. His wishes for succession to go unchallenged.\n\nAs with colonial law, when a commander departed by resignation or death, the government would swear in a successor exactly twenty-three days following. Each day representing a major civilization under the colonial banner.\n\nThough Dalton secretly admitted he knew nothing about leading such a proud people, he also believed that many commanders before him knew less than that, and they were able to pull it off. In fact, he was guilty of slugging one and bedding down the daughter of a second, though her looks fell way-short of her political standing.\n\nBlame the whiskey.\n\nEither way, he was about to lead the colonial people. At least from a military perspective. A civilian was to be sworn in as well, the wishes of Commander Ortega, and they would share power while working together.\n\nSo it was to be.\n\nDalton expected a pretty big ceremony \u2013 though he knew there would be a shortage of man-drink, but he was not prepared for the coming inauguration.\n\nAt least two-thousand people, all seated and awaiting the ceremony. A large podium, with several ranking officers sitting close by, both civilian and military. Everyone awaiting a man who was minutes late for his own swearing in.\n\n_Ah shit._ He thought, knowing it wasn't possible to slip in unseen to the witness of thousands who sat quietly.\n\nThe sound of his boots seemed to echo throughout the landing bay as they clicked to the cement floor. He would have cursed the floor and the people for listening so damn hard, if the military branch of their government hadn't stood up in salute.\n\nIt brought a smile to the man's face, continuing his walk proudly. Though he noticed something odd. A harsh look from the politician in which he would share power. Even a whisper by the man to another high-ranking politician.\n\n\"Doctor Arness has delivered his speech,\" a man said, his role of organizing the event pretty obvious. \"Everyone awaits yours.\"\n\nSpeech? You've got to be shitting me! Nobody mentioned a speech!\n\nStepping to the podium, Dalton cleared his throat a bit, looking onto the crowd and trying to imagine them naked. Quickly realizing a majority of them were male, however, he began to think of his lover naked instead.\n\n\"The truth is,\" Dalton said, adjusting the microphone a bit as the crowd remained silent. \"I don't have a prepared speech.\" he admitted.\n\nThe crowd began to whisper a bit, in disbelief of his statement.\n\n\"Anyone who knows me, knows it wouldn't be my style,\" he said. \"I speak from the heart unless cheap whiskey is involved.\"\n\nHis statement brought laughs and cheers from most of the military branch, while the civilian branch seemed mixed in their reaction.\n\n\"Please, I appreciate it, but don't cheer me. I'm just a man. No different than the millions who perished during this war,\" Dalton said, hushing the crowd in an instant. \"I'm being honest when I say I've worked beneath a variety of men in power. Some that I respected, some that I scratched my head in wondering how they even got into power to begin with,\" he added. \"What I've learned is that I want, more than anything else, the respect of those who work for me. I plan to do anything I ask someone else to do and lead by example.\"\n\nHeavy cheers began to roll in from the crowd, bringing the new commander a moment unlike any he'd ever experienced.\n\n\"So with that, let me just say this,\" Dalton said, giving the crowd a moment to settle down. \"I'm not a commander that believes in delegating my job. You ever have a problem, any of you,\" he added, speaking to them with truth. \"You come and see me personally.\"\n\nThe entire group began to erupt with cheering, although his political equals wanted none of it.\n\n\"Just because you were Ortega's lapdog, doesn't mean you belong here. Just play your part and stay out of my way.\" Doctor Arness whispered as the roar of cheers continued.\n\nAs Dalton looked onto the man, fresh-cut hair of solid black and the face of a young buck, Dalton raised his hand to acknowledge the crowd's growing cheer.\n\n_Lead by example. Fuck it._ Commander James thought.\n\nMoments later, he decked Doctor Arness in front of thousands of eyes which turned cheers into shock. With it, the military began to scuffle with the political \u2013 on stage and in front of those who represented the entire fleet.\n\n\"In fact,\" Dalton said loudly into the microphone. \"As you can see, anyone who speaks for his own benefit and not that of the innocent voices of this fleet,\" he added. \"Really pisses me off.\"\n\nKnowing someone would most likely be killed if he didn't, Dalton exited the podium area and began a walk from the ceremony. This time under guard for his own protection.\n\n\"Sir, that was one hell of a shot.\" one of the marines boasted.\n\n\"Think so?\" Dalton asked. \"I think I knocked two of the son of a bitch's teeth out.\"\n\n\"He has plenty more.\" the marine replied.\n\n\"Hated to put you guys in this position son, I just...\" Dalton began to explain.\n\n\"It's alright sir, several of us heard his words toward you. I've been wanting to deck the bastard for nearly a year now.\"\n\n\"Either way, it will most-likely cause tension within the fleet.\" Dalton admitted.\n\n\"Within the ranks of the political parties' maybe, but not to those who matter. I think that shot to his chin earned you the respect of a lot of civilians, sir.\"\n\n\"I'm hoping with the military as well. If it comes down to a battle of books and guns, I'd love to know you guys have my back.\" Dalton said with a grin.\n\n\"Sir, you had that before you decked him. You've proven yourself time and time again on the battlefield.\"\n\nAt that moment, Dalton James \u2013 in this case Commander James, realized that the marine's statement rang true. All of the shit he'd been through as a military grunt; a glorified fetch boy, had finally paid off.\n\nAs Commander James entered the ship's CIC for the very first time, its staff stood to their feet, clapping loudly and even whistling. They had heard his speech over the com system, as well as the report of him loosening the teeth of a certain politician. Making him a hero in their eyes.\n\n\"Thank you, thank you,\" Dalton said with a grin, calming the CIC crowd down a bit. \"Now, can someone please walk me through what the hell I'm supposed to be doing exactly?\"\n\nHis words erupted laughter as most went back to their workstations.\n\n\"I can help you with that, if you promise not to slug me?\" a well-dressed soldier replied.\n\n\"Alright son, you have my word.\" Dalton said with a grin.\n\n\"Com Officer Paul Anthony, sir,\" the man stated. \"A privilege to have someone like you leading our CIC.\"\n\nDalton nodded his appreciation to the man, who was clean shaven and not a day over twenty-five years of age. Several medals pinned snugly to his chest.\n\n\"Sir, we've mapped out several locations that our fleet may able to survive a journey. I've marked a couple of routes into deep space that our scouts have confirmed may be rich in resources.\" the com officer said.\n\n\"Don't need a map. I know where we're going.\" Dalton replied.\n\n\"Um,\" Anthony replied with confusion. \"Alright sir. Where would that be?\"\n\n\"To get my best friend's son back.\"\n\n\"Sir, with all due respect, we don't even know where the Hunters are?\"\n\n\"No resource ships in their fleet. Means they have to be somewhere in the Skyla System, and I can promise you,\" Dalton said with stern truth. \"There's not a rock in this entire system that the bastards are going to be able to hide under when I'm finished.\" he promised.\n\n\"Alright sir.\" Anthony replied, though he seemed reluctant to do so.\n\n\"So you send our scout ships back out and you have 'em comb the system. When they find the Hunters' fleet, you have 'em float over a message in a bottle,\" Dalton said, choosing his words proudly. \"That we're coming \u2013 and I'm bringing motherfucking revenge with me.\"\n\n\"Will do sir.\"\n\n\"Who in here served on Glimmeria the first time around?\" Dalton asked loudly.\n\nThree hands were raised. Two of them deck officers, while a third was a colonial soldier stationed on the door of the CIC.\n\n\"How many friends did each of you lose?\" Dalton asked.\n\nA strange question, though each respected his command enough to offer their answer. Seven. Four. Eighteen.\n\n\"Congratulations, you're my new XO. Now get your ass up here.\" Dalton demanded of the soldier stationed on the door.\n\n\"Sir?\" the soldier asked.\n\n\"Commander, you should consider this decision wisely.\" Anthony pleaded in a soft voice.\n\n\"Who's a better candidate to lead a group of people that have lost so much - then a man who has also lost, and done so while fighting for the right side since day one?\"\n\n\"Sir, I just think...\" Anthony began to plead.\n\n\"I don't want you to think,\" Dalton replied sharply, staring the man down. \"I want you to execute my damn order. Every minute the vampires are out there is a minute that filthy bitch has her hands on my godson.\"\n\n\"Yes sir.\"\n\n\"Come on private, carry your ass up here.\" Dalton insisted of the guard by the door.\n\n\"Yes sir, I'm just taken back by the promotion. I think very highly of you and appreciate you thinking so much of me. Hope I don't let you down when I admit I know nothing about these computer systems?\" the soldier asked.\n\n\"Well,\" Dalton replied, reaching over to read the soldier's name tag. \"Sergeant Cohen, it can't be too damn hard,\" he added, leaning over to whisper into his new XO's ear. \"Everyone in here has soft hands. How hard can it be?\"\n\nSmiling to his new XO, Cohen eventually smiled back \u2013 understanding that he and Dalton were cut from the same cloth. Hell-raisers for the same cause. Defense of the defenseless.\n\n\"Maybe you're thinking on it a little too much.\" Cambria suggested.\n\n\"Maybe,\" Dalton replied, sitting at a large desk of polished wood as he studied the papers carefully.\n\n\"You should rest,\" she said with concern. \"Particularly your slugging hand.\" Cambria added with a chuckle.\n\n\"That sumbitch had it coming.\" Dalton replied in his own defense.\n\n\"Alright, if you say so,\" Cambria replied, placing her hands in the air. \"Just don't hit me.\" she added with a grin.\n\n\"Oh, you're a wise-ass.\" he commented, offering her a wide grin in return.\n\n\"Speaking of,\" Cambria said, placing her palm to her head as though she were suffering. \"You owe me cowboy.\"\n\n\"I reckon I do.\" Dalton replied, cutting his full-attention to the woman who awaited his embrace.\n\n\"I would hate to think that our mighty leader was no good on his word.\" she said playfully.\n\n\"I'm good for my word alright,\" he answered, standing to his feet as Cambria now lay there, half-nude and teasing him. \"Or, as so many women have called it,\" he added, drawing a disapproving look from his lover. \"Just plain good.\"\n\n\"Really?\" she asked.\n\n\"Just get over here and love on this old hound dog. That's an order.\" Dalton said \u2013 technically his first command as the man in charge.\n\n\"What?\" one of the two stationed guards asked as the other stared to him.\n\nAnswering his question with a continued stare, it was evident that the thickened-steel walls weren't thick enough.\n\n\"Block it out.\" the guard added, Cambria and Dalton growing louder \u2013 as if wild animals were mating on the other side of the door.\n\nA smug look came across the face of the quiet marine. His way of saying impossible.\n\n\"Try.\" the first marine added, escaping into deep thought for a moment.\n\nIt's gonna be a long damn night.\n\nCommander's Log\n\nThe first of many, I suspect, as life seems to have thrown a curveball right into my lap. Still, as commander of this fleet, I'm tasked with providing hope. A task I welcome.\n\nSeeing the pain in the eyes of my best friend has been indescribably hard. He is a brother. The closest thing to family I've known since I was a child. So, as I look into the eyes of those around me among the fleet, I understand their loss.\n\nThe good news is that we've confirmed across the fleet that no infected made the exodus. The bad news, of course, is that we have no real idea of direction. We simply do not know what perils or wealth of resources await us beyond the line we consider uncharted space.\n\nWe've deployed probes that have relayed information back to us, but only the basics. We've no idea if life exists out there. No real number of days we can actually survive based on our food storage and fuel counts.\n\nWe have literally become a race that is chained to our ships. Bringing with us only what we could stock in rush, which doesn't amount to much in terms of comfort.\n\nSome among the fleet think we need to revisit the planets throughout the Skyla System once more. Perhaps salvage more of what we need before setting sail into the stars beyond.\n\nNot revisiting the planets among our former system seems to be the only thing Doctor Arness and myself agree on. The sumbitch. I can already see that he plans to be a constant thorn in my side, though he will do so with a few teeth missing.\n\nThey say that assuming power changes a man. I don't know about that. I've changed, that's for sure, but I do not credit my new position of power for it. I credit loss.\n\nAs I look back on all of the memories gone by. The bars. The bar-fights. The jail time. The bedding of women. Well, to be frank, this list could go on for quite some time. Being an official entry and all, I'll cut to the chase.\n\nThe loss of so many who I cared for has changed me. Many of my good friends. My crew...hell, even my dog. They've all been taken from me, each one taking a piece of me with them to the grave.\n\nThe moment I held true love in my arms - I became a man. So I accept the challenge of leading these people to a new home. I'm ready.\n\nI'll lead these people as the man they need me to be. The man that life has molded me to be.\n\nThe whiskey though, I'm not giving that up. I've grown into a man, but I ain't dead.\n\n-Commander Dalton James\n\nAbout the Author\n\nJohn M. Davis is the author of several books, including three which have grabbed the #2 overall spot in their respective genres. He currently resides in the beautiful mountains of Virginia with his wife and two spoiled children. The journey doesn't end here! Be sure to visit the official blog for information on The Fleet, featuring Commander Dalton James.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nTHE  \nIRRATIONALIST\n\nSUZANNE BUFFAM\n\nPOEMS\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2010 Suzanne Buffam\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.\n\nDistribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author's rights.\n\nThis edition published in 2012 by\n\nHouse of Anansi Press Inc.\n\n110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801\n\nToronto, ON, M5V 2K4\n\nTel 416-363-4343\n\nFax 416-363-1017\n\nwww.houseofanansi.com\n\nLIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA\n\nBuffam, Suzanne, 1972\u2013\n\nThe irrationalist \/ Suzanne Buffam.\n\nPoems.\n\nISBN 978-0-88784-307-5\n\nI. Title.\n\nPS8603.U52I77 2010 C811'.6 C2009-906400-6\n\nCover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang\n\nCover image: Old Modern Handicrafts\n\nShip in a bottle, featured on the cover, is manufactured in Vietnam by Old Modern Handicrafts and distributed by Capt. Jim at capt.jimscar-go.\n\nWe acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.\nFor Mira\nThere is another world, but it is inside this one.\n\nPaul Eluard\nI\nRUINED INTERIOR\n\nIn the beginning was the world.\n\nThen the new world.\n\nThen the new world order\n\nWhich resembles the old one,\n\nDoesn't it? Its crumbling\n\nAqueducts. Its trinkets and shingles.\n\nIts pathways lacquered in fog.\n\nIf all we've done is blink a bit\n\nAnd touch things,\n\nNotice how dust describes\n\nA tin can by not falling\n\nWhere it sits, or how a red sleeve\n\nGlimpsed through curtains\n\nMimics the tip of a flickering\n\nWing, was the whole day a waste\n\nOr can worth be conferred\n\nOn a less than epic urge? Bow-wow\n\nSays the doggie on page two.\n\nAhoy says the sailor.\n\nArise says the tired queen\n\nAnd face the highway\n\nThe donut shops, and the boardwalk.\n\nIt rained today. You can see\n\nPerfect inversions of streetlights\n\nSuspended in drops on the window.\n\nYou can see the skyline\n\nTrying to hold up the sky.\n\nDon't tell me there's another,\n\nBetter place. Don't tell me\n\nThere's a sea\n\nAbove our dreaming sea\n\nAnd through the windows of heaven\n\nThe rains come down.\nIF YOU SEE IT WHAT IS IT YOU SEE\n\nI didn't look at the fire.\n\nI looked into it.\n\nI saw a wall of books\n\nCrash down and bury me\n\nCenturies deep in red leather.\n\nI saw a statue in a park\n\nShake dust from its fist\n\nAnd a ship called Everything\n\nSink down on rusted wings.\n\nTen thousand triangles collapsed\n\nInto a point\n\nAnd the point was this.\n\nI cannot tell you what I saw.\n\nMy catastrophe was sweet\n\nAnd nothing like yours\n\nAlthough we may sip\n\nFrom the same\n\nBroken cup all afternoon.\nAMOR FATI\n\nAny idiot can become a genius if she wants it badly enough.\n\nOne must study how the crow flies.\n\nOne must say to oneself as the crow flies so fly I.\n\nIn the dream I am an empty tree. One by one my branches fill with silent crows that have travelled great distances to reach me.\n\nEach crow contains a golden seed of knowledge locked in its craw and by containing them all in my lofty crown I contain all knowledge of the kingdom.\n\nMy attempts to remember are proof in themselves.\n\nAt times one must accompany a shadow like the moon above a field of bitter greens.\n\nIn this wretched spirit the pilgrim applies herself and is rewarded.\n\n\"I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love,\" she explains, \"like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.\"\n\nI can't help what I want.\n\nThere is no such thing as a dream that comes true.\n\nEvery dream is already true the moment it is dreamed.\nTHE NEW EXPERIENCE\n\nI was ready for a new experience.\n\nAll the old ones had burned out.\n\nThey lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside\n\nAnd blew in drifts across the fairgrounds and fields.\n\nFrom a distance some appeared to be smouldering\n\nBut when I approached with my hat in my hands\n\nThey let out small puffs of smoke and expired.\n\nThrough the windows of houses I saw lives lit up\n\nWith the otherworldly glow of tv\n\nAnd these were smoking a little bit too.\n\nI flew to Rome. I flew to Greece.\n\nI sat on a rock in the shade of the Acropolis\n\nAnd conjured dusky columns in the clouds.\n\nI watched waves lap the crumbling coast.\n\nI heard wind strip the woods.\n\nI saw the last living snow leopard\n\nPacing in the dirt. Experience taught me\n\nThat nothing worth doing is worth doing\n\nFor the sake of experience alone.\n\nI bit into an apple that tasted sweetly of time.\n\nThe sun came out. It was the old sun\n\nWith only a few billion years left to shine.\nHAPPY HOUR\n\nI'll have an Icecap.\n\nMake it a double.\n\nBring me a Fog on the River,\n\nA Niagara Falls on the rocks,\n\nAnd a Tempest with a chaser of Hail.\n\nI don't want to be rescued.\n\nI want to crawl through a honeycomb\n\nOf subglacial passageways,\n\nShove my head under God's faucet\n\nAnd keep chugging until I pass out.\n\nI want thirst to drink me.\n\nI want to come back as a bucket of blood.\nOCCASIONAL POEM\n\nToday is the thirteen thousand, one hundred and forty-first day of the rest of my life.\n\nThere is no way to know how many beans are in the jar without removing them one by one.\n\nIf I find it harder to learn the future tense than the younger students in my Spanish class do, it is because so much more of my life resides in the past.\n\nStill I try to live in the moment, where everything is endlessly happening at once.\n\nThe earth spins, the curtain lifts, clouds appear to be floating, and yet they are, in fact, constantly falling.\n\nTo be ahead of one's time may be the same as being very far behind it.\n\nWhen he saw the bison leaping off the walls at Lascaux, Picasso turned to his guide and lamented the achievements of modern art.\n\n\"We have discovered nothing,\" he is reported to have said.\n\nAnd yet today is different from yesterday.\n\nYesterday only contained itself and the days leading up to it, while today contains itself, yesterday, plus all the endless days before that.\n\nLet us celebrate.\n\nLet us separate the movement from the moving thing.\nDEATH TOLL RISES IN BLACK SEA SINKING\n\nFrom where I stand\n\nThe world is a warm blue bath.\n\nI can wash my feet in it.\n\nI can pick a cloud\n\nAny cloud\n\nAnd watch it nudge a mast\n\nAcross a harbour of light.\n\nI have the potential\n\nFor offspring inside me\n\nAnd if it is desire that I lack\n\nI can sit down on a rock\n\nAnd wait for my lack\n\nTo dissolve.\n\nI can do so\n\nAnd so I do so\n\nWaiting with my feet\n\nAt the edge of the bath\n\nUntil at length it is time\n\nTo lug my body home.\n\nThere I read about a storm\n\nIn the east\n\nIn a story from the west\n\nAbout a boatload of sailors\n\nWho sank that the water would rise.\nTHE SOLITARY ANGLER\n\nOne day I woke up\n\nAnd did not fear the old gods.\n\nI called the number on my fridge\n\nAnd when the movers arrived\n\nI gave them everything.\n\nOn my way out of town\n\nI spat into the wind\n\nAnd did not linger to see where it landed.\n\nWho can say for sure\n\nIf the dream has ended or begun?\n\nA frail dimness rims my craft.\n\nStars swim to the surface of a bottomless well\n\nAnd sink when I take my eyes off them.\n\nThere is no greater calamity\n\nThan to underestimate the strength of your enemy.\n\nThe ancients saw the stars\n\nAnd called them angels.\n\nThey turned everything else into a clock.\n\nI say wear a watch if you must\n\nBut don't count on it. \nTHE ARENA\n\nThe judges invite me to enter a contest of wits.\n\nIf I win, I will be ashamed of myself for having stooped to enter such an unworthy contest in the first place.\n\nIf I lose, I will be ashamed of my not being the one to throw down her laurels in disgust.\n\nThe only solution seems to be to avoid the arena entirely.\n\nAnd yet, not to venture at all seems a concession to anticipatory shame \u2014 a shameful position in its own right.\n\nTo compete or not to compete: this question has dogged mankind since the first hollow sceptre was whittled from a bone.\n\nI will have to turn my shame into a point of pride, I see.\n\nI go home and take off my pants, hang a funhouse mirror from my bathroom door, and force myself to eat soup with a spork.\n\nI call myself every bad word I know.\n\nI heap scorn upon myself by the shovelful until I grow so heavy with shame I can barely lift my body into bed.\n\nBy the end of the week I feel ready to submit.\n\nBut when I show up to take my place at the podium, I discover the contest has ended.\n\nThere is cheering in the stands. I am sentenced to reign in a kingdom of sand.\nPLACEBO\n\nIt is possible to die of fright after being bitten by a non-venomous snake.\n\nAlso, in some cultures, to kill a man by pointing a bone at his heart.\n\nThese are two severe examples of the nocebo effect \u2014 from the Latin for \"I will harm.\" A third is when I forget to wear my lucky orange scarf and lose at craps.\n\nWilliam James writes that often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.\n\nHow often is often enough?\n\nWill faith alone finish this poem?\n\nWhen he ran out of morphine on the Tunisian front, Henry Beecher injected dying soldiers with saline instead. At the time he was relying on the strength of faith alone, but what he could not have known back in 1943 was that this solution in fact released a pain-relieving substance in the patient's aching brain.\n\nWhen asked to discuss his religious beliefs, Luis Bu\u00f1uel replied: I'm an atheist, thank God.\n\nDespair comes from failing to believe new things are possible.\n\nScience: one bold leap after another, suspended by a theory of invisible strings.\n\nObecalp: what the doctor scrawls on the prescription pad when the pharmacy runs out of science.\n\nPlato believed that to release another person from ignorance despite their initial reluctance was a great and noble thing \u2014 and yet every day he woke up and lived in the world as if it were real.\n\nAsleep beneath the sirens and the clashing of arms, who hears the angels gently plucking their inaudible tune?\n\nWho sees the black dog running through the night?\nTO LIVE HERE\n\nPaul Eluard\n\nI built a fire, the blue sky having abandoned me.\n\nA fire to befriend.\n\nA fire to introduce me to the winter night.\n\nA fire to live better.\n\nI fed it what the day had fed to me.\n\nForests, foliage, wheat fields, vines.\n\nNests and their birds, houses and their keys.\n\nInsects, flowers, furs, festivals.\n\nI lived with the solitary sound of crackling flames.\n\nWith the solitary perfume of their heat.\n\nI was like a boat coursing in closed water.\n\nLike the dead I had but one element.\nINFINITIVE INTERIOR\n\nTo be small among voices.\n\nTo wear the black hat.\n\nTo kneel in the shavings.\n\nTo speak of the nameless blue flowers.\n\nTo eat them.\n\nTo retreat to the torn red interior.\n\nTo hear the low engines approaching.\n\nTo button.\n\nTo hammer.\n\nTo have.\n\nTo have not.\n\nTo have sat by the sea and been rewarded with a pair of glinting wings.\n\nTo have held out for more.\n\nTo have had it.\n\nTo have held out for less.\nIDEAL WORLD\n\nNothing matters in an ideal world.\n\nNot the stones you skip,\n\nNot the fat birds overhead.\n\nRun your fingers through the sand all day.\n\nLie still as a ship at the bottom of the sea.\n\nStick out your tongue\n\nAnd taste the wrecked century\n\nIn a melting snowcone purchased for a peso.\n\nAll you taste is the taste of it.\n\nLight plucks the coins from your eyes,\n\nThe heart spends its store\n\nOn a few everlastings\n\nJutting from cracks in the boardwalk.\n\nCall it a kingdom nevertheless.\n\nWatch the light black canopy\n\nLower from the west\n\nWhere a rust-stained tanker spins\n\nA slow pirouette en route to oblivion\n\nVia Sudan.\n\nIf you feel lonely\n\nIt's because you were borne this way.\n\nIf there are clouds here\n\nThey must be ideal clouds.\n\nClouds you can see through.\nII\nLITTLE COMMENTARIES\n\nThere is no one centre of the universe.\n\nNICOLAUS COPERNICUS, COMMENTARIOLUS\nOn Possibility\n\nHere comes the train from Tehuantepec\n\nBringing lovers and rice.\n\nBringing last night's dream of floating ponies\n\nTo today's rusty gate.\n\nSee the faces at the station look up.\n\nSee the mystery deepen.\n\nThere is no train from Tehuantepec.\n\nHere it comes!\n\nOn Necessity\n\nAs a young man Galileo\n\nUnderstood very well\n\nThe workings of the pendulum\n\nBut not until he was an old man\n\nApproaching\n\nThe hour\n\nOf his death\n\nDid he devise\n\nThe pendulum clock.\nOn Shortcuts\n\nI know a painter\n\nWho fills every canvas with sky.\n\nThis makes his landscapes look lonely\n\nAnd his figures bereft.\n\nIt's a shortcut, he concedes.\n\nLike adding wings to men\n\nOr putting birds in poems.\n\nOn Attachment\n\nA house burns all night\n\nIn the middle of a field.\n\nA beautiful sight\n\nEven if the burning house\n\nDoes happen to be mine.\n\nSooner or later\n\nAll burning houses will be mine.\nOn the Fire Sermon\n\nBurning burning burning burning\n\nQuotes T. S. Eliot\n\nA man so famed\n\nFor his chilly demeanour\n\nNot even his pipe\n\nSeemed to give off smoke.\n\nOn Valleys\n\nTo be a valley\n\nFind a hill\n\nAnd lie down at its feet.\n\nOn Clouds\n\nTo be a cloud\n\nFind a hill\n\nAnd swallow it.\nOn the Enlightenment\n\nTake the thing you love most and cut it up.\n\nArrange the parts carefully\n\nAccording to the picture in your head.\n\nNow shine your mind at them.\n\nIf their laws come striding boldly forth at you\n\nYou will soon become a great man of your time.\n\nIf instead they lie there on the table bleeding beauty\n\nYou are probably a poet or a child.\n\nOn Moonlight\n\nMoonlight fills the bathroom sink.\n\nIf a person could drink from it\n\nShe would be her own ghost.\n\nOn Ghosts v. Zombies\n\nSoul without a body or body without a soul?\n\nLike choosing between an empty lake\n\nAnd the same empty lake.\nOn Abstract Expressionism\n\nAd Reinhardt\n\nFilled his black canvases\n\nWith everything he knew\n\nAbout Modern Art.\n\nRobert Rauschenberg\n\nEmptied his white canvases\n\nOf everything he knew\n\nAbout Modern Art.\n\nTogether they express\n\nEverything and Nothing\n\nThere is to know about art.\n\nOn Negative Capability\n\nA man and a woman\n\nSide by side\n\nNot speaking\n\nNot not speaking\n\nCross a moonlit plaza\n\nWithout plans.\nOn Love Poems\n\nA friend says relationships\n\nAre only good for two poems:\n\nOne at the beginning\n\nAnd one at the end.\n\nStevens says better to peddle\n\nPineapples than write love poems\n\nUnless you happen to be\n\nIn love, that is.\n\nWhen your lover shows up\n\nWith a basket of fruit\n\nThank him in advance\n\nFor the poem you will one day receive.\n\nOn First Lines\n\nThe first line should pry up\n\nA little corner of the soul\n\nAs the first ray of daylight\n\nPries open the sleeper's lids.\nOn Quandariness\n\nI do not know which to prefer\n\nThe beauty of Nova Scotia\n\nOr the beauty of France.\n\nDucks landing on the saltmarsh\n\nOr poached in their fat on my plate.\n\nOn Dining in Paris\n\nTake small bites.\n\nChew your food before swallowing.\n\nDo not expect the waiter to congratulate you.\n\nOn Drinking in Paris\n\nGreet the new Beaujolais\n\nWith a mixture of fondness and disdain\n\nLike a childhood friend from the provinces\n\nOr yet another Oscar-winning picture\n\nStarring G\u00e9rard Depardieu.\nOn Parakeets\n\nPractice concentrating on an empty stomach.\n\nPractice making love with a terrible sunburn.\n\nPractice walking with little dried peas in your shoes.\n\nSprinkle sand in your food.\n\nSprinkle salt in your tea.\n\nPitch your tent in a howling gale.\n\nSoon you will be ready to live in the house on the hill\n\nNext door to the house full of parakeets.\n\nOn Could\n\nThere is no cake in the oven, alas\n\nBut a small bit of effort\n\nCould put one there.\n\nOn Travel\n\nNot past my Father's Gate\n\nShe Vowed \u2014\n\nAs she Closed her Eyes\n\nAnd lit out for Zanzibar.\nOn Borges\n\nPut one dream\n\nInside another.\n\nOn Oblivion\n\nThe most harrowing thing\n\nAbout outer space\n\nClaim the astronauts\n\nWho have set foot there\n\nIs not so much the darkness\n\nAs the silence.\n\nBeethoven heard it\n\nAnd composed his final symphony.\n\nOn opening night\n\nHe kept his back to the audience\n\nAnd when the orchestra reached\n\nThe music's echoing close\n\nHe continued to conduct for several bars.\n\nEmbarrassment\n\nRippled through the room\n\nLike cosmic wind.\n\nBut not through Beethoven\n\nBy then light years away.\nOn Romanticism\n\nOut of nowhere\n\nBlows a baleful wind\n\nTo explain your heart to you.\n\nOn Flags\n\nFew things are more stirring\n\nThan a flag in the wind.\n\nA problem of aesthetics vs. ethics.\n\nAll morning I study\n\nA tea towel drying on the line.\n\nA flag without a country\n\nIs like desire without an end.\nOn Metaphor\n\nWhen Job laments that the Lord\n\nHath put my brethren far from me\n\nIt is up to you to decide\n\nIf he is speaking metaphorically.\n\nOn Invective\n\nFuck you and the horse you rode in on\n\nIs often just another way of saying come back.\n\nOn Ad Campaigns in the Underworld\n\nBet you can't eat just one\n\nSmiled Pluto\n\nAs he held out his handful of pain.\nOn Impossibility\n\nI try to write \"automatically\"\n\nBut keep stopping to look at the sky.\n\nWords are in it\n\nAnd a great blue silence\n\nThat fills the distance between.\n\nOn Irrational Numbers\n\nAhoy cries the sunrise\n\nTo the sea's flagging captains\n\nAmong whom you number\n\nInfinity plus one.\n\nOn Seville\n\nEvery tree is an orange tree.\n\nEvery pigeon a dove.\nOn Geological Time\n\nEnjoy the view while you can,\n\nMt. Everest.\n\nOn Middle Names\n\nVictor\n\nSelwyn\n\nHamish\n\nAdeline\n\nAurora\n\nSomerset\n\nLoomis\n\nAnd Stearns\n\nSet out for a picnic\n\nBeneath the green\n\nNever trees.\nOn Normandy\n\nFate piles up\n\nOn the bloody Norman shore.\n\nIf you must swim there\n\nSwim on your back.\n\nOn Last Lines\n\nThe last line should strike like a lover's complaint.\n\nYou should never see it coming.\n\nAnd you should never hear the end of it.\n\nOn Vanishing Acts\n\nThe magician says watch closely.\n\nThe lover says close your eyes.\n\nOn Duration\n\nTo cross an ocean\n\nYou must love the ocean\n\nBefore you love the far shore.\nOn Pi\u00f1atas\n\nNo point in swinging the bat\n\nUnless the blindfold's secure.\n\nOn Fireworks\n\nRadiant pitchforks thunder in the now\n\nTrailing spectres of is.\n\nOn Ambition\n\nLike love\n\nIt grows impatient\n\nOf both rivals and delays.\n\nOn Gold\n\nUnlike love\n\nIts value increases\n\nWhen it sits in the vault.\nOn Yesterday\n\nOf all the bright fruits in the market\n\nI bought only one.\n\nNow my peach\n\nIs a pit.\n\nPlant it deeper.\n\nOn Winter\n\nIt is a good rule of thumb\n\nTo leave your house at least once.\n\nIf you have a little dog\n\nYou can take him for a little walk.\n\nIf a big dog, a big walk.\n\nBut you cannot cross an open field\n\nWhere snow is melting\n\nWithout growing a little bit\n\nOlder with every step.\nOn Fountains\n\nJoy alone upholds the moment\n\nWhen the sparkling ascent\n\nIs overwhelmed.\n\nOn Joy\n\nJoy unmixed with sorrow\n\nIs like a fountain turned off at night.\n\nOn Inverse Relations\n\nThe pleasure I feel\n\nWhen I say the word \"trousers\"\n\nIs equal, exactly\n\nTo the discomfort I feel\n\nWhen I say the word \"slacks.\"\nOn Moving Day\n\nTwo houses stand aloof\n\nIn their emptiness.\n\nThe same dusty sunlight\n\nLicks the floorboards\n\nOf your future and your past.\n\nIt is good\n\nTo be homeless\n\nFor an hour.\n\nOn Exile\n\nOne of the richest men in Rome\n\nSeneca knew many pleasures in life.\n\nIn particular, it is said\n\nHe loved to dine on quail\n\nAt a citrus-wood table\n\nWith ivory legs.\n\nBut he also knew\n\nThe fickle winds of Empire.\n\nFar from home\n\nWithout a friend\n\nOr lover near\n\nWith but a thin gruel\n\nBefore you\n\nAnd plank for a pillow\n\nRecall his recollection\n\nOf these pleasures in a letter\n\nTo his mother from the tower:\n\nBetween them and me\n\nI have kept a wide gap.\n\nOn Evolution\n\nPlace your face\n\nInto your hands.\n\nA perfect fit!\nOn Relativity\n\nA pygmy hippopotamus\n\nIs roughly the size\n\nOf a large family dog.\n\nA capybara\n\nIs an enormous guinea pig\n\nRoughly the size\n\nOf a very small horse.\n\nThe smallest horses\n\nWear very small shoes\n\nRoughly the size\n\nA fairly large person would wear\n\nDuring infancy\n\nA brief phase\n\nIf you are human\n\nA lifetime\n\nIf you are a fly.\n\nOn the New Darkness\n\nWhat's wrong\n\nWith the Old Darkness?\nOn Satisfaction\n\nMake lists\n\nOf things you have already done.\n\nPleasure exists\n\nIn crossing them off one by one.\n\nOn La Gioconda\n\nCrowds press in to glimpse her terrible smile.\n\nWhat diet of secrets sustains it?\n\nThe crowds soon tire\n\nAnd retreat to the buzzing caf\u00e9.\n\nAloof behind her varnish and her bulletproof veil\n\nShe casts her gaze on nothing now \u2014\n\nThe greatest, said Da Vinci\n\nAmong all great things found here among us.\nOn Impediments\n\nChildren play ball\n\nIn the crowded plaza\n\nNot in spite of the crowd\n\nBut because of it.\n\nOn Riding Backwards on Trains\n\nThrough the red hills and over green dells\n\nThe shock of it shakes from you\n\nEndless farewells.\n\nThere goes a fountain. There goes a goat.\n\nBack to the future\n\nHeart in your throat.\n\nOn the Verb Esperar\n\nIn Madrid you may wait your whole life for salvation\n\nWhile hoping all day for your turn at the bank.\nOn Forgiveness\n\nIt is best to forgive all sins in advance\n\nBecause afterwards it can be hard.\n\nOn Advice\n\nDo not offer advice\n\nAnd do not solicit it.\n\nSeek wisdom within.\n\nBut do be sure to bring\n\nA pair of long underwear\n\nFor those long cold hours\n\nIn the desert at night.\n\nOn Space Travel\n\nNot to see the frozen heavens up close\n\nBut to see our leaky planet from afar.\nOn Common Sense\n\nAristarchus of Samos\n\nSealed his fate as a footnote\n\nBy pointing out the movement of the Earth around the Sun\n\nTo Aristotle of Stagira\n\nWho pointed out birds in the sky\n\nKeeping pace with it.\n\nOn St. Augustine\n\nLove and do what you will\n\nIs a dangerous slogan\n\nTo plaster on the walls\n\nOf a freshman dorm in spring.\n\nOn Madame Bovary\n\nMisanthropy starts at home.\n\nSo great was Flaubert's\n\nGrasp of pitiless fact\n\nHe cast himself as a woman\n\nAnd punished her with all\n\nThe love in his heart.\nOn Beauty\n\nNoon comes hammering down on the harbour\n\nRinging all its bells.\n\nMasts tip\n\nThis way and that\n\nScratching God's name on the vault.\n\nOn the Seine\n\nBeggar sailor soldier thief\n\nAnd the dregs of Saint Joan\n\nSlip black as God's mirror\n\nBeneath your bright bateaux mouches.\n\nOn Suicide\n\nPeople who commit suicide don't fail to believe in life.\n\nThey fail to believe in death.\nOn the Logic of Dreams\n\nWhile in dreams it is true\n\nAnything can happen\n\nDreams often seem bound\n\nBy inexplicable rules.\n\nIn this way they resemble Poetry\n\nAstronomy, Geometry, Love . . .\n\nOn Church Bells\n\nEvery\n\nHour\n\nOn\n\nThe\n\nHour\n\nWhat\n\nStirs\n\nThis\n\nSleepy\n\nNowhere\n\nIs\n\nOld\n\nNews\nOn Hummingbirds\n\nThe smaller the heart the swifter the wings.\n\nOn White Flowers\n\nBy moonlight the lily dominates the field.\n\nOn Clear Nights\n\nAt most two thousand stars\n\nCan be seen with the naked eye from earth.\n\nA difficult number to grapple with.\n\nToo large, and, on the other hand, too small.\n\nA simple mathematical equation\n\nMay throw the problem into relief.\n\nConsider a battlefield.\n\nThe fighting has ended\n\nAnd the bodies lie still in the grass.\n\nHow many dead soldiers\n\nEqual the sky overhead?\nOn Antigone\n\nLaw spoke\n\nAnd the land bit its lip.\n\nWhy spit in the wind?\n\nLove too is a law.\n\nOn Where You Live\n\nSomewhere I have never been\n\nThat you\n\nBent over your books\n\nIn snug bronze lamplight\n\nBeyond\n\nNight's silvered reminiscences\n\nWill never see.\nOn Paradise\n\nNo Then.\n\nNo My.\n\nNo Soul.\n\nNo Like.\n\nNo To.\n\nNo The.\n\nNo Lark.\n\nNo At.\n\nNo Break.\n\nNo Of.\n\nNo Day.\n\nNo Arising.\n\nNo From.\n\nNo Sullen.\n\nNo Earth.\n\nNo Sings.\n\nNo Hymns.\n\nNo At.\n\nNo Heavens.\n\nNo Gate.\nOn Everyone\n\nEveryone loves a balloon in the sky.\n\nIt is head-shaped and floating away.\n\nIt knows not why it goes\n\nNor where it will be when it gets there.\n\nIt wags its little tail and disappears.\nIII\nTHE WISE MAN\n\nI am not a wise man. This makes my life difficult in certain ways. But in other ways it simplifies things. I find it hard to sit still very long before I get up and wander the halls in my hat for example. On the other hand I stay warm and keep moving. Could these ways be the same way? A wise man could tell you. A wise man would look out his window and see not a row of low clouds rolling east like a trainload of coal through a crossroads, but a lit glimpse of the infinite, the wise man's only home. A wise man might think of his childhood and smile. Often in a quandary I ask myself what would a wise man do? A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees, said a wise man, and when I look out at the spruce I wonder what a wise man sees. A wise man might laugh at such questions. As for me I laugh often, but I don't get the joke. \nTHE TRUE BELIEVER\n\nThere are only two ways of reacting to life. Every scripture in the world will tell you this. Choose the wrong one and no amount of digging will save you. Before me an old woman plucks a stubborn hair from her cheek. Behind me a child weeps into her spinach. I'm the one on her knees with a shovel, wiping starbursts of spit from her chin. Each day rises with the promise of news. Sometimes it isn't time for so long I forget what I'm hoping it's time for.\nTRYING\n\nFor a long time we looked at the world and thought not. Then we looked at our lives and thought maybe. Now we are trying. We bought a new set of sheets for the bed. We bought a thermometer and a book.\n\n*\n\nI find the book on the whole reassuring. It gives lots of examples using real-life names like Gail, Audrey, and Dr. Smith, as well as comic touches here and there like Dr. Rhea Sure, who keeps popping up on Gail's chart. But Appendix K does contain some trying phrases. What, for example, is a Hamster Egg Penetration Assay? What is Nonstimulated Oocyte Retrieval In ( Office ) Fertilization? What is the Male Factor? What is Within Normal Limits?\n\n*\n\nIf procreation were a matter to be decided purely on the basis of rational thought, would the human race still exist? Schopenhauer thought not. Every evening, rain or shine, he would walk his poodle, Atma, for two solid hours through the streets of pre-war Frankfurt, trying to imagine a world as sterile and crystalline as the moon.\n\n*\n\nI try to find it reassuring that Gail is thirty-eight.\n\n*\n\nAfter swallowing a tiny vial of poison that had weakened over time around his neck, Napoleon escaped his island exile on Elba in the autumn of 1812, having built up a tiny island empire there, replete with tiny army and navy, tiny copper mines, and fields of tiny cabbages and beets. When his ship touched shore he rode bravely out to meet his former soldiers alone and dismounted to address them. The entire Grande Arm\u00e9e turned around on the spot and escorted Le Petit Corporal back to Paris, where he renewed his ancient vow to die trying.\n\n*\n\nThis morning I tried on my bikini while my husband walked the dog. I turned around and used a compact to study my backside in the mirror above the sink. The mirror, perhaps mercifully, was dusty, and I did not get a good look.\n\n*\n\nThe majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin, said Balzac.\n\n*\n\nMy husband, thank heavens, is cooperative. He has even read a few pages of the book. And yet sometimes I worry that it is his fault. That either he is not trying hard enough, or that he is trying too hard, or that no matter how hard he tries or does not try it is his Male Factor that is the problem.\n\n*\n\nWhile searching for advice on overcoming adversity, I find a book called Tom Cruise: Overcoming Adversity. I learn that the public only sees the glamour \u2014 but Phelan Powell shows the significant obstacles Tom Cruise has overcome in order to live his life of pampered opulence. In Cruise's case dyslexia was one obstacle \u2014 it nearly cost him the part of the barman in Cocktail ( he thought it was a film about cockatiels and told his agent he \"didn't do parrots\" ) and he bought his own wildebeest to research the part of Lieutenant Maverick Mitchell in Top Gnu. This description is a direct cut-and-paste from an Amazon.com review by a reader named Henry Raddick in London, UK, who gives the book five stars and titles his review: \"Pig-ignorance no bar to fame and fortune.\" I try to picture what Henry Raddick looks like, and does he live with his mother.\n\n*\n\nThe book lives on the back of the toilet and I try to visit it from time to time throughout the day. Sometimes I just look at it. Sometimes I go in there and sit down and open it at random and get lost looking at the pictures. The follicle develops. The egg begins its journey down the tube . . .\n\n*\n\nThe human soul, wrote Aristotle in his treatise on ethics, has an irrational element which is shared with the animals, and a rational element which is distinctly human. In order to live a virtuous life one must try to achieve some sort of balance between them. In his Poetics, however, Aristotle points out that it is exclusively the irrational upon which the wonderful depends for its chief effects.\n\n*\n\nEvery morning, before getting up to make breakfast, I record my temperature down to the tenth of a degree on a chart, and draw a line between yesterday's and today's. I compare my progress with the sample in the book and try not to worry.\n\n*\n\nPeople who believe in God will tell you that \"trying\" to believe will not work. And yet some believers insist that simply wanting to believe is enough. I keep flipping back and forth between trying and wanting to try.\n\n*\n\nIn his early twenties it was said that Jean Cocteau could bring himself to orgasm without touching himself, purely by the power of his imagination. Here I am trying to live, he wrote, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me to live.\n\n*\n\nWhen my two oldest friends write to tell me their good news, I try not to let my jealousy show, and sprinkle exclamation marks liberally throughout my replies.\n\n*\n\nOften, I have read, the very act of \"trying\" can undermine one's prospects of success. This makes trying difficult. The trick, they say, is to try without actually \"trying.\" Having finally decided to start trying we must keep on trying while trying not to feel like we are \"trying\" at all. We must above all try not to worry. Sometimes I worry that I am not trying not to try hard enough.\n\n*\n\nIt is one thing to marvel at the miracle of life, but quite another to try to explain it. Almost every freshman biology textbook printed in the last fifty years contains the famous Miller-Urey experiment of 1953, in which Harold Urey and Stanley Miller tried to simulate early atmospheric conditions on Earth, in order to see what they could generate by adding an electrical spark. What they discovered were amino acids, the basic building blocks of life. From there, most books lead straight into a discussion of evolution, prompting the student to conclude that scientists have thus proven life can be created from a few nonliving chemicals. We tell this story to beginning students of biology, admitted Nobel laureate George Wald in his 1954 article, The Origin of Life, as though it represents a triumph of reason over mysticism. In fact, he points out, it is very nearly the opposite. \nTRANS-NEPTUNIAN OBJECT\n\nThe time and place and manner of my death are three facts that don't exist yet.\n\nFacts exist for whole centuries and then suddenly cease.\n\nPluto used to be a planet and now it is a chunk of debris, number 134340.\n\nMy grandmother's house stands on the hill above the sea where she left it.\n\nWhen I come back to visit I discover a crater in its place.\n\nThis room is full of facts.\n\nAll day I let the cat out, let it in, then let it back out again.\n\nI mean this metaphorically.\n\nSome facts never exist.\n\nIt is winter.\n\nIt is summer.\n\nAll night the branches tap at the glass.\nTELESCOPIC INTERIOR\n\nSolar wind singing in a bottlecap.\n\nDistant drone of stone\n\nDrilled through for more stone\n\nLess prone to collapse.\n\nAdd fire. Add feast days and photons\n\nAnd glue the whole mess\n\nTogether in a nerve net\n\nSwinging through the cosmos on a peg.\n\nIf you can sleep through this\n\nSend me a lullaby\n\nFrom your crib of green dreams.\n\nDown here the weather's red\n\nAnd the century's turning\n\nEvery storm back to port.\n\nAt the last resort\n\nThey're selling sand as souvenirs.\n\nThe roses have never looked lonelier,\n\nLess photogenic, but get this \u2014\n\nThey're going ahead with the festival.\n\nThey're addressing the peacock dilemma.\n\nThey're dredging the harbour.\n\nThey're shooting pitchforks at the moon.\n\nThrough a cracked telescope\n\nI watch the late show unfold\n\nIts milky arabesque across the deep.\n\nHow could I sleep? The brightest star\n\nIn the sky tonight is a planet\n\nCalled Tomorrow.\n\nI used to live there.\n\nI should know.\nTHE LAST THING\n\nIn one version heaven is a tidy German town.\n\nIn another it's a shining patch of glory at the centre of the earth.\n\nRead the various accounts and you will learn that happiness consists in greater happiness ahead.\n\nYet every story about the future becomes, in time, a story about the past.\n\nAnother story about the past: you live in a town on the surface of the earth.\n\nThings happen in this town.\n\nA dog barks. A bell rings. A cart overturns on the sidewalk and spills a winter's worth of oranges in your path.\n\nMeanwhile astronomers predict a \"Big Rip\" in the cosmos resulting in a cold, dark, never-ending end.\n\nWhat kind of happiness is this?\n\nDrink your coffee.\n\nUnplug your phone.\n\nDon't believe the stories about life outside your town.\nTHE SOLITARY ANGLER (II)\n\nMa Yuan of the Song Dynasty was famous for painting \"just one corner\" of his canvases. His solitary angler sits small as a stone above a dark sea dissolving into mist. The point is, there is much we can't see.\n\nMan should be a windowpane through which God's light can shine. In his dark night, St. John saw this.\n\nSo long had it been since he'd seen a woman's foot, when he met Joan Baez, Thomas Merton asked her to remove a shoe. Paradise is still ours but we do not know it, he wrote.\n\nSnow falls on birch trees and the branches bend to earth.\n\nIf only I had the tiniest grain of wisdom, wrote Lao Tzu, I should walk in the Great Way, and my only fear would be to stray from it.\n\nMy little way, wrote Th\u00e9r\u00e8se de Lisieux, stroking death's sleepy head nestled in the damp folds of her sheets.\n\nThe brain is a small grey tissue afloat on a wave. Everything we know and can ever know about existence is there.\n\nMan stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark.\n\nOne way to know is unknowing, yet another way reports, which must be different than not knowing.\n\nHow else would we know not.\nABSTRACT FIRES\n\n(Mixed media. 1972\u2013present)\n\n#1. Candy canes, tinfoil, flamenco guitar.\n\n#2. Fork, butterfly, dog hair, dust.\n\n#3. Trampoline, harpsichord, rust.\n\n#4. Thumbtacks, chewing gum, forklift, car.\n\n#5. Light bulb, lipstick, ceiling fan, string.\n\n#6. Bathtub, shaving cream, flag.\n\n#7. Disco ball, flashlight, dental floss, diamond ring.\n\n#8. Sand, tin cans, oilcloth rag.\n\n#9. Termites, teacup, artist, microscope.\n\n#10. Sequins, hairdryer, liquid smoke.\n\n#11. Work boots, aquarium, encyclopedia, peach.\n\n#12. Cigarette, rope.\n\n#13. Paper bag, rose.\n\n#14. Glass jug, snow.\nDIM-LIT INTERIOR\n\nI'm done crying in my beer about love.\n\nMy days of riding the shiny brass school bus are behind me as well.\n\nThe changes come slowly but suddenly.\n\nOne day the sun will burn so brightly it will turn all our seas into vast boiling vats.\n\nFreedom comes from understanding our inability to change things.\n\nSo lead me O Destiny whither is ordained by your decree.\n\nJust please don't force me to vacuum the stairs.\n\nThe quiet that follows the storm may be the same as the quiet before it.\n\nLet the wind blow.\n\nLet it blow down each tree on the bright boulevard.\n\nThe things I would most like to change are the things that make me believe change is possible.\nENOUGH\n\nI am wearing dark glasses inside the house\n\nTo match my dark mood.\n\nI have left all the sugar out of the pie.\n\nMy rage is a kind of domestic rage.\n\nI learned it from my mother\n\nWho learned it from her mother before her\n\nAnd so on.\n\nSurely the Greeks had a word for this.\n\nNow surely the Germans do.\n\nThe more words a person knows\n\nTo describe her private sufferings\n\nThe more distantly she can perceive them.\n\nI repeat the names of all the cities I've known\n\nAnd watch an ant drag its crooked shadow home.\n\nWhat does it mean to love the life we've been given?\n\nTo act well the part that's been cast for us?\n\nWind. Light. Fire. Time.\n\nA train whistles through the far hills.\n\nOne day I plan to be riding it.\nVANISHING INTERIOR\n\nLittle patches of grass disappear\n\nIn the jaws of lusty squirrels\n\nWho slip into the spruce.\n\nCars collapse into parts.\n\nSpring dissolves into summer,\n\nThe kitten into the cat.\n\nA tray of drinks departs from the buffet\n\nAnd voila! the party's over.\n\nAll that's left are some pickles\n\nAnd a sprig of wilting parsley on the rug.\n\nWhen I think of all those\n\nGong-tormented Mesozoic seas\n\nI feel a ripple of extinction\n\nAnd blow a smoke ring through the trees.\n\nSoon there will be nothing left here but sky.\n\nWhen I think about the fact\n\nI am not thinking about you\n\nIt is a new way of thinking about you.\nPLAIN GREEK\n\nFate's wind can be cold it is true.\n\nWhat is the wind to you\n\nBut an impression of wind\n\nA phantasia\n\nAs Epictetus puts it\n\nIn his Handbook\n\nA fact you must weather\n\nLike any other fact\n\nSuch as daylight adultery taxes\n\nAnd naturally death.\n\nFace the facts.\n\nThey do not matter.\n\nWhat matters is the use\n\nYou put them to.\n\nThe Iliad consists of nothing but facts.\n\nEpictetus wipes his nose\n\nAnd explains this\n\nTo the students growing restless at his feet.\n\nFact prompted Paris.\n\nFact prompted Helen to follow.\n\nIf fact had prompted Menelaus\n\nTo count his blessings\n\nIn the face of Helen's absence\n\nNot only The Iliad\n\nWould have been lost to us\n\nBut The Odyssey too.\n\nWhen the wind blows\n\nDo not long for warmer climes.\n\nEpictetus puts it\n\nIn plain Greek.\n\nWipe your nose\n\nAnd do not accuse God.\n\nIf all is fire\n\nYou may warm your hands\n\nBy thrusting them here\n\nInto this burning book.\nIDEAL TREE\n\nGod is in the forest counting trees.\n\nYou are in the city writing poems.\n\nYou put a tree in a poem.\n\nA tree without roots or branches\n\nOr squirrels or sap\n\nWithout even a shadow\n\nIn its crown, for it grows\n\nWithout even a crown.\n\nYou are so pleased with your poem\n\nAnd with the sound it makes\n\nWhen you read it out loud\n\nAnd when you whisper it\n\nInto your pillow at night\n\nYou call your poem\n\n\"The Tree of Everlasting Love\"\n\nAnd plant it lovingly\n\nBetween the waiting pages\n\nOf an unwritten book.\n\nThere it dwells for many years\n\nUntainted by moss or regard.\n\nAnd when you finally publish\n\nYour book of sad poems\n\nNo one even notices the tree.\n\nNo one sees it burning coldly\n\nThrough all the foggy mornings\n\nOf your misinterpretable world.\nA PERFECT EMERGENCY\n\nIt was already aflame when I spotted it there in the parking lot.\n\nKids were standing around throwing sticks at it, kicking dirt in its face.\n\nAll I could do was look on in pity as it thrashed at the air like a tiny, vengeful sun.\n\nBut like a tiny, vengeful sun, the burning bush didn't want pity. When I approached with my hands in my pockets, it shook out its golden locks and sang in a language I could see.\n\nI am the Unburnt Bush! it cried. I am Burning but Flourishing! I am Swallowed but I am not Consumed!\n\nIn my head was a page from a musty old book with its useless list of Latin verbs. Before me I could see all the lives I might have lived, lined up and leaping through the same burning gate.\n\nIt was a perfect emergency. The only thing worth saving was the blaze.\nROMANTIC INTERIOR\n\nWind rips splendour from the trees\n\nAnd lays it at our feet.\n\nSome of us hungry,\n\nSome of us lucky to be upright at all.\n\nSeason past sweetness.\n\nStuck in the throat with a fork.\n\nA speck in the spectrum\n\nSpins into a wet little planet\n\nStudded with heartlust,\n\nFlooded with pamphlets\n\nFor classes on how to forget.\n\nWhere Keats sees a reaper\n\nAsleep on the granary floor,\n\nHer scythe set by quietly,\n\nWind playing games\n\nWith the husk of her hair,\n\nI see a dead squirrel.\n\nIt's the end of October\n\nAnd I don't have a costume.\n\nPast lives clutter my closet\n\nA long way from home.\n\nThere's a hole in the ground\n\nWhere my house used to be.\n\nA hole in my head\n\nWhere my heart used to be.\n\nI'm climbing a hillside.\n\nA green patch of laughter. \nEXIT\n\nLow cirrocumulus clouds in the west.\n\nWar in the east.\n\nLift teabag from cup.\n\nAdd milk.\n\nAsk if it is happiness\n\nOr pleasure you prefer.\n\nWatch the storm churn to the surface.\n\nShadows gather in the valley below.\n\nTo count them is to know their many shapes\n\nCannot be counted.\n\nThey must be numbered among.\nNOTES\n\n\"Amor Fati\": The passage in quotations is Simone Weil's, from a letter to Father Jean-Marie Perrin in which she recounts her spiritual autobiography. It appears in the collection Waiting for God.\n\n\"Occasional Poem\": The line about learning Spanish owes a debt to my father. This poem is for him.\n\n\"The Solitary Angler\": The lines \"There is no greater calamity \/ Than to underestimate the strength of your enemy\" are adapted from a Zen proverb.\n\n\"On White Flowers\": This poem owes a debt to my mother, and is for her.\n\n\"Dim-Lit Interior\": The line \"So lead me O Destiny whither is ordained by your decree\" is adapted from a translation of Cleanthes of Assos's \"Hymn to Zeus.\"\n\n\"Enough\": The lines \"What does it mean to love the life we've been given? \/ To act well the part that's been cast for us?\" owe a debt to Epictetus.\n\n\"A Perfect Emergency\": The italicized passage uses language adapted from the Eastern Orthodox Church, and from the mottos for the Presbyterian Church of Ireland and the Church of Scotland. \nACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nGrateful acknowledgement is made to the editors of the following journals who kindly published poems from this manuscript: Alaska Quarterly Review, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Commonline, Court Green, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Fou, jubilat, MiPoesias, Pleiades, A Public Space, Ryga, SmallStations, and Washington Square.\n\nAdditionally, some of this work was represented in anthologies, and I am grateful to the editors of these as well: The Canarium Anthology, Vol. 1. ( Canarium Books, 2008 ), VERSschumggel\/reVERSible ( Wonderhorn \/ Editions du Noro\u00eet \/ Literaturwekstatt ).\n\nSeveral poems from the manuscript were published in a chapbook, Interiors, with art by Shawn Kurunero ( Montreal: Delirium Press, 2006 ).\n\n\"Dim-Lit Interior\" was featured in the Poem of the Week section in February 2008 on the website of the Parliamentary Poet Laureate.\n\nThanks to my family, friends, teachers, and colleagues for their love and guidance throughout the writing of this book.\n\nThank you, Chicu. Ideal reader.\n\nAuthor Photograph: Anna Knott\n\nSUZANNE BUFFAM'S first collection of poetry, Past Imperfect, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and was named a Globe and Mail \"Top 100\" Book of the Year. She won the 1998 cbc Literary Award for Poetry and has twice been shortlisted for a Pushcart Prize. Born and raised in Canada, she currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.\nABOUT THE PUBLISHER\n\nHouse of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi's commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada's pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as \"Publisher of the Year.\" \n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\nMore than Matter?\n\nWhat Humans Really Are\n\n## Keith Ward\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2010 Keith Ward  \nThis edition copyright \u00a9 2010 Lion Hudson\n\nThe author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work\n\nA Lion Book  \nan imprint of  \nLion Hudson plc  \nWilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road,  \nOxford OX2 8DR, England  \nwww.lionhudson.com  \nISBN 978 0 7459 6247 4 (print)  \nISBN 978 0 7459 5858 3 (epub)  \nISBN 978 0 7459 5857 6 (Kindle)  \nISBN 978 0 7459 5859 0 (pdf)\n\nDistributed by:  \nUK: Marston Book Services, PO Box 269, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4YN  \nUSA: Trafalgar Square Publishing, 814 N. Franklin Street, Chicago, IL 60610  \nUSA Christian Market: Kregel Publications, PO Box 2607, Grand Rapids, MI 49501\n\nFirst edition 2010  \n10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0  \nFirst electronic edition 2011\n\nAll rights reserved\n\nFor more information on the author, Keith Ward, please log on to  \nwww.keithward.org.uk.\n\nCover design: Victoria Dokas  \nCover image: Andy Taylor Smith\/Corbis\n\nA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library\n\n## Contents\n\nCover\n\nTitle Page\n\nCopyright\n\nIntroduction\n\nChapter 1 Dualism, minds, and bodies: the problem stated\n\nChapter 2 A range of philosophical views about what is really real\n\nChapter 3 The limits of knowledge\n\nChapter 4 Putting minds first\n\nChapter 5 Questions of personal identity\n\nChapter 6 The place of human minds in the cosmos\n\nChapter 7 Dual-aspect idealism\n\nChapter 8 Metaphysics and common-sense philosophy\n\nChapter 9 In defence of dualism\n\nChapter 10 Consciousness, value, and purpose\n\nChapter 11 Thoughts and perceptions\n\nChapter 12 Minds and moral values\n\nChapter 13 Acting for the sake of good alone\n\nChapter 14 The idealist view of life\n\nChapter 15 Can we still speak of the soul?\n\nNotes\n\nShort bibliography\n\nGlossary\n\n## Introduction\n\n\"You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve-cells and their associated molecules.\" (Francis Crick)\n\nThis book exists to put a different view. The success of the physical sciences has led to a quite widely held view among the scientifically literate that all that exists is matter or some sort of physical stuff. Human beings are often presented as the accidental results of millions of genetic copying-mistakes and freak accidents of nature. Their cherished ideas of value, freedom, and purpose are illusions, since humans are nothing but the puppets of blind and mechanical forces of nature, and their consciousness is doomed to inevitable extinction, having never been more than a by-product of cosmic processes to which they are completely unimportant.\n\nI believe that this picture of human life is both scientifically questionable and philosophically naive. Moreover, it undermines the belief that human beings, with their thoughts, feelings, ambitions, and moral challenges and ideals, have intrinsic worth, and that worth lies in their mental lives, not in the behaviour of their nerve-cells, however complicated. It is this view, justifying a commitment to the distinctive value of human consciousness and responsible action, to which the deepest reflection on the nature of our cosmos points. That is what I hope to show.\n\nThe view that prioritizes human thought, feeling, and action over the behaviour of physical particles is often called humanism, embodying a commitment to human welfare, interpreted as the fulfilment of the uniquely personal experiences and creative capacities of humans. In that sense I am a humanist; but I think humanism requires ontological backing. That is, there must be good reasons for seeing human experiences and actions as important and human persons as of intrinsic value in a universe like this.\n\nI intend to produce philosophical reasons for such ontological backing, and I find these reasons intellectually compelling. I make little or no reference to religious considerations, based on revelation or religious authority. But I think there is little doubt that many religious believers will find that the arguments I propound have a natural affinity with some religious beliefs about the human soul, and I myself think that some convergence of humanist and religious beliefs will provide the most adequate view of human persons that is available to us.\n\nBut I have confined myself to sustained reflection on the nature of being human, trying to point to phenomena that are available to anyone, whatever their religious beliefs or lack of them. The motto of the book is in fact the reversal of the opening quotation from Crick, and it goes like this: you, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are much more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve-cells, and that \"more\" gives each personal life a significance and value that expresses and points to the ultimate meaning of the universe itself. Human persons are not accidental mistakes in a pointless perambulation of fundamental particles. They are a window into the inner reality, value, and purpose of the cosmos.\n\n## Chapter One\n\n## Dualism, minds, and bodies: the problem stated\n\nGilbert Ryle was an important twentieth-century British philosopher who is famous for attacking what he called \"the myth of Cartesian dualism\", the myth of the \"ghost in the machine\". This is the \"myth\" that minds are different from and more than matter. But was Ryle right? And does his attack also undermine (without meaning to) belief in the unique dignity and value of human persons, which is centred on the nature of their inner experiences and responsible actions? Those are the central questions of this book.\n\nOnce upon a time, when I was studying philosophy at Oxford, my supervisor was Gilbert Ryle. He was one of Britain's outstanding philosophers in the 1950s and 60s, and I was one of his last pupils. He was also my moral tutor, though he said, \"I do not know what a moral tutor is, and I hope I never have to find out.\" And, as far as I know, he never did.\n\nAlthough not as well known as Wittgenstein these days, Ryle was extremely influential and was a kind of Oxford equivalent of Wittgenstein, holding views about philosophy that were very similar to those of the Cambridge philosopher. In a sense, this is a book about Wittgenstein as much as it is about Ryle \u2013 except that people get so emotional about different interpretations of Wittgenstein's gnomic philosophy that I have thought it better only to make rather muted claims in that area. When I was teaching philosophy in Cambridge, Professor Anscombe, who translated and edited Wittgenstein's later work and often discussed it with me, terrified me so much that I have decided that it is safer to leave discussion of Wittgenstein to acknowledged experts like the Oxford philosopher P. M. Hacker. Nevertheless, I believe that much of what I say about Ryle would apply to Wittgenstein, or at least to many popular interpretations of Wittgenstein, as well.\n\nIt is worth talking about Ryle because he was a very good and significant twentieth-century philosopher, and because he wrote the classic critique of Descartes' dualism (usually called Cartesian dualism), the view that the mind and the body are two distinct substances. Ryle originated the expression \"the ghost in the machine\" to describe Descartes' view, implying that the mind is a ghost (an illusion, really) wandering in the machine of the body. I strongly object to this description, though it has been very influential, and want to try to rehabilitate Descartes, at least to some extent. I want to suggest that mind and consciousness are different from, something over and above, molecules and matter, and that they are not at all ghostly. And I will argue that having such a belief is important if you put a great value on individual human experience and responsible moral action.\n\nRyle is particularly interesting because he rejected dualism, but he was still a humanist. He thought that you could defend human uniqueness, freedom, and responsibility without having a belief that minds are something more than matter. I do not think this is true, but examining Ryle's arguments is a good way of finding out what you really think about this issue. In fact, it will take me some time to get around to considering Ryle in detail, as there are problems that have to be cleared up first about the nature of philosophy and about differing philosophical views of the nature of reality. I will use the word \"metaphysics\" to mean a general view about what kinds of things are real (whether, for instance, there are minds in addition to bodies, and whether everything is determined by laws of nature or whether the will is free). Ryle had one such philosophical view, but, oddly enough, he did not think that he had.\n\nHe was certainly not a materialist, a person who thinks that everything that exists, including minds, is purely physical, so that minds are \"nothing but matter\". Nevertheless, his rejection of mind as a distinct substance suggests that, if you are going to have a grand metaphysical theory about what kinds of things exist, you will probably end up as some sort of materialist. And his rejection of materialism has come to seem rather implausible to philosophers like Daniel Dennett, who, as a pupil of Ryle roughly contemporary with me, is a more overt materialist. That is partly because Ryle objected to having any metaphysical theory at all and argued that such grand theories are the results of \"logical howlers\" or grammatical mistakes. His aim in his best-known book, The Concept of Mind, was to correct these mistakes, and rid us of the temptation to think that we could sit in an armchair, philosophize, and thereby discover the nature of reality.\n\nIn my case, he completely failed. Despite the worst (or best) he could do, I went on having metaphysical thoughts. I am still having them. I think that there is a major intellectual battle going on, especially in the West, between those who adopt a purely materialist view of human persons and those who believe that there is a distinctive reality and value about human minds, and that such minds far transcend their physical embodiments both in their nature and in their moral worth. This battle is not about a set of grammatical mistakes. It is about what it means to be human and about the distinctive importance of human personhood in our physical universe. It is a metaphysical battle, a battle about what sorts of things exist and about whether persons are distinctive sorts of things that are different from purely material things. This metaphysical battle is real.\n\nRyle did not hold the fact that I thought this against me. He published my first philosophical article and helped to get me my first philosophical job, in the Logic department at the University of Glasgow. I think he regarded me as a somewhat retarded example of his own early philosophical errors, and expected that I would grow out of them in time. But things have only got worse. I am more than ever convinced that the question of what it is to be a human person is the biggest intellectual question of our day.\n\nGilbert Ryle and common sense\n\nPhilosophy has a job to do. That job is not to provide universally agreed and incontestable answers. It is to examine questions like that of the nature of personhood as deeply as possible, taking account of many different disciplines and points of view. It may help individuals to come to an informed opinion of their own. More likely, it will help to confirm the opinion they already have \u2013 but their opinion will be more informed, more aware of its own limitations and weaknesses, and more appreciative of why other opinions exist, and of why it is so difficult to find any agreed position.\n\nGilbert Ryle made a major contribution to the examination of this question of what it is to be a human person, and whatever he said about metaphysics, he believed that philosophical enquiry was essential for clearing away confusions and needless obscurities. For that reason, as well as out of a sense of relief that he never had to find out what a moral tutor was, I have always valued my discussions with Ryle and have always seen him as one of my philosophical mentors. One of my prized possessions is a signed copy of The Concept of Mind. It was not a book I ever agreed with. My whole being rebelled against it from the first. But it was beautifully written. It had the peculiar property that while I was reading it I believed it. Only when I stopped reading did I know that it was wrong, but I could never quite formulate just what was wrong with it.\n\nThat, I suppose is the mark of good philosophers. They can make you believe that something is supremely reasonable for the space of half an hour, as they take you into their thought world. But, as David Hume used to say, if you put their books down and go and play backgammon, you quickly recover the ordinary beliefs you had before you read their books and wonder what came over you to make you think what they said was so reasonable.\n\nThis is a philosophy book (though I have avoided the lengthy technical discussions that are the mark and pride of the best modern philosophical work), so if it is any good it may have the same effect \u2013 it will seem convincing until you put it down, but perhaps not for much longer. I feel just the same about my own books, so it follows that I am pretty sceptical about my own philosophical conclusions. But I have to say that I am not as sceptical about my conclusions as I am about other people's conclusions, and especially about some of Gilbert Ryle's conclusions.\n\nThat is because Ryle thinks his conclusions are just ordinary common-sense conclusions, as opposed to the incoherent myth of Cartesian dualism. But I think Ryle's conclusions are not at all commonsensical. In fact, they contradict many common-sense beliefs about human persons, their minds, and their bodies.\n\nWhat are these common-sense beliefs about human beings? That we are physical objects in space and time, animals that are born and die, quite quickly wearing out and decaying like most physical objects. Unlike many physical objects, we perceive, think, feel, and act to achieve goals. We have a mental life.\n\nNobody else, not even our closest friends, we often think, really appreciates how we feel. It often seems to us that we are constantly misunderstood and under-appreciated, and nobody else ever really knows what it is like to be us.\n\nFurther, by dint of heroic personal struggles, we make major contributions to the world. These, too, are rarely appreciated by others, who are all too ready to accuse us of dishonesty or selfishness, when we have only been trying to make the best of a very complex situation and improve life for everybody. Or that is what we all tend to think.\n\nWe also have very complicated relations with other people. They teach us our language and skills, but they often try to use or abuse us, and we have to choose our friends very carefully so that we can make our way in a largely hostile and untrustworthy world. Many secret plots and subterfuges are required if we are to acquire a position of status and authority, and if possible \u2013 it seems these days \u2013 become a celebrity whom everyone admires and imitates.\n\nIf we put all these rather gloomy and absurdly self-regarding but common-sense thoughts into philosophical language, we can say that humans have unique memories, thoughts, and feelings to which no one else has complete access. They have the power to act intentionally to achieve various purposes. And they interact with other persons who are also intentional agents with hidden feelings of their own, who are parts of a social culture which shapes the thoughts, feelings, and skills of each individual member of that culture.\n\nI think that Ryle's picture of human persons in The Concept of Mind fails to give an adequate account of this mental life of human beings, and gives an unduly vague and incomplete account of responsible human action. However, it gives a rather good account of the social reality of persons. So it only partly fits our common-sense beliefs about human persons. And, regrettably, it has helped to demonize Descartes in recent philosophy by putting Descartes' views in a very distorted way. I still love Ryle's book and am immensely indebted to him as a teacher and philosophical role model. For a while I even smoked a pipe, as he did, thinking that this was part of being a proper philosopher. But as I grew older I gave up smoking and decided that I really preferred the views that Ryle himself had before he complicated his early common sense with anti-Cartesian philosophy and excessive pipe-smoking.\n\nThe Cartesian myth: the ghost in the machine\n\nWhat about \"Descartes' Myth\", as Ryle terms it in chapter one of his book? It states, according to Ryle, that \"minds are not in space\". Further, \"only I can take direct cognisance of the states... of my own mind\". And \"of at least some of these episodes he [the person whose mental states they are] has direct and unchallengeable cognisance\".\n\nThe thing is that I regard these as plain facts, not myths. Thoughts, feelings, sense-perceptions, mental images, dreams, recalled memories, and intentions, cannot be observed at any location in public space. The temptation these days is to say that they are in the brain. It is of course true that if the brain is not working properly, thoughts or images will not occur. But even if my brain is scanned, observers of the scan can only register the occurrence of electrical activity or enhanced blood flow in a region of my brain. They cannot observe the thought or image I am having. They cannot be directly aware of it in the way that I am.\n\nThe obvious thing to say is that thoughts can only occur in humans if brain activity occurs, and that thoughts are correlated in some way with specific sorts of brain activity. But the content of a thought \u2013 what it is about \u2013 cannot be detected by observation of physical activity in my brain. It can, however, be detected by me, though obviously not by observing my own brain and not by observing any portion of physical space.\n\nEach of us can detect the content of a thought without observing it in space, and in a way in which no one else can detect it. It does not follow that my detection is \"unchallengeable\", though usually we would give an introspective report of what someone is thinking a higher authority than an observer's report of what that person is thinking. But I guess that introspective reports are as fallible as most reports. That is, they are likely to be correct in general, but not always, especially under very unusual or complex conditions (like being in a brain-scanner).\n\nSo far, as far as I am concerned, the myth is not a myth at all, but a statement of what is apprehended to be the case. Did Ryle really think that other people could observe what he was thinking when he sat in his chair smoking his pipe and frowning slightly? I at least had to wait until he spoke, and even then I wasn't always sure what he had just thought. Perhaps he wasn't sure either, but he was surely in a better position than I was to say what he was thinking. He had privileged access by introspection to his own thoughts, even when he was thinking that there was no such thing as introspection or privileged access. Yet that, it seemed to me, was a self-refuting thought to think!\n\nLogical positivism and other people\n\nWhen, after talking to Ryle for an hour, I began to wonder whether anyone had any private experiences, I would take a short walk from Magdalen College to New College to visit Professor Ayer, also in Oxford at that time, and be reassured that he at least had private experiences (which he called \"sense-data\"). In fact, he had hardly anything but sense-data.\n\nAyer was a logical positivist, which meant that he thought all factual assertions had to be verifiable by some sense-experience. Ayer had a very rigorous definition of what a sense-experience (a sense-datum) was. It had to be an immediate datum of some sense (sight, hearing, smell, taste or touch), without including any inferences or theories. So a sense-datum is something like a patch of red or a sound or a sudden smell or taste. Positivists thought that all meaningful words must refer to such data in the end, and you could verify the truth of statements by just having the appropriate sense-data. If you could not do that, words and sentences were actually meaningless. This was positivism, because it insisted that all knowledge is analysable into confrontation with bare sense-data (it is \"positive\", as opposed to speculative or theoretical). It was logical, because it told you what words were meaningful, and what words were not.\n\nA funny thing about sense-data is that they seem to be essentially private. Nobody else can have my sense-data, and I cannot have theirs. In fact, persons are nothing but chains of sense-data, and these chains can never overlap or meet. So when Ayer met other people, what was really happening was that his chain of sense-data included sounds, smells, and sights that looked like the bodies of other people. But they were really just sets of sense-data, and the theory that they were other people was just a theory, a sort of shorthand to make things more convenient (so it is not really so \"positive\" or non-theoretical after all!). The existence of an objective physical world with other people in it was, Ayer thought, a construction out of sense-data.\n\nAs a good logical positivist, Ayer believed that he constructed the whole world, including physical objects and other people, out of his own private experiences. Following this thought through to its logical conclusion, it followed that all the students in his seminars were actually constructed out of parts of Professor Ayer. This was even more disconcerting, however, than Ryle's denial that Ayer was having any private experiences, so I felt the truth must lie somewhere in between these two completely conflicting views of two of the most eminent philosophers in Britain at the time.\n\nWhat did Ryle have against private experiences? I think that he feared that once he got into a world of private experiences, he would never get out again. Each person would be locked into their own little private world, with no way of communicating with, or even of knowing what was going on in, any other person's little private world. \"Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet,\" he said.\n\nHe felt that, in a dualist view, minds and bodies would be two completely separate sorts of thing. Since each mind is essentially private, the best we could do would be to infer unobservable mental events from people's bodily movements. But we could never check whether our inferences were correct. We could never be sure anything was going on in the minds of other people at all. And we could never say what sort of transaction was taking place between minds and bodies, since such transactions between two such different realms would belong neither to bodies nor to minds. They would be forever mysterious and beyond reasonable explanation.\n\nOn a Cartesian view, the gulf between mind and body is so wide, Ryle thought, that when we make a remark about someone's thoughts or intentions, \"the onlooker... can never assure himself that his comments have any vestige of truth\". Bodily behaviour might be wholly disconnected from the inner mental events which are forever hidden from others: \"External observers could never know how the overt behaviour of others is correlated with their mental powers.\"\n\nThis is indeed a puzzle that philosophy teachers like to place before first-year undergraduates. If all our knowledge begins from our own experience, how can we ever be sure that anything exists beyond our experience? How do we know that our best friends are not robots, without real minds? How do we know that we are not being totally deceived in thinking there really are any other people with thoughts and feelings?\n\nThis could be called the \"Matrix\" problem (from the film of that name). Might we not all be in some gigantic factory, wired up to machines that produce in our brains the illusion that we are talking to other people, while the truth is that some machine is producing sets of false beliefs in us? There are actually no other people there, just bodies that act and speak as if they were people. And in that case, even the bodies are illusions, so we really are in trouble.\n\nThe irony is that this is exactly the sort of problem Descartes was trying to deal with, as he asked himself what he could be absolutely certain of, without any possibility of doubt. But whereas Descartes thought the thing we could be most certain of was our minds, Ryle claimed that we did not have any minds (in this sense) at all. If we did have minds, we would have all the insuperable problems just outlined. What I want to ask is whether this is really true. I am pretty sure that it is not.\n\nThe Dead Philosophers' Club\n\nIn some obscure corner of limbo we might imagine the Dead Philosophers' Club meeting regularly to discuss whether they had ever really existed. (Or we could have imagined this before Pope Benedict XVI officially abolished limbo.) Now the members of the club have even more reason to suspect that they do not really exist, as their accustomed meeting place has disappeared, by papal command.\n\nNevertheless, we might imagine Professor Ayer meeting up with Gilbert Ryle to discuss deep problems of philosophy, including the major problem of whether they were talking to each other at all.\n\n\"Ryle, I wish you would stop smoking that pipe,\" Ayer might say. \"Don't you know that smoking is very bad for your health?\"\n\nRyle could reply, \"Being dead is not very good for your health either, but I have to put up with it. In any case your cigarettes are much worse than my pipe.\"\n\n\"That,\" Ayer might say, \"is just your subjective opinion. Since subjective expressions of opinion have no truth-value, it follows that it is not true.\"\n\n\"Is it not just your subjective opinion that I am sitting here smoking my pipe?\"\n\n\"Not at all. That is a fact. Statements about facts have a truth-value, and my experience can verify their truth, if they are true. I am quite certain that you are smoking your pipe or at least that someone very like you is smoking something very like a pipe. Admittedly my evidence is not as conclusive as I would like, and you could, after all, be just a set of visual sense-data that give me a strong impression that it is you who is sitting there. I suppose what I am really certain of is that a set of coloured shapes exists in my visual field; but they look remarkably like Gilbert Ryle to me.\"\n\n\"That is a very odd thing to be certain of. I, on the other hand, am quite certain that there are no such things as sense-data, so you can hardly be certain that you are having some of them. That would be to fall into a gross Cartesian error.\"\n\n\"We both agree, Ryle, that whatever else is the case, Descartes fell into a gross error. But we seem to disagree about what the error was. You seem to think he was mistaken in thinking there were any private thoughts. I am sure that there are private thoughts, but I think he was mistaken in thinking that anybody was thinking them. Perhaps, though, we can both agree that he was mistaken in thinking that the mind is an immaterial thing which is churning out thoughts, whereas we know that there is no such thing, no ghost of Descartes hidden in the machine which is his body.\"\n\nAnd there we might leave the Dead Philosophers' Club, with two of its leading members being absolutely certain of totally different things, and being equally certain that the other is wrong. Furthermore, there does not seem to be any way of deciding who is correct, which means that they can go on discussing the issue forever, without ever being in danger of coming to an agreed conclusion. I rather think that this should at least make philosophers relatively modest in their claims and open to the possibility of reasonable disagreement. It may even be quite an intellectual advance to recognize the tentative nature of human guesses about the ultimate nature of reality, and the impossibility of arriving at complete agreement about it. At the very least, we will not be able to regard all those who disagree with us as fools and knaves \u2013 though no doubt some of them are (I'm not saying who).\n\n## Chapter Two\n\n## A range of philosophical views about what is really real\n\nDualism \u2013 the view that mind or spirit is different from body and brain \u2013 is widely derided in much modern thought. But actually it is just one of a number of widely held philosophical views about what is really real, and about what human persons are. In this chapter I outline five of them, all held by reputable philosophers: phenomenalism (the view that all human knowledge is built up from, and is basically limited to, sense-experience); naive realism (the view that the world exists very much as we see it, even when we are not observing it); materialism (the view that only material objects, perhaps publicly observable objects in space-time, are ultimately real); dualism; and epiphenomenalism (the view that minds exist and are different from matter, but that they are wholly dependent upon brains, and play no causal role in anything that happens, as the material brain does all the work). Materialism, though currently very popular, is just one of these views, and I argue that on purely philosophical grounds materialism is less plausible than dualism.\n\nWhat is really real? Are there sense-data, as Ayer supposed? Is there an immaterial thinker, as Descartes supposed? Or are (almost) all statements about minds analysable into dispositional, \"if-then\" statements about the behaviour of publicly observable bodies, as Ryle supposed? It seems as if what these philosophers are doing is to start from a basic set of axioms, trace out what can be inferred or deduced from them, and then see how these consequences fit with their experience of reality. They are each able to see the weaknesses in their opponents' theories, and propose accounts that try to remedy them. Ayer accepts Descartes' claim that mental occurrences like thoughts and images could exist without physical bodies, but rejects the claim that there is an immaterial subject who has such thoughts and images. Ryle accepts Ayer's claim that all factual statements must be verifiable in principle, but rejects the claim that such verification consists in having private sense-experiences which no one else could ever check. I am accepting Ryle's claim that many (not all) statements about mental properties are dispositional statements about what a human animal is capable of doing or is liable to do in various circumstances. But I am querying his claim that there are no private and non-spatially locatable mental occurrences.\n\nDoes this mean there is a ghost in the machine after all? Ghosts are usually visual appearances of people, but they lack solidity and they tend to moan and wail rather a lot. I don't suppose anyone thinks that inside their head there is a wailing gaseous hallucination which pulls the levers that make the brain work. That is plainly ridiculous, and it is meant to be. The metaphor of a ghost in the machine has worked well as a rhetorical device to make people think that we all know the brain (the machine) is real, whereas talk of a mind other than the brain or of mental events in addition to brain-events is talk about something peculiar, not quite real, and probably illusory (a ghost).\n\nIt seems to me that the situation is quite the reverse. Talk of mental events is the most real thing we humans know. We know we have sense-experiences, bodily sensations, thoughts, feelings, and images. We know we experience things in ways that are unique to us and never wholly communicable to other people. We know that all our knowledge of the world has to begin with such experiences. Mental events are real, and to deny them would deprive us of all knowledge. They are not ghosts or hallucinations at all.\n\nBut do we know that brains are real? Well, yes, because we can see and feel them, at least if we are surgeons or pathologists. But may the brains we observe only be appearances to us of a reality which is rather different from what we see? This is another standard problem for first-year philosophers: what would brains look like if we were not looking at them?\n\nWe can never find out by observation, because every time we look at something we only see the way it looks to us. It is no use trying to cheat by closing our eyes and then opening them very quickly, as if to take the world by surprise. However quickly and surprisingly we manage to take a peek, we still only see what things look like to us. We can never manage to take them unawares, and find out what they look like when no one is looking at them.\n\nThis is very frustrating. We are tempted to say, \"Well, obviously, they go on being the same whether we are looking at them or not.\" But there are good reasons for thinking this is not true. One of the most important features of objects in our experience is colour. When we admire a beautiful view, we usually admire the colours objects have. But physicists tell us that colour is a product of the brain. External objects emit electromagnetic waves. Some of these impinge on the cones in human eyes, and cause electrochemical impulses that land up in the visual cortex. Only after that long causal journey do colours appear to us. The original wavelengths have no colour. They cause sensations of colour when they affect human sense-organs and the human brain. Colours are precisely some of those private mental states that Ryle wanted to get rid of. Different individuals may see colours in rather different ways. Colour-blind people certainly do. And some animals do not seem to see colours at all (they have no cones in their eyes). What we see depends on our cognitive apparatus.\n\nBut where are the colours themselves? They are not literally in the brain, as physical objects. The brain does not change colour when we see coloured objects. They are not on the objects we see, which have no colour. Colours are, as John Locke said, following Galileo, secondary qualities. They do not belong to external objects. They are contents of the mind, when stimulated by the brain, which in turn has been stimulated by wavelengths of light. Colours are caused by physical events, but they are not themselves physical events. They are how consciousness perceives physical events. There is a causal basis of conscious events, but it does not exist as we see it.\n\nBrains are rather boring, where colour is concerned. They are usually greyish. But are brains grey when we are not looking at them? Apparently not; they then have no colour at all. In fact, we could go much further than this and say that brains are not the solid porridge-looking objects they appear to be. Any physicist will say that brains are mostly empty space, in which molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, and other strange particles buzz about in complicated ways.\n\nIt seems as though physical objects, when not being observed, have no colours, and no sounds, smells or tastes either. Sounds, like colours, are not physical events. Neither are smells, tastes or sensations. Things do not smell like, taste like or feel like anything, when nobody is smelling, tasting or feeling them. The physical world, it seems, is totally vacuous. No colours, sounds, smells, tastes or sensations. What on earth is left?\n\nWet philosophers\n\nFor Locke and Galileo, what is left is a world of \"primary qualities\" \u2013 qualities which, they thought (wrongly, as modern physics shows) physical objects cannot fail to have, but which are quite distinct from the \"secondary qualities\" that we see, hear, and feel, but which do not belong to the physical world. The world of primary qualities, the \"real world\", is basically a world of colourless, intangible, inaudible particles located in space, moving around and continually bumping into one another (though of course not realizing that they are doing so).\n\nScience tells us that all objects are made of atoms and other very small particles, and that atoms have no colour, smell or taste. They just have properties like mass, charge, position, and momentum. So they are not exactly how they look to a human being.\n\nWhen oxygen and hydrogen atoms are put together in a particular way, they feel wet to human observers \u2013 they form molecules of water. But if there were no observers, they would not be wet. There would not be any wetness. There would only be what John Stuart Mill called \"a permanent possibility\" of wetness, which would only become actually wet when somebody went for a swim.\n\nThus there is no point in asking Mill whether the sea is warm enough for swimming. He would have to reply, \"Not yet, but it might be if you jump in.\" Anyone who thinks that we see things as they actually are, however, would say that the sea is wet and warm, even if there is nobody about. But there is a problem. How do we know? There is absolutely no way of checking, without jumping in \u2013 and then of course you have not proved that it was wet and warm before you jumped in. This is why, on the philosophers' annual outing to the seaside, you may observe groups of philosophers rapidly jumping in and out of the sea, to try to see whether it remains wet or not. But they can never be sure it is going to be wet before they jump in, and they can never prove that it is still wet after they jump out.\n\nWe might say that it is just common sense to say that the sea continues to be wet when there is no one in it. But it must be admitted that it cannot be proved by sense-experience or observation. It is just much simpler to say that if the sea is wet every time you jump in, it is wet in between jumps. Of course that hypothesis will not work if you only jump in the sea once a year. But if you jump in and out as quickly as possible, it is the simplest explanatory hypothesis to account for why we can more or less predict that the sea is going to be wet.\n\nSo we can assume that the sea continues to be wet even when there is nobody in it. Nevertheless, it is probably safer, even if a little more complicated, to say that the sea is such that, if we jump into it, we will find it wet. There is some continuing causal basis for our feelings of wetness, though there is no actual unobserved wetness in the sea. That is what Galileo, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill, all supposed.\n\nWeird science\n\nBishop Berkeley famously objected to any distinction between primary and secondary qualities. He held, with some justification, that talk about tiny colourless atoms bouncing about is a mere abstraction. Why should we think that such abstractions are real, when in fact this world we observe, with all its smells, tastes, and colours, is the most real thing we know? There is little reason to suppose that science tells us the truth about reality, whereas the senses only provide appearances. It would make more sense to suppose that both science and common sense are concerned with appearances produced by the interaction of a hidden reality with human minds.\n\nThough Bishop Berkeley has become a by-word for silliness among many philosophers, there are things in modern physics that give him some support. The so-called \"real world\" posited by classical Newtonian science is not only an abstraction. It has passed its sell-by date, and it is nowhere near abstract enough. For quantum science, the world has dissolved into sets of probability waves in Hilbert space, of entangled and superposed wave-particles, and of ten-or twenty-six-dimensional curved space-time manifolds, which probably arise by quantum fluctuations in a vacuum. If you want something abstract, try that on for size.\n\nThis scientific view of the real world is about as far from what most people believe, or could even imagine, as it is possible to get. Common-sense consciousness, which is the sort most common people have, experiences things as colourful, tasty, smelly, and wet. Why should we think that the scientific world of probability waves and so on is the real world, as it is in itself when it is not being observed, whereas the common-sense world is just that world as it appears to us?\n\nThere is a great deal of controversy about the interpretation of fundamental physics. Some theorists, like Michio Kaku of the City College of New York, one of the founders of string field theory, boldly claim that \"the matter in the universe and the forces that hold it together... may be nothing but different vibrations of hyperspace\". Superstrings require a ten-or twenty-six-dimensional universe, and the basic forces of electromagnetism, gravity, and the nuclear forces may be caused by the \"crumpling\" of a universe that exists in dimensions far beyond the four-dimensional space-time of our common-sense observations (not that common sense usually gets even as far as four dimensions).\n\nOther physicists, like Niels Bohr, prefer to think that the world of observation is fundamentally real, and that all talk of such things as hyperspace uses mathematical constructs that cannot be mapped onto any objectively existing reality. In other words, quantum field theory does not tell us what the objective world is \"really\" like. As Bishop Berkeley suggested, we cannot get beyond a world of appearances, of things-as-they-appear-to-us, whether they appear as sense-perceptions or as mathematical intelligible mental constructions.\n\nAfter all, probability waves are not actual waves. They are mathematical devices for assigning probabilities to discovering the location of an electron under specific constraining conditions of measurement. You might say that electrons are probably in a number of places at the same time, but they are not actually at any precise place. That is certainly not common sense, and it is very hard to believe. Quantum physics is undoubtedly correct. Its predictions have been verified many times. Yet equally undoubtedly it does not give an adequate description of how things really are. It provides a set of sophisticated mathematical operations for understanding the behaviour of very small energy interactions under controlled and relatively isolated conditions. But one could not say that the variables of the formulae correspond to so-called \"real entities\". They are constructions of the mind.\n\nThe conclusion, for a number of quantum physicists, is not that there is really nothing there at all. It is that reality is hidden from us in its inner nature. All we can do is construct hypotheses that explain the structure of its interactions with our minds. But if we consider that our minds play a fundamental role in constructing both the sensory world that the senses reveal and the mathematical world that the mind explores, we may be led to the opinion that mind or consciousness is a foundational element of reality. As the eminent quantum theorist John von Neumann put it, \"All real things are contents of consciousness.\" Bishop Berkeley lives again, as the solid Newtonian world of classical physics dissolves into the abstract mathematical world of quantum theory, and leaves the mind as the most \"solid\" and basic constituent of the real world.\n\nIt is time to pause and take stock. We have already come across three main philosophical opinions about what the world we experience is really like.\n\nFirst, there is the opinion that the things we perceive are just what they seem to be \u2013 warm, wet, fuzzy, and colourful (they might also be beautiful or ugly, ordered or chaotic, pleasant or unpleasant, though that is disputed). The world of sense-experience is the real world.\n\nSecond, there is the opinion that our senses disclose only appearances or things as they appear to us. In itself reality is very different, and science and intellectual reflection can tell us what it is like. The world of science is the real world.\n\nThird, there is the opinion that appearance and reality are indeed different. But fundamental science deals in abstract mathematical constructions, and such abstractions do not tell us what reality in itself is like. We do not know what the real world is like. But both sense-experience and science are constructions of the mind, so maybe hidden reality is something like consciousness or mind.\n\nThese three philosophical positions, which are basic metaphysical theories (theories about what sorts of things really exist, and what sorts of things are actually real, not just apparent), can be, have been, and still are, ably defended by philosophers. My own preference is for some form of the third view, and I shall try to defend it. The discomfort I feel with Ryle's philosophy is that it seems to espouse some form of the first view, and this basic (and in my view mistaken) commitment is presupposed in all his specific arguments about the concept of mind. If the third view is right, things will look very different, as I shall show.\n\nWhat you see is what you get\n\nOn closer inspection, the three main views I have outlined split into many further into subdivisions. I will restrain myself and mention only a total of eight philosophical possibilities. No doubt we could think of even more divisions and different kinds of overlap between views \u2013 there is probably one sub-division for every philosopher who has ever lived \u2013 but eight is enough to be going on with.\n\nThe reason why it is important to examine these metaphysical views is that the problem of what persons really are cannot be resolved unless we have first come to a decision about what sorts of things fundamentally exist. Many discussions about the nature of persons fail to tackle this more fundamental question or even fail to see that it is a really difficult problem. Many people just assume some sort of common-sense view, that humans are evolved animals in space and time, and that this three-dimensional world that we experience is what is actually real. Other people, more scientifically inclined perhaps, admit that the real world is very different from the one we see and feel, but it is still definitely and completely material. There are no \"spooky\" or \"supernatural\" entities, and Cartesian dualism, in particular, is just a relic of an outmoded superstition.\n\nIf we are going to approach the issue rationally, however, we need to see that these are just two out of a pretty large field of possible metaphysical options. In fact, they are both very controversial and highly contested from a philosophical point of view. It is only when we see the wider range of metaphysical options that we realize how tenuous the arguments for common sense and for materialism are.\n\nI am going to argue that the most adequate view of human persons will fall under what I have called the third group of metaphysical theories, which says that there is a reality underlying our everyday experience whose basic character is consciousness or mind. So I need to establish that this is a coherent and plausible metaphysical view. That means setting it out alongside some other major metaphysical views, and showing their strengths and weaknesses. That is what I am now going to do.\n\nThe first group of metaphysical theories is the \"things are basically what they seem to the senses to be\" group. The most radical version of this is the view that when nobody is observing things, when they are not contents of consciousness, there is nothing there. There is only what David Hume calls a succession of impressions and ideas. The idea of a continuing unobserved world is a postulate of the imagination, and, if we were trying to get the simplest possible account of the world, such a postulate would be regarded as superfluous. Things are what they seem to be, but there is no objective continuing world to support the things we see, hear, and touch. If we attend closely to what we experience, we will realize that we never experience unobserved continuing physical objects. So there aren't any such things.\n\nThis extreme position \u2013 a sort of radical empiricism, sometimes called phenomenalism (I will call it Theory 1) \u2013 is too much for most people, but it makes the point that the common-sense belief that there is a world of physical objects depends upon rational postulates that, strictly speaking, cannot be substantiated simply by appeal to experience. Most people do make such postulates and accept a philosophy of common sense. They assume that things continue to be roughly what they are observed to be even when nobody is observing them. We live in a real world of objects in three-dimensional space, and we observe it more or less as it is (this is Theory 2, sometimes called naive realism, because many philosophers think it really is rather naive).\n\nI think the consideration of properties like colours is sufficient to render this view improbable, especially since we can carry out the same type of analysis for smells, tastes, sensations, and sounds. Nevertheless, I suspect Ryle holds some version of this opinion. At least he speaks as though he does, though to put it like that possibly sounds too \"metaphysical\" for his taste. Like Wittgenstein, he would probably think that \"everything is in order as it is\", that metaphysics raises a host of pseudo-problems that arise from linguistic confusions, and that philosophy can provide no new information about the world, least of all about \"ultimate reality\". Philosophy has no theories.\n\nThe problem is, that is a theory. And Ryle does, as I have suggested, have some beliefs that fly in the face of common sense \u2013 for instance, that there are no objects that are not in publicly observable space (the contents of minds, those \"ghosts in the machine\"). Common sense says that there are dreams, images, sensations, feelings, and thoughts that are not observable in space. At least my common sense does, and most people I meet down the pub think it does, and if we are not common, who is? Common sense says that things are what they seem to most people to be, but we do not explore too deeply what happens to things when we are not looking at them.\n\nThe people who do explore that sort of thing are physicists. Common sense seems to conflict in a marked way with modern physics. This fact leads into the second group of theories about the nature of the world we experience, that science tells us the truth about reality. Modern physicists sometimes say that there are other space-times (\"many worlds\" or a multiverse of universes), and if so those space-times are certainly not publicly observable in this space. Space and time are only four of many possible dimensions, and physicists like Stephen Hawking envisage realms of being in which space or time does not exist at all or can become interchangeable. It seems to be an open question whether there are non-spatial entities, and philosophers are not going to avoid it by saying that it arises from a logical mistake or category error.\n\nThere's more to life than meets the eye\n\nSo we are led beyond common sense toward the currently fashionable position that science tells us about a world that is very uncommonsensical indeed. Because physicists do not like to think of themselves as naive, this is sometimes called critical realism as opposed to naive realism (the unkind term for common sense). The world as it is in itself is not as we observe it in experience. But it has nameable properties such as mass, position, and velocity, and science \u2013 preferably fundamental physics \u2013 can tell us what they are.\n\nSince the 1930s it has become much more questionable what nameable properties fundamental physics does tell us about. If there is five times as much dark matter in the world as there is matter that we can see, if the fundamental forces of our space-time are in fact crumplings of ten-dimensional hyperspace, and if fields and tensors have replaced particles and waves as the fundamental stuff of the universe, we might well begin to wonder what may be coming next. It sometimes seems that physicists are telling us that something is most definitely real, but we are no longer sure just what it is. This realism is so critical that it seems to have become pretty unrealistic.\n\nThis is what I mean by saying that materialism, at least in the sense of saying that everything that exists must have a location and extension in space-time, seems to be scientifically questionable. Many modern physicists have left ordinary space and time well behind. Nevertheless, advances in other scientific areas like neuroscience and artificial intelligence have encouraged a view that all mental events must be identical with spatio-temporally locatable events in the brain. This has led to the adoption of varieties of materialism (Theory 3) which presuppose that, whatever some physicists say, the scientific world is the only one that exists, and the scientific world contains only material entities.\n\nThere are physicists who would support materialism in a more sophisticated form (sometimes called physicalism or naturalism), extending the idea of matter (or energy) considerably, but insisting that all that exists must be material in that extended sense. For instance, if our subjective sense of time passing is the result of a crumpling of hyperspace, or even if time is a fourth dimension in some realistic sense, then our consciousness of passing through time may not be a good clue to what reality is like. Time may be there \"all at once\", existing from beginning to end as a fourth dimension, and we just seem to be passing through it. For such views our sense of personal development, of having interesting and unique experiences one after the other, is an illusion, as is consciousness itself. Only the material, as defined by the latest scientific theory, is real.\n\nIt is not quite clear, however, who would be having such an illusion. Anyway, illusions seem to have some sort of existence. If I seem to see something, there must be something that I seem to see; there must be a \"seeming\" as well as a \"reality\". Or must there?\n\nHeadless women\n\nSuppose a conjurer makes it appear that he saws off a woman's head, and in consequence I seem to see a headless woman. That is an illusion \u2013 the head is there, but I fail to see it. I do not in fact see a woman without a head. I fail to see the head of the woman. I do not see what I think I see. So it is not true that if I seem to see X, there must be an X that I seem to see. However, there is something that I see. I see a woman whose head is concealed, but I misdescribe what I see. That is easily done. Conjuring tricks work because they are easily done. We often make mistakes when we describe what we see. Yet there is something I see, even though I have the description wrong.\n\nCompare this with \"having the illusion\" that I am passing through time, one second after another (whereas, in fact, past, present, and future all exist in one four-(or more) dimensional continuum, and I am not moving through time at all). What is it that I seem to see? One thing happening after another. But could I be describing this wrongly? This would be like saying that time is actually all there \"at once\", but I (wrongly) see it as one thing after another. Even if I am misdescribing it, however, I am seeing one thing after another. Someone (me) is having the experience of a succession of times. So a succession of times does exist \u2013 in my experience.\n\nThat is enough to establish that my experience has properties that objective time does not \u2013 properties of temporal succession. Even if time is an illusion, we must distinguish personal experience from objective physical reality. Therefore it cannot be true that personal experience does not exist. Illusions, too, exist, and have properties that do not belong to objective reality.\n\nThe extreme materialist view that consciousness is an illusion can only be consistently held by philosophers who are not conscious. Therefore most conscious philosophers who are dissatisfied with common sense distinguish personal experience from objective reality, and maintain that while subjective conscious experiences do exist, objective (unobserved) reality has whatever properties scientists ascribe to it. This is actually what Cartesian dualism (Theory 4), Ryle's main target, maintains. Conscious experiences are distinct from material objects, and you cannot get rid of them simply by saying that they are illusions.\n\nYou could, however, say that consciousness somehow \"emerges from\" complex physical structures like the brain, even if you have no idea how it does so. This has been termed epiphenomenalism (Theory 5), since consciousness is regarded as a by-product of the physical brain that does not influence behaviour. Descartes did not think consciousness could emerge from matter, since they are so different from one another, and causes, he thought, can only produce effects like themselves. But you could just say that this need not be the case. If one sort of thing (matter) produces another type of thing (mind), there is no point in complaining that we cannot see how it is done. We just have to live with it.\n\nIt should be noted, however, that if you say this, you will also just have to accept that matter, or changes in matter, might be produced by minds. So minds could produce physical changes or even possibly physical entities, and again it would be useless for philosophers to complain that they cannot understand how it happens. They will just have to get over it. Mind\u2013matter interaction might be real.\n\nNevertheless, scientifically minded philosophers often assert that all genuine causes are physical, whereas the personal or mental is a sort of by-product that plays no effective role in governing what happens in the world. This seems to be just a basic dogma \u2013 all causes must be physical, because I say so. (I should add that I am not against having basic dogmas. We all have them, but at least we should acknowledge that they are dogmas, and are by no means obvious to everybody.) It is certainly not an opinion that is confirmed by observation or by any natural science. Of course the dogma is not produced by some arbitrary whim. It is produced by the adoption of an elegant and comprehensive explanatory hypothesis \u2013 that the unobserved world has the \"primary properties\" noted by physical science, but no \"secondary properties\" which belong only to subjective experience. The hypothesis can become very tightly constraining, when it is postulated that the physical world is governed by a simple set of absolute and inflexible laws which wholly determine everything that happens. This is the \"machine world\" against which Ryle also inveighs. And in that machine personal experiences or the subjects of such experiences become \"ghosts\", illusory apparitions with no causal part to play in the workings of the cosmic machine.\n\nThe big options\n\nI have now collected five of the eight philosophical views I wanted to outline. Phenomenalism (Theory 1) and naive realism (Theory 2) attempt to maintain that reality is basically what it seems to be to the human senses. The advance of the natural sciences introduces critical realism, and this in turn subdivides into materialist views that mind is not a thing at all (Theory 3), dualistic views that mind and matter are distinct (Theory 4), and epiphenomenalist views that mind does exist, but is a product of and wholly dependent upon the physical world that science correctly describes (Theory 5).\n\nOne reason I have listed these views is to make the point that there are many defensible philosophical opinions about the nature of the world we observe and know, and about our own natures as observers and agents in that world. There is not just one obviously true opinion. In fact my suggestion is that the third group of metaphysical theories, which I am just about to embark on, is more plausible than the first two groups. The three members of the third group could be called forms of idealism, which is, in its most general form, the belief that mind or consciousness is more real than matter or provides a better clue to the nature of reality as a whole. If I could establish that, we would be well on the way to showing that human persons are not just complex bundles of matter and molecules. Their moral importance and value lies crucially in their mental lives and acts.\n\nOf course I do not expect to establish it to everyone's satisfaction. No philosopher ever manages to do such a thing. But I do hope to show that idealism is a coherent and plausible view, fully consistent with the best modern scientific knowledge. And I hope to show that the philosophy of materialism, which is assumed by many to be obviously true, is far from obvious and contains major weaknesses from which idealism is free.\n\nUnderlying all this discussion is the belief that metaphysical differences are real and important. Ryle's claim that he is only rectifying the logic of our language about minds by distinguishing logical categories, and not making any statements about the nature of the world, is unconvincing. Ordinary language carries philosophical presuppositions. It presupposes \u2013 contrary to what Ryle claims \u2013 that minds are causes on occasion, that humans are at least sometimes free agents, and that private states of consciousness exist. If we ceased to believe these things, our language might well change.\n\nPhilosophical reflection can make a difference to what we say, to how we speak, and to what we claim to know. The rise of the natural sciences has raised questions about human personhood in a sharp way. It has given rise to radical forms of dualism, which separate minds and bodies completely, and to materialism, which eliminates minds (in this sense) altogether. So another goal I have in mind is to place radical dualism and materialism in historical context as extreme responses to new scientific knowledge, and to point forward to more adequate interpretations of contemporary knowledge.\n\nThis of course is what Ryle thought he was doing. He rejected both radical dualism and materialism as inadequate philosophical theories, and tried to replace them with a more rounded view of humans as essentially social animals. In doing this, he was importantly right. His mistake was to think that he had no philosophical theory, but was only stating the obvious (once people got their logic right). But that, ironically, was his philosophical theory.\n\n## Chapter Three\n\n## The limits of knowledge\n\nAnother major philosophical view is idealism: the theory that reality is mind or mind-like, and that material things are appearances of this reality to consciousness. This is the view I aim to defend. Most classical European philosophers have accepted some form of it. It was most fully formulated by German philosophers like Kant and Hegel, and it dominated British philosophy in the early twentieth century. Immanuel Kant was especially influential, and he is still taught in most philosophy courses today. Kant thought that reality-in-itself is completely unknowable, but that human thought constructs reality-as-appearance (as we see it), and that human reason compels us to think of persons as free moral agents, not determined by the material world. Materialism, Kant thought, confuses appearance with reality. So even though we cannot know reality-in-itself, we must think of it as personal.\n\nAs I approach the topic of philosophical idealism, I will begin with some major philosophical questions raised by the natural sciences: does the objective world really consist only of the basic properties identified by physics? Is it governed by universal and unbreakable laws? Do those laws determine everything that happens, so that no alternatives are even possible?\n\nAffirmative answers to these questions are very ambitious dogmas or postulates indeed; and they could not be confirmed by observation. We cannot observe the unobserved; we cannot be sure that laws of nature are never broken; and we can never know that nothing could have happened except what did happen. The postulates that physics can accurately and adequately describe what the unobserved world is like, that absolute laws of nature in some mysterious sense exist, and that there is one and only one possible effect of every cause, seem to be oddly arbitrary. Why should it be so?\n\nPerhaps these are the basic postulates which helped modern science to get going. Only if we think that the human mind is capable of understanding the structure of nature, only if we think that there are mathematically describable laws or general principles of causality in nature, and only if we think that causality is universal, so that there is always a reason why anything happens, that nothing happens that cannot be accounted for by reference to some general rational principle, is modern science possible. These are, as Immanuel Kant put it, necessary conditions of the possibility of natural science (at least of a Newtonian sort).\n\nBut there is a paradox about these postulates. They give human thought and imagination a central role in comprehending the nature of reality. Human thinking, especially in inventing systems of mathematics and in devising cunning experiments to see how nature behaves, is assumed to be adequate for an understanding of nature.\n\nBut can we trust human reason? \"Reason is the slave of the passions,\" said David Hume. How can we have the arrogance to think that the petty human mind \u2013 the product, according to some evolutionary views, of millions of random genetic copying-mistakes and accidents \u2013 is capable of understanding the origin of worlds or the ultimate nature of things? Perhaps, said Hume, we should accept that habit or custom controls human conduct. We just think the way our brains are set up to think, and they are set up that way, because brains with those thoughts in them have enabled organisms to survive and reproduce better than brains without such thoughts. Hume did not know about evolution. But he certainly would have approved of it, since he believed that enlightened Scottish intellectuals were more evolved than the common herd of humanity.\n\nBrains that thought that you could never predict what was going to happen next died out, because they never learned from experience. Only brains that assumed the future would be like the past had the sense to flee from predators, and only those brains survived. Over many centuries a stock of common-sense beliefs builds up, simply because brains without those beliefs get wiped out. Such beliefs would include the belief that there are predators out there even when you don't observe them (the principle of objective existence), that predators are going to behave in regular and more or less predictable ways (the principle of induction), and that the same predator always produces the same effect \u2013 namely, once you are caught you will be eaten (the principle of efficient causality).\n\nOf course this is just a way of saying that true beliefs tend to be more useful than false beliefs. The reason these sorts of beliefs have survival-value is that they are true; they say what reality is like. You could say that the beliefs are based on long and repeated observations by many people, some but not all of whom got eaten. They are not just abstract rational principles, thought up in some primeval cave.\n\nI was once asked to contribute the section on philosophy in a Reader's Digest book, The Last Two Million Years. I agreed to write the first half and, before the commissioning editors had quite realized what was going on, collected quite a nice fee for saying, correctly, that as far as we know nothing happened in philosophy for the first million years. They nevertheless produced some pretty pictures from the Lascaux Caves, which perhaps could, by a large stretch of the imagination, be called philosophical (that is to say, nobody is quite sure what they are about). Regrettably I missed the opportunity to write a chapter on Neanderthal philosophy, which did not, as it turned out, have a very good survival-value.\n\nToward the unknown\n\nReturning to the question of basic evolved beliefs, the point remains that these beliefs go well beyond simple observation. They begin from observations, but what they do is organize our sense-perceptions so that we interpret these perceptions as perceptions of entities which have objective existence, which threaten, entertain or eat us, and which behave in more or less predictable ways. Such organizing principles are not arbitrary, since they can help us to eat other things before they eat us \u2013 a skill at which humans are remarkably adept.\n\nThese principles no doubt form the basis of the more science-based principles of objectivity, causal law, and determinism. They are nonetheless very different. Common sense sees the world as consisting of predators and prey, not atoms and molecules. We see that predators behave in more or less regular ways, without thinking that they obey universal laws of nature. We think that we can sometimes escape the predator's leap, not that there is no alternative to being eaten. The idea of a Newtonian reality of deterministic and universal law is a leap of imagination that was first clearly formulated by Newton himself, even though it was presaged by some late medieval philosophers, as a combination of ideas of predestination and the creation of the universe by a rational all-determining being.\n\nMoreover, the Newtonian picture omits entirely some other human basic evolved beliefs. Early humans developed a \"theory of mind\", that other animals have purposes and intentions partly hidden from us, but helping us to predict what they will do next. They developed a principle of reciprocity, that you can never quite be sure how other animals will react to you, but your attitude to them will be an important factor in how they subsequently behave. They developed a principle of responsibility, so that on many occasions you can choose between alternative actions, and you are responsible for that choice.\n\nAll these natural principles are hard to accommodate in a Newtonian scheme of nature. Minds, personal relationships, and free actions, are all alien to a wholly mechanistic view of objective reality. Yet it is precisely in scientific investigations that we must assume the importance of understanding and imagination, the cumulative cooperation of many meaningfully communicating minds, and the free selection of experimental conditions and mathematical axioms that will enable us to understand the physical world better.\n\nIs it plausible to consider all this as a higher-order by-product of the unconscious, mechanically determined, exclusively rule-driven behaviour of huge numbers of fundamental particles, each of which is identical in nature to every other of the same sort? Locke baulked at the thought, as had Descartes before him. Thus they were driven to introduce minds into a Newtonian mechanistic scheme that left no room for them. Having constructed the machine of nature, they then had to introduce ghosts to pull the levers of the machine. But how insubstantial ghosts could pull solid material levers, or even where exactly the levers were to be found, remained a mystery.\n\nPerhaps the solution is not to get rid of the ghosts, but to dismantle the machine and start again. That is precisely what happened in the early twentieth century with the advent of quantum mechanics. The machine itself began to disappear. Ryle and Wittgenstein had that thought, too. But they preferred to bypass the findings of the new physics, and to resort to the sort of common-sense beliefs that had preceded physics, and that left questions of the nature of reality as pseudo-problems that could be ignored.\n\nSome physicists agree and regard philosophy as a waste of time. We can do the maths, make the predictions, construct the nano-devices. But we do not need to give any theoretical interpretation to what we are doing. Others, however, feel the need to relate our mathematical computations to our understanding of the world, and to answer the question of what the world is objectively like. But maybe what quantum physics suggests is that the question is unanswerable. For quantum physicists like Bernard d'Espagnat objective reality is forever \"veiled\" from human knowledge, and all we can know is how things appear to us when we observe them (when we collapse wave-functions) in laboratory conditions. Perhaps there is no way of knowing what reality is like in itself, apart from human observation of it. We know how the world appears to us, but its inner reality remains forever veiled. That possibility introduces my sixth philosophical theory about what the world is really like, the theory that human knowledge is confined to how the objective world appears to our minds and senses, but that the world in itself is wholly unknowable. Nevertheless, in some sense the world as we know it is a product of mind. In the history of philosophy, that is the view of Immanuel Kant, who called it \"transcendental idealism\", but in his later writings said that he preferred the phrase critical idealism (Theory 6).\n\nImmanuel Kant and unknowable reality\n\nMost classical philosophers have been idealists \u2013 they have thought that the ultimate character of reality is mind-like. But in modern philosophy the most influential name is that of Immanuel Kant. If we want to trace the roots of modern forms of idealism, we have to start with Kant. There is quite a lot of misunderstanding of his views \u2013 he is thought to have undermined the possibility of metaphysics and to have destroyed all arguments for God, for example. On the contrary, his aim was to place metaphysics on a firm footing, and to defend belief in God as rationally necessary (though not founded on theoretical arguments about causality).\n\nKant's views are very complex, but it is worth exploring them, as they provide the basis for taking modern idealism seriously. He held that space and time themselves, which seem so objective, are in fact forms of our intuition. That is, they are a framework the mind constructs to build a map in which our sense-perceptions can be located. The map is mind-constructed, and if we take away mind, we have no way of saying what is left. This may seem an extremely odd view, but it receives some corroboration from modern physics. In quantum physics our view of space as a three-dimensional Euclidean container, and of time as a kind of cosmic clock which ticks at an absolute rate, adding second to second as we pass through it, is a purely subjective condition of our perception, which does not copy what objectively exists. Quantum physicists tend to say that space-time is non-Euclidean, and is part of a multi-dimensional reality in which space and time may become, under certain conditions, interchangeable. Superstring field theorists say that space and time are perceptually selected fragments of a ten-dimensional hyperworld, and do not exist objectively as the Euclidean space and flowing time that we perceive them to be. Such things can be mathematically expressed, but if we try to imagine what such a strange world is like, imagination fails. Things in themselves are totally beyond our categories of thought.\n\nIt seems, then, that the whole of experienced space-time, and everything in it, is a construction of the mind, and would not exist without the mind. Some philosophers talk about \"constructions of the brain\" rather than constructions of the mind. But that is a fairly crude mistake, since the brain is a material thing in space-time, and therefore cannot be what constructs the reality of experienced space-time. The brain, like all material things, is a construct of the mind and would not exist as it appears to us without that constructive activity of the mind. So the world as we see it is not a construction of the brain, but the world as we see it (including the brain) is a construction of the mind.\n\nThat is enough to refute the simple materialist view that nothing exists, or even can exist, outside of space and time. Beyond observed space-time, there are at least two things. One is the unknowable world of things in themselves and the other is the mind that constructs the world of appearances, by its creative interaction with things in themselves.\n\nBut if the mind is not an appearance (since it constructs the world of appearances), it must be a thing in itself. Or, to be more precise, what appears to us as the constructive activity of the mind in producing the world of appearances, is also an expression of an entity in the world of things in themselves.\n\nEven if the mind as we experience its activity is an appearance, it is as real an appearance as the world of physical objects we sense. It is not the case, as Gilbert Ryle seems to say, that physical objects (bodies) are obviously real, whereas minds (creative intellectual acts that constitute the world of sense-perceptions and thoughts) are ghosts. On the contrary, both bodies and minds are appearances of an objective reality. They have an equally real (or unreal) status.\n\nThe personal world\n\nRyle would of course object that this is even worse than Cartesian dualism. His view is that in the Cartesian world we never know what is going on in other minds. Minds are locked in permanent isolation and never meet. But at least bodies meet. That is enough. We do not need these private islands where minds spend their lives in solitary confinement.\n\nThe Kantian world is much worse. Not only are minds in isolation. The whole of the experienced world is put into isolation, minds, bodies, and all. People cannot ever get out of their own private worlds or know what is going on in anybody else's world. Bodies never meet, for bodies are just parts of essentially private worlds. We are condemned forever to never meet anyone else, and never to know what is really going on. All of us are condemned to permanent ignorance and illusion, from which there is no escape. Is that better than Descartes?\n\nRyle is right. We cannot have a world in which knowledge depends upon making untestable inferences to hidden processes. But Kant does not think that we make inferences to the external existence of objects. Kant proposes that from the very first we interpret what we experience as experience of a world of objects. Our interpretations of the world are not just passive receptions of inert sensations. We are not faced with a lot of private sensations from which we subsequently have to infer the untestable assumption of an external world and other people. Experience is in a sense not shared with anyone else. But that is a realization that comes only from the much later sophisticated reflection that not everyone sees the world as I do.\n\nFrom the very first, Kant argues, human thinking is an active power that necessarily interprets experience as experience of a world of continuing substances in causal interaction. That is, we interpret the coloured shapes we see as appearances of external objects which we encounter through these perceptions. This is a basic interpretative activity of the mind. We do not see sensations. We see objects, presented to us via sensations. Experience comes to us already interpreted by thought. We are aware both that something beyond our control is given to us in experience, and also that thinking actively interprets that \"something\" as a world of causally interacting substances. We are never isolated and alone. On the contrary, we are always encountering other objects and actively responding to them. We are active agents in a world of active agents. That is not an inference; it is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, both in science and in everyday experience of personal relationships.\n\nTo know anything you need both perceptions \u2013 sensory data \u2013 and concepts \u2013 thoughts. So of the world beyond our perceptions, of reality in itself, there can be no theoretical knowledge. This is the proper reply, Kant thinks, both to common sense (naive) realists and to reductive materialists. They both think they know what there is, but both are mistaken. Kant does not know what there is (not theoretically, anyway). But, whatever it is, it must produce the appearances we see and the active minds that interpret them. There is a hidden reality, and the mind plays a positive creative role in interpreting its appearances. This provides the key to understanding what Kant always regarded as the most important, and most misunderstood, part of his philosophy: that which reason forbids me to know, reason compels me to believe.\n\nThe limits of reason\n\nKant argues that if reason claims to tell the truth about ultimate reality it leads to contradictions (he calls these \"antinomies\"). But we do know that if there are appearances, then there must be a reality that appears. In the world of appearances, we seek determining causes for everything. We actually insist that nature conforms to our demand for causes for all events. It is a condition of the possibility of scientific knowledge of the world that we think of the world as consisting of continuing substances in a succession of regular and predictable causal relationships. That is no mere whim, as if it were no better than being inclined to think of the world as moved about by the arbitrary acts of millions of fairies. These inclinations are rational, because they are the very conditions of the possibility of our understanding of an intelligible world. And they are confirmed by constant experience, as science continually finds out more about the natural world.\n\nJust as reason (or understanding, in Kant's terminology) lays down the conditions of the possibility of scientific knowledge, so reason lays down the conditions of a complete rational explanation of the world, including the non-scientific facts of subjective consciousness, freedom, value, and purpose. These conditions cannot be completely confirmed by any specific experience, so they remain postulates \u2013 not irrational leaps of faith, but rational postulates that cannot be fully confirmed by experience.\n\nThe postulates of reason, according to Kant, have both a negative and a positive sense. In their negative sense, they show that materialism, naturalism, and fatalism are indefensible, according to Kant's Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic. Materialism is the view that the mind is nothing but a material thing, whereas Kant shows, he thinks, that it is the part-creator of reality-as-appearance. Naturalism is the view that nature is self-sufficient, whereas Kant shows that nature is the appearance of an underlying and unknowable reality. And fatalism is the view that all human acts are products of blind necessity, whereas Kant shows that they may indeed be free in reality, even though we can never prove that they are.\n\nTo many philosophers, it sounds impressive to say that the experienced world is only an appearance of a very different underlying reality. But it is not quite so impressive when it is added that we know nothing at all about such a reality. Kant's position of complete theoretical agnosticism about the world of things-in-themselves does not quite ring true.\n\nThe leap of reason\n\nIt is at this point that \"faith\" comes into the picture, and gives a positive sense to the postulates of reason. Faith, for Kant, has absolutely nothing to do with revelation or religious authority, both of which he hated so much that he never went to church and regarded kneeling down to pray as an affront to human dignity. Kant was a great defender of autonomy, of deciding things for yourself, and he tried to get all his disciples to take his word for it that they should decide things for themselves. He added of course that if they decided correctly, they would all agree with him, since he always made the most rational decisions. Insofar as they disagreed, they were not being fully rational.\n\nKantian faith is the positive acceptance of the unprovable but fully rational postulates of reason on practical or moral (not religious) grounds. Kant wrote three \"critiques of reason\", in which he set out to show the limits of reason and its positive role in human thought. At this point I am only concerned with the first two critiques. His first critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, was concerned with examining the role of theoretical reason in helping us to achieve knowledge in science. He argued that it is a condition of the possibility of doing science that you accept some necessary postulates of understanding (most importantly, the objective existence of substances and of causality).\n\nHis second critique, the Critique of Practical Reason, went on to discuss the role of reason in practical action and especially in morality. He argued that it is a condition of the possibility of morality that you accept some postulates of reason (most importantly, the objective existence of free agents who are able to act on rationally chosen principles). Having shown that science does not give a theoretical account of things-in-themselves, he now suggests that morality gives a special sort of insight into that veiled reality. At least it compels us to think of it in a particular way (as a world of free agents), even though we cannot theoretically establish our beliefs.\n\nReason thus plays a positive role in human knowledge. In theoretical matters it requires sense-experience to confirm its postulates. But humans not only think and understand. They also act and set and pursue goals that they believe to be good. Is this a function of reason also? Can reason set goals of action, and are we free to pursue them? For Kant, reason does set two general goals of action \u2013 the happiness of others and one's own perfection, \"the fullest use of one's free powers\".\n\nBut if reason sets such goals, then reason must be assumed to possess a causal role in the world, setting goals of action which I can then pursue. This entails two beliefs \u2013 that I am free to set and pursue rational goals and that it is possible to achieve them (otherwise it would not be a rational pursuit). Thereby results one of Kant's major conclusions: I can never theoretically prove the human will is free. But for rational action and moral commitment to be possible, I must presuppose freedom in practice. Whatever my theoretical indecisions, I must commit myself in practice, and I know that I should commit myself to the wholly good.\n\nMoreover, if I really think free commitment to realizing goodness is reasonable, I must believe that the good \u2013 which consists of both happiness and that form of self-cultivation which is virtue \u2013 is achievable, even in a corrupted world. Kant's point is that if moral action is to be fully reasonable, and not just a matter of arbitrary decision, I must assume that what I am trying to achieve is possible. So fully rational moral action must commit itself to the hope that a world in which happiness is realized in accordance with the practice of virtue can and will exist. That is a presupposition of the rationality of the real world to which the human will commits itself in genuine moral action. For if reality is rationally structured, it will exist in order to realize an envisaged good, and the realization of that good is assured by the rational order of reality.\n\nKant is not, after all, a total agnostic. He believes there can be no knowledge or proof of the nature of the world beyond the senses. But he knows there is and must be such a world. The world of appearance is a world constituted by both an unknown objective reality and the constitutive activity of the mind, which in itself is also unknown.\n\nBut where theory may hesitate, persons must act. This is not as far from Hume as it may seem. Hume also is sceptical about transcendent metaphysical truths obtainable by reason. Hume also thinks we must act on the basis of our human sentiments and habitual inclinations to believe. But whereas Hume thinks that we are driven by passions and habits, which we cannot help, Kant insists that there are rational goals of action, that human persons are free, autonomous (capable of direction by their own free decisions), and that we must assume (without theoretical proof) whatever is necessary to embrace that freedom.\n\nIn this way Kant qualifies his view that we can know nothing of reality in itself. Though that is true of theoretical or testable knowledge, in moral action we commit ourselves to thinking of objective reality in a specific way, as a realm of autonomous rational agents. The limitation of theoretical knowledge to appearances means that such a commitment cannot either be established or disproved theoretically. In that situation, practice takes priority over theory, and, as Kierkegaard was later to put it, we may passionately commit ourselves to what is theoretically uncertain. For Kant, such passionate commitment is not irrational or non-rational. It is supremely rational and a condition of accepting the reasonableness of human moral freedom. It is a leap of reason, not a leap of faith.\n\n## Chapter Four\n\n## Putting minds first\n\nKant's denial of all theoretical knowledge of reality was judged by many philosophers who followed him to be implausible. Other forms of idealism, the best known of which is that of Hegel, more boldly affirm that we can know something about reality-in-itself, namely, that it really is mind-like. There are other forms of idealism too. Many of them can be found in Indian philosophy. In the West, one of them is process philosophy, formulated by the British philosopher and mathematician A. N. Whitehead, which claims that there are many mental realities, rather than just one dominating Absolute Mind. In all its forms, however, idealism is obviously opposed to materialism, and gives mind or consciousness a primary place in our idea of reality.\n\nKant says that the conceptual categories we use only have theoretical meaning within the realm of sense-experience. Yet he also holds that there is a reality beyond sense-experience, of which the sensory world is an appearance. But how can he even say that there is a realm beyond sense-experience, which is the hidden cause of our sense-experiences? He is using the categories of substance (things-in-themselves are described as things, after all), existence, and causality, which should have no meaning. He is even describing the things-in-themselves as noumenal (which means \"mind-like\" or \"only apprehensible by mind\"), intelligible or conceptual as opposed to sensory.\n\nAlthough the freedom of the self cannot be proved by induction or by empirical methods, it must, he says, be postulated as a condition of moral action. The ideas of reason do not have theoretical meaning, but we must act as if they are true of the noumenal world, and the justification for this is that they must be used to achieve unity in our knowledge and to underpin moral action. It is far from satisfactory, however, to hold that we must act as if something is true, when we know it is not, and when we have no idea, theoretically speaking, of what is true. To hold that this is a totally rational procedure stretches the meaning of rationality beyond any reasonable limits.\n\nThe trouble is that Kant provides a wholly mechanistic and deterministic view of phenomena, while free action and the judgments of understanding and reason are allocated to a nonmechanistic and non-deterministic (but also non-temporal and non-spatial) realm. This means that I must regard my moral actions as free and undetermined \u2013 but only in a noumenal realm beyond space and time.\n\nFor most of us, however, free acts take place in time. I am free when I perform a specific action. It is not really much help to say that all my specific actions in time are determined, but that there is some sort of non-temporal freedom as well. The attempt to make sense of this even leads Kant at one point to say that perhaps the place where I am born is freely chosen by me in a non-temporal sense, and that is dangerously near to saying that I am poor and oppressed because I choose to be. I do not think we want to go there. This is worse than a ghost in a machine; it is something completely invisible inside the appearance of a machine. And that threatens to undermine the very morality and rationality the Kantian system was designed to protect.\n\nThe personal, the moral, and the scientific have to be integrated in a better way than this. It is actually Kant and not Descartes who is the chief proponent of the myth against which Ryle inveighs. Descartes doubted only for a while, and in a purely hypothetical way. But Kant advocates an utter scepticism about what reality-in-itself is like. His doubt is total and irrevocable. Of course Kant protests that his philosophy leaves everything as it is, in this phenomenal world. That is why he protests (too much?) that he is not an \"idealist\", in the sense of being a person who thinks physical objects are only ideas in the mind or that the whole of reality is in the mind of a perceiver.\n\nBut the fact is that Kant does think that the whole of reality as it is perceived is a product of the mind of the perceiver. The term he preferred for this philosophical outlook was \"critical idealism\". There is an unknowable reality underlying the world of appearances, but it adds nothing at all to theoretical knowledge. It could simply be ignored, except that it gives the mind a constitutive and active and essential role in experience. Thus it leads us to think of reality-in-itself as mind-like, even though we have no theoretical knowledge of it. Reason does in fact have something to say about the world of things-in-themselves. But it says it only from a practical (Kant says, a \"regulative\") point of view, for the sake of grounding and motivating our moral action and our sense of the intrinsic moral worth of human persons.\n\nMany modern philosophers would recommend avoiding this conclusion by getting rid of things-in-themselves, and reverting to some sort of realism. I think Ryle did that. The trouble is that once you recognize the dependence of human knowledge of the world upon the specific structure of human senses and brains, and once you give thought a constructive part in building up human knowledge, you do seem to be stuck with the conclusion that the world we perceive is largely a product of our perceptual and conceptual apparatus. Even our brains are parts of the perceived world of appearances. Kant is not saying that you only have the appearance of a brain. His assertion is that your brain is only an appearance \u2013 so it cannot be what constructs the world of appearances.\n\nStill, Kant could not get rid of the suspicion that there must be some reality underlying the appearances. Neither could many philosophers after Kant, the best known of whom is probably Hegel, who said that if you can posit that there are things-in-themselves, you must also posit that the mind has some access to what those things really are. Kant really believed this anyway, deep down, but his philosophical system forced him to say that we could have no theoretical knowledge of reality-in-itself. We are moving toward a more fully-fledged statement of philosophical idealism.\n\nThe priority of mind\n\nIn order to get to a more robust form of idealism, we only have to discard the idea, central to Kant's theoretical philosophy, that concepts without \"intuitions\" or perceptions are empty. There are some concepts (roughly, the ones Kant called \"ideas\") that are not conclusively confirmable by sense-observation, but that may be basic to our metaphysical scheme. These will include concepts suggested by reflection upon the causal activity of the mind in both theoretical knowledge and moral action.\n\nKant is convinced that his critical philosophy shows materialism to be false. Minds, since they play a constructive part in creating the objects of knowledge, cannot be just objects of empirical knowledge (brains). Minds are active in two main ways, theoretically and practically. Theoretically they interpret sense-experience in terms of a world of enduring objects having causal relations and often forming integrated wholes. They \"see\" the immediate and transitory data of the senses as mediating a reality beyond themselves. Thus they see the present as mediating the past, in remembering past data and identifying present data as integral parts of what has gone before. This is perhaps clearest in music, where we hear notes as parts of a tune, not as isolated sounds.\n\nMinds also see the present as mediating the future, seeing possibilities for action over stretches of time. Minds see the present as mediating objectivity, a world of objects continuing to exist unobserved. Minds also see the present as mediating a sense of self, a continuing agent which integrates experiences into one unique totality of \"my experience\". And minds see the present as often mediating other agent selves, with goals that may block or help their own.\n\nIn all these ways, I have the idea of myself as a continuing cognitive agent among others in a common world \u2013 something that perception without thought could not generate. My inner mental life of perceptions and thoughts does not, as Ryle suggests, lock me into a private world that could never encounter or be known by others. On the contrary, it is because minds have private thoughts and experiences that they are of interest to others, and that they always remain to some extent mysterious and intriguing. But it is because minds interpret their sense-perceptions as mediating a world of objects and persons (intentional agents) that they know there are others to find intriguing. Persons meet through the mutual interpretative mediation of their thoughts, through language, by which marks or sounds are taken as mediating meaning beyond their sensory appearances.\n\nMinds are also active practically. They consider future possibilities and evaluate them. They choose courses of action and initiate them. They make moral decisions and to some extent shape their own characters by the habitual patterns of action that they choose over time. So persons are praised or blamed for their actions, assuming that they could have chosen otherwise, and that they knew the moral quality of what they were doing.\n\nWe may not know what the veiled reality underlying physical objects is. But there is a good case for saying that we do know what the reality underlying our own mental activity is. That reality is known, not through perception, but in the cognitive and moral activity of the self. At this point reality is known in and through its activity, and that activity is the activity of mind, of free and conscious interpretation and choice.\n\nKant said that we do not know what the mind is in itself; we only know its phenomenal acts. But the mind is known in itself precisely in its activity. Mental activity is not something that appears to us in one way, but exists in itself in another way. Mind is known in its actions, which are not appearances of objects \u2013 that was Hume's mistake when he tried to find the self as an object. The self is not an object that can be perceived like a block of wood or a tree. The self is the unobservable agent that makes all experience of the sensory world possible and is the source of all responsible actions in that world.\n\nIt is thus the activity of the self that gives access to reality, and which creates for us the world of appearances. The primary sense of reality-in-itself that we have is that it has the character of mind, of active mediating knowledge, and responsible choice. To make such a blunt assertion as this is to move beyond Kant's agnosticism to a more fully-fledged idealism, affirming that we are capable of knowing that the basic character of reality is mind or consciousness.\n\nAbsolute idealism\n\nIdealists are aware that there are many human (and perhaps other finite) minds. They claim that the material world (which is the phenomenal world, the world as we know it through perception) exists as an environment created by a primordial mind in which finite minds can exist in mutual self-expression and interaction.\n\nThis is about as far from materialism and as far from commonsense realism as it is possible to get. It totally reverses the modern myth that minds are by-products of a purely material evolutionary process, completely determined by physical events in their bodies and brains. What it says is that physical events as we perceive and know them are appearances constructed by minds. What the reality underlying those appearances may be in detail we do not know. But since minds are the only sorts of reality we know to belong to the world of things-in-themselves, it is reasonable to think that reality does not exist without mind and consciousness, evaluation and intention, understanding and action. Minds are irreducible elements of reality and they play a constructive role in the existence of the phenomenal world that we perceive and know. Minds are not illusory ghosts in real machines. On the contrary, machines are spectral, transitory phenomena appearing to an intelligible world of minds.\n\nWhat idealists maintain is that the ultimate nature of reality itself is mind-like, and that human and other finite minds are the best clues we have to what objective reality is like. The cosmos is not a mindless, unconscious, valueless, purposeless, yet somehow strangely intelligible, mechanism. Such a view is the result of extrapolating a machine-model, very useful in many scientific contexts, to provide the most comprehensive and adequate picture of the real cosmos.\n\nIdealists propose that the human mind provides a better model from which to extrapolate to the cosmos as a whole. That is not because the cosmos looks like a very large human person or because there is some large person hovering just beyond the cosmos. It is because human minds play a creative and constructive role in producing the phenomenal world. They seem to point to a level of reality that is not merely phenomenal or an appearance to consciousness. Human minds generate an idea of reality as mind-like in a way that far transcends human mentality, yet that does include something like consciousness, value, and purpose as essential parts of its nature.\n\nThere are many forms of idealism. Kant's critical idealism is just a little too agnostic for most idealists. Some philosophers, like McTaggart, have proposed that a society of minds underlies and gives rise to our physical cosmos. Perhaps the best-known European idealist, Hegel, hypothesized that there is just one Absolute Mind or Spirit which progressively realizes its nature in the history of the cosmos. This form of idealism, often called absolute idealism (Theory 7), is what I am calling the seventh philosophical view.\n\nIt is found as a major strand in the Indian philosophical traditions, too. Sankara, an eighth-century sage and saint, founded the school of Advaita\u2013 non-dualism \u2013 which holds that the whole of the cosmos and everything in it is an appearance of one Supreme Spirit. Though that Spirit \u2013 Brahman \u2013 is unknowable in its inner nature, it makes itself known as sat-cit-ananda, an infinite reality of intelligence and bliss. Finite minds are appearances of that one Absolute, and each human person can come to know itself as a part of that Absolute Mind, not a separate entity.\n\nThere is an interpretation of absolute idealism to which I should like to draw attention, because it gives a much more positive role to the material world than the rather negative assertion of Advaita that matter and individual minds are in the end illusions. It is best approached through the work of another Indian philosopher, Ramanuja, probably a twelfth-century thinker, who founded the philosophical school of Vishist-advaita Vedanta or qualified non-dualism. This school is non-dualist, because it stresses that all things and all persons are parts or expressions of one supreme reality of Spirit. But it places strong emphasis on personal autonomy and relationship. So Spirit realizes itself by \"becoming many\", by relating to partly autonomous finite spirits which together express the nature of Mind. On this interpretation, it is perhaps clearer that the cosmos of finite persons is not just some sort of illusion, which should ideally be transcended. The cosmos is more like the positive \"play\" (lila) of Spirit, with a positive function of allowing relational properties like cooperation and friendship to exist as proper parts of the self-expression of Absolute Spirit. The ideal is a sort of diversity-in-unity, in which differences remain, but are united in a wider whole. I think that this is rather close to what Hegel meant to convey, though Hegel seemed to suffer from a congenital inability to convey anything very clearly.\n\nProcess philosophy\n\nA rather different form of idealism is more radically pluralistic, and gives causal priority not to one Absolute Spirit, but to a huge, possibly infinite, number of entities, which make up the physical universe. Each of these entities has a psychic or mental aspect, as well as an outer or physical aspect. Bertrand Russell believed such a view for at least two days, calling it \"neutral monism\". I prefer to call it pluralistic idealism (Theory 8), because it gives causal priority to the inner or mind-like aspects of events.\n\nThis may seem very unrealistic if it entails that even rocks and trees are conscious and have feelings, feeling hurt when they get moved around or chopped down. We may, however, confine consciousness as we experience it to higher organisms with brains, and yet say that all physical entities also have an \"inner\" nature that is a sort of embryonic consciousness, an unseen centre of capacities and powers that forms the heart of their being. Such a view \u2013 the eighth and mercifully, you may think, the last view that I will consider \u2013 has received an extensive exposition in A. N. Whitehead's \"Process and Reality\" \u2013 a series of Gifford lectures that is immensely complex and difficult in detail, but contains some basically simple ideas that reframe traditional metaphysical views in the light of modern science.\n\nOne of these simple ideas is that all events have an inner nature, hidden from external observation, which is the source of the creativity that drives the cosmos onwards in time. This philosophy, influenced in part by new developments in mathematical physics, can fairly be seen as a form of radically pluralistic idealism.\n\nLike most really original philosophers, Whitehead begins his philosophy by denying what most other philosophers take to be absolutely certain. Kant, for example, held that we necessarily interpret the world as a collection of substances which continue to exist even when all their non-essential properties change. Whitehead, however, denied that there are any substances at all. There are only processes, chains of events, not held together by any underlying substance. Whitehead's view is that events are discrete existents, and that the chains they form are complexes in which the individual creativity of huge, perhaps infinite, numbers of basic events is the true cause of change in the phenomenal world.\n\nWhitehead, like many philosophers, devises a technical vocabulary that is at times almost impenetrable. But with a bit of over-simplification, his basic scheme is this: the world is made up of huge numbers of \"actual occasions\" or events, which are tiny blobs of \"feeling\". Each one lasts only for a split second, coming into being and perishing in the blink of an eye. Each one \"prehends\" or internally registers influences from a set of other events immediately preceding it. And each one then creatively projects into the future a new integration of these prehensions, which is passed on to its immediately succeeding actual occasions. These occasions form the process of actual being. Even though they \"feel\", they are not conscious, so feeling is a word for their internal structure, not for their emotional state.\n\nActual occasions form complex unities, in which a dominant event presides over a large array of smaller events in an organic whole. The human sense of self is a product of a vast array of actual occasions, organized into a complex organic unity, the human body, under the partial control of a dominant actual occasion which is fully conscious. Yet this dominant occasion, like all others, is in fact a series of evanescent events succeeding each other in a continuous sequence, maintaining the process of prehension and creativity that constitutes our actual world.\n\nTo many people this will seem a strange scheme, and it need not be taken too strictly. As with many philosophical systems, it may be wise to accept some general insights while resisting the intricacies of detail that seem to go with devising a grand philosophical system. Whitehead himself is alleged to have said, as he was dying, \"I want no disciples\" \u2013 to which of course those around him said, \"Yes, Master.\" Process thought is not a final dogmatic system. It is more a spur to thinking in new ways about our complex universe.\n\nWe might pick out its main elements as being these: the world consists of a constant flow of transient moments, a \"process\". There is not a sharp dualistic disjunction between mind and matter. Matter is formed of \"low-grade\" events, and mind of \"high-grade\" events, but there is a continuity of being and a development of new characteristics as organic forms get more complex. What drives the process is not a set of mechanical and blind repetitive routines, but continual creativity and novelty, aiming overall at greater harmony and beauty and some sort of realization of the possibilities inherent in each new situation \u2013 but also realizing many conflicting and negative (narrowly self-satisfying) possibilities as an inevitable corollary of the system.\n\nAbsolute idealists would give a more positive causal role to Absolute Spirit, and might also feel that there is an important distinction of kind between conscious selves that can know and respond responsibly to their situation and the \"lower-grade\" events that have no consciousness, knowledge or freedom of action. Yet Whitehead's form of pluralistic idealism presents a philosophical hypothesis that takes account of the continuity and emergent development of the natural world and stresses the value of creativity, individuality, and freedom in nature that can be overlooked in some forms of absolute idealism.\n\nBoth forms of idealism, absolute and pluralistic, if taken to extremes, may put the concept of persons as autonomous, free, rational agents in question. The seventh theory, the idea that persons are all parts of one cosmic mind, may subordinate individuals completely to one all-determining reality, so that the cosmos becomes nothing but the progressive realization of \"Absolute Spirit\". Hegel has, probably unfairly, often been accused of this.\n\nThe eighth theory, that persons are chains of actual occasions, may undermine the idea of persons as continuing intelligent substances, seeing them as transitory parts of a much wider complex flow of events. Thus a major problem for idealism is to formulate an adequate concept of human personhood.\n\nRyle does not explicitly deal with the question of what constitutes a human person. I suspect he would say that the way we use language shows that we all know what a person is \u2013 not a rock, not an animal, and not an angel. I am not so sanguine. I think there is no more important question in the whole of philosophy and in the whole of life than that of what a person really is. Is a person a by-product of purposeless and blind physical forces, as materialists suppose? Or a single continuous autonomous rational agent, as Descartes thought? A particular finite expression of one universal mind, as Hegel claimed? Or part of an endless stream of sensations, thoughts, and feelings, of actual occasions, as Whitehead asserted?\n\nTo answer these questions, we have to have some theory about what is really real, since persons are certainly parts of reality. That is why I have set out eight main theories of the \"really real\": phenomenalism, common-sense or naive realism, materialism, dualism, epiphenomenalism, critical idealism, absolute idealism, and pluralistic idealism.\n\nI have argued that there are good reasons for rejecting phenomenalism, naive realism, and materialism, and I do not much care for epiphenomenalism and critical idealism. But I have yet to deal with Ryle's objections to Cartesian dualism, which I need to do because I am aiming to develop a view of human persons that lies somewhere between Descartes, as traditionally understood, and a form of idealism.\n\nI believe that persons are continuing centres of consciousness and responsible moral agency. I have said that a process view of persons may threaten to undermine this position. However, I actually think that process thought need not conflict with a view of persons as autonomous continuing selves \u2013 in Descartes' terms, as \"thinking substances\". In the next chapter I will try to show that this is so.\n\n## Chapter Five\n\n## Questions of personal identity\n\nWhat is the nature of human persons? Are they aspects of one Absolute Mind (as in Hegel) or complex combinations of a huge number of mind-like events (as in Whitehead) or something else? I argue that human persons are primarily chains of experiences \u2013 thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and sensations \u2013 and actions (as in Process and some Buddhist forms of pluralistic idealism). But these chains are \"owned\" by continuing subjects (\"mental substances\") who give them their unique identity. It is thus possible to speak, as Descartes did, of continuing mental substances, and to emphasize that those substances (\"minds\" or \"souls\") are primarily made up of inner experiences and intentions.\n\nSo far I have tried to show that there are good philosophical arguments for idealism, and I have hinted that I intend to defend some form of Cartesian dualism, though not the most radical form (which I think is often wrongly ascribed to Descartes). The Cartesian view maintains that human persons are continuing mental substances, \"thinking things\". Idealist views may hold that persons are aspects of one Absolute Mind or that they are composed of streams of \"actual occasions\", as in Whitehead. In defending a form of Cartesian dualism, I want to suggest that there are varieties of idealism that can accommodate that form of dualism, and that such a combination of views may provide the most adequate account of what human persons are.\n\nI will begin the discussion with a consideration of pluralistic idealism, because I think it is a good starting point for seeing what might be meant by considering persons as continuing substances. One reason for thinking of persons as substances has been that this idea enables us to think of a person as \"the same\" person through many changes of personality or in physical and mental properties. But is the idea of \"substance\" really helpful here, and what role does it play? Reflection on a view like process philosophy that explicitly denies the idea of \"substance\" might help to clarify the issue.\n\nAccording to process philosophy, there are no continuing substances, whose properties may change while the underlying substance remains the same. There is just a continual flow of properties, some of which we group together when we speak of things continuing to exist as \"the same things\". Instead of saying, \"The tree (a substance) has green leaves (properties), but they will turn red and fall off in winter (the properties change while the tree remains the same),\" we should say, \"This collection of leaf-like, branch-like, and trunk-like properties will remain the same in some respects, but it will change in others.\" Whether we call it \"the same tree\" or not is a matter of convention. We could say that it is not the same tree, because some of its properties are different. But we normally say that it is the same tree, because its trunk and branches are similar, and the leaves have changed in a generally regular and predictable way.\n\nSome people think that an object can be called \"the same\" only if it is a continuous physical entity in space and time. A tree is the same tree only if it continues to occupy the same space (or a continuously connected series of spaces) throughout one uninterrupted time. But what if one day the tree disappeared and an exactly similar tree instantaneously appeared three feet to the right? Would it be the same tree? I guess that if trees consistently jumped three feet to the right on Tuesdays, we would get into the habit of calling them the same trees.\n\nWould we say the same sort of thing about persons? What if my wife kept disappearing, but then reappeared after a short interval, three feet to the right? I guess I would get used to it in time. I would not say that I had lots of different wives in quick succession, all of them just like the last one. This seems to show that what matters is the process, the way in which properties succeed one another, and we do not need any invisible literally continuing substance to hold the properties together. My wife, and what I value about my wife, is not an invisible unchanging substance. It is the constantly changing, often surprising, always inventive yet reliable and dependable, chain of memories, feelings, likes and dislikes, habits, and goals, that I have lived with for forty-odd years. So far, the process view seems right.\n\nHowever, lots of funny things can happen to processes. In Kafka's novel, The Metamorphosis, a man goes to bed one night and when he wakes up the next morning, he has changed into a large beetle. Whitehead would just say that lots of properties have changed, though what the man's wife would say is another question altogether. She would probably say that her husband was not as reliable as she had thought.\n\nIt is important for finding our way round in the world that people (collections of people-properties) do not suddenly change into collections of beetle-properties. We like to have regularities of change. Without them we could not do science, and it is doubtful whether we could have any long-term human relationships. Could you, for example, marry a man who might change into a beetle? Would you have to say, \"Well, I married him for better or for worse. It just looks like things have suddenly got much worse\"? Or should you have a new marriage vow: \"I marry you for better or worse, unless you turn into a beetle (or some other large and offensive object)\"? We like our processes to be fairly regular and predictable. Fortunately, they usually are.\n\nSo we might be tempted to say that persons are not permanent unchanging substances. They are complex chains of memories, perceptions, imaginings, evaluations, feelings, choices, and thoughts. They are processes. Buddhists manage to live with that thought without much trouble. Nevertheless, Buddhists notwithstanding, these processes are very special. They form unique kinds of unities, and in two main ways. It may turn out that these unities are an important part of what Descartes had in mind when he talked about \"mental substances\".\n\nFirst, there is the unity of many memories, thoughts, perceptions, and feelings in one experience, a unity of experience. All the memories I have are my memories. Even if by mistake I have someone else's memories, when I have them they enter into one present consciousness which includes many thoughts and feelings and perceptions which are all mine. There is a unity of co-presence in consciousness.\n\nSecond, each chain of thoughts and perceptions is separated from every other chain in such a way that it is not possible for anyone to get from one chain to another. Your experiences remain yours and my experiences remain mine, and, it seems, never the twain shall meet. There is a unity of succession in consciousness.\n\nMoreover, conscious events are not just passive experiences. They include active events like attending to or focussing on specific experiences, choosing to seek or avoid specific experiences, and forming intentions to bring future events about. If Kant is anywhere near right, the whole of conscious experience is the result of active acts of attention and interpretation, as well as of passive reception of data.\n\nGiven these facts, we can say that one and the same person continues to exist if there is a unitary consciousness of co-present elements that flows smoothly and continuously through time without gaps, in ways that have at least partly been consciously and intentionally envisaged, evaluated, and chosen. That will do for a first shot at saying what a person is, and what it is for a person to continue as the same person over time and through change. It will need a little amendment to take account of some \"gaps\" in consciousness that obviously exist \u2013 when we go to sleep, for example \u2013 and that will come later in this chapter.\n\nTechnically, for process philosophers, each moment of choice could be seen as a new act, performed by a new, never-before-existing agent. But such choices are made in view of all the knowledge and memories in one consciousness at that time, and as part of a future-directed process whose constituent events are parts of one unique chain of such unitary conscious complexes. Assuming that there are no breakdowns or delusions in such knowledge and memory, and that the pursuit of longer-term goals proceeds by a series of overlapping intermediate steps, we call the series of events that forms one discrete \"chain of events\" or process the acts and states of one and the same person.\n\nThere is in fact no discernible difference between there being a succession of agent-causes, linked together by being members of one unique chain of unitary conscious states, and there being one agent that continues as the \"same\" throughout the existence of such a chain. As long as each agent remembers one and only one immediately past consciousness and intends to modify one and only one immediately future consciousness, this is just what it means to say that the same agent continues through that chain of experiences. So it turns out that a process view of persons as successions of acts and experiences of a unique kind does not differ, when properly examined, from a Cartesian view that there is one continuing mental substance that thinks, feels, imagines, and perceives.\n\nYou cannot peel the substance off from its thinkings and feelings as though it could continue intact without them. That which thinks and feels is the succession of active causes that are normally linked by a continuous chain of conscious events in a way that no other causes are. As David Hume said, I cannot \"see\" a causal agent in addition to all the causal agencies of attending, choosing, and intending, that are the contents of my consciousness. But I do not need to do so, since I am the collection of all my responsible actions \u2013 a collection that is still being formed \u2013 and there is nothing else that I need or should want to be.\n\nOf course the normal process that leads us to speak of personal identity can go wrong. Bodies can radically change, by serious accidents or diseases, for example. The unity of co-presence in consciousness can fragment, as with so-called multiple personality, when different consciousnesses seem to connect with the same body. Memories and thoughts can become imagined or illogical, as when I seem to remember doing things I never did \u2013 which seems increasingly to happen as I get older. Actions can become wrongly directed toward their goals, or those goals may change and disappear from consciousness, so that I may obsessively perform actions over and over again, without any idea why.\n\nPersonal identity is a fragile process and often a matter of degree. There are no hard-edged boundaries that delineate when a person who has changed radically in some ways is or is not \"the same person\". The sort of body we have, the memories that haunt or delight us, the personality that disposes us to be good-humoured or acerbic, our basic evaluations and goals, are all important to being a human person. A major change in any of these aspects might make us wonder if we are the same person. A major change in most of them would probably incline us to say we are not. Nevertheless, there are some clear central, and it is to be hoped normal, cases where \"being the same person\" is not in doubt. We do not have to say that there is some invisible and undetectable substance that continues underneath all the changing states and properties. But in central cases, consciousness and responsible choice are important factors in determining identity of personhood. Mental factors, in other words, are crucially important in determining what persons are, in a way that material, bodily, factors are not, even if we do not want to be forced into the position of denying that humans who lack those factors are persons. Perhaps that may seem obvious. I hope it does. Yet it is something that tough-minded, eliminative materialists deny.\n\nMemories and persons\n\nSo far we have a rough idea of how persons can continue to exist at different times and places. Philosophers, however, will not be satisfied with such a rough idea. They will try to test it to destruction in order to undermine the claim that persons are constituted by chains of memories, thoughts, and feelings. They do this by imagining how they can mix such chains of conscious experiences up in various ways, until we no longer know whether we are talking about the same person or not. If we can do that, they say, this attempt to say that persons are primarily defined by their conscious mental lives will have collapsed.\n\nWhat would happen, for instance, if you took the memories of one person and put them into the mind of another person (perhaps by means of a brain transplant)? This may not seem impossible. It is quite possible that I may remember doing things that somebody else did (I may clearly remember winning Wimbledon, though Pete Sampras did so). The line between imagination, fantasy, and memory is very thin.\n\nIf I remember doing something I never did, have I become the person who did them (John Locke is often accused of thinking this)? Or if I remember doing something nobody ever did, have I become nobody?\n\nThe film Total Recall, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and based on a story by Philip K. Dick, starts with the idea that future travel shops can save on their carbon footprint by not actually sending you anywhere. Instead, they implant memories that you have already been there in your brain. You pay for the memory of a holiday and, since you usually only remember the good bits, that is in many ways preferable to the hassle of actually travelling and possibly being disappointed.\n\nThe point of the film is that the hero changes his mind and escapes from the memory-implant machine. He then undergoes a series of increasingly alarming experiences, ending in him saving the planet from destruction. But this is exactly the adventure he had in fact paid for in the first place. So did he really escape or did he just falsely remember that he had escaped? We never find out. It's a pretty good story, even though my wife thinks I liked it because of the extreme violence in it. However, I know that it was the philosophical puzzles I liked (at least I think I know that, but I can't quite remember).\n\nSuppose I remember killing someone, though I actually never did so (though no one knows that). I might confess to murder and sincerely regret what I think I did. Should I be punished for it? In the state of California, a philosophically minded defence lawyer has argued that his client, who actually did murder somebody, should not be punished, because he was not a continuing self, and the agent who committed the murder had ceased to exist long ago. Since then, he had been replaced many times by a number of other agents, and the present agent standing in court had only just begun to exist. So he could not have murdered anyone. The defence did not succeed. But why not?\n\nIt is not in question that we often have false memories and that we lose many memories. Do we have to remember something accurately before we can be punished or rewarded for it? Or could we receive a Nobel prize for a discovery we cannot remember making and that perhaps we have forgotten all about? The Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit imagines replacing half of his brain with half the brain of Greta Garbo. Would he then receive half of a lifetime achievement award for what she did? Or would it be he, or half of him, who had done it? Or would she never receive the award, because she had turned into someone else, namely Greta Parfit or possibly Derek Garbo?\n\nThe mind boggles. Normally, if I work hard for a long time I may deserve a reward, and if I have done many things that are harmful to others, I may deserve some sort of penalty. We do think about the future, and about the consequences of our actions. And we think about our future, not just somebody's future. If I save hard for my retirement, I will not be happy if somebody else gets my pension. The point is: I do not do things that will cause some good states later, whoever experiences those states. I do things, at least when I am being prudent rather than altruistic, that will cause good for an agent who is continuous with me now. The experience in future will include memories of me now and will be able to connect a whole series of actions with one continuing set of overlapping experiences.\n\nIn fact, no one could ever perform an action for their own future well-being if they did not believe they would exist in the future. But when we analyse it, what distinguishes me in the future is that there is a temporal continuity between successive sets of private experiences, to which no one else has direct access. \"I\" am constituted by a present unique set of experiences and actions, which continues into the future. So I realize that what happens to this present member of the chain of experiences is a consequence of what some past members of the chain have done. Conversely, what I do now will have consequences for some future agent\/experient who is uniquely connected in time to this chain.\n\nMost of the curious cases that philosophers have thought up are cases in which there is some pathological malfunction in the chain. It is imagined that some members of one mental chain are spliced into another mental chain. Those members will not have been caused by previous free and responsible acts in this chain, but they may have been caused by prior free acts in another chain from which they came.\n\nThe full story must of course include the fact that the chains have been tampered with, and that most instances of tampering will be criminal acts of psychological damage. A normally healthy person will remember events in his mental sequence and will be able to formulate long-term plans for future events in the sequence and act to realize them. Amnesia is an illness, which should be treated if possible, and which should not affect the treatment of present persons as (to the appropriate extent) a product of their previous free acts. Having false memories is also an illness, and since they do not represent genuine past causes, they have no implications for the present treatment of persons.\n\nIf, by some mischance, you have someone else's memories, these should usually be treated as false memories. But if you can imagine two memory-chains being forcibly merged, like Parfit and Garbo, you would have one person with two distinct parallel sets of memories. If, unlike Parfit and Garbo, one was a serial killer and the other a saint, we would have a problem. Maybe we should think that both past persons have died, and we should just start again. We can only hope such a situation would never arise, since it would amount to penalizing the saint's past acts and overlooking those of the serial killer. But who said human life was perfectly fair anyway? We just have to muddle through doing the best we can. Human justice may work in normal cases, but break down in borderline, extremely improbable, situations.\n\nMy conclusion is that fantastic scenarios of memory-change do not undermine the claim that persons are largely constituted by continuous chains of memories, thoughts, and feelings, and that these are much more important than considerations of bodily continuity. This is what underlies our normal notions of moral responsibility, and the idea that we can develop our characters by attention and effort (or of course destroy them by distraction and indolence). It underpins our normal belief that human persons have a distinctive, perhaps unique, moral dignity and value.\n\nPersons and bodies\n\nI have stressed the importance of temporal continuity of experiences to our normal idea of continuing personhood. We also think that spatial continuity is important \u2013 there is normally a continuous spatial track between my body now and my body as it used to be, even though those bodies may look and feel very different. I have suggested, however, that strict spatial continuity may not be essential to my continuing to be the same person throughout a stretch of time. My body may disappear for periods of time, or it may move three feet to the right instantaneously, and I would still be the same person, as long as there is not more than one body that claims to be me.\n\nCould we also dispense with strict temporal continuity? Could there be temporal gaps, so that I could altogether cease to exist for half an hour and then come back into existence again as the same person? In a sense, this already happens, because when I go to sleep there is a gap in the stream of conscious experiences, but that does not usually lead me to say that I die every night and somebody else wakes up in the morning. Of course my body has been there during the night. But I do not have to check that I have the same body before I can be sure exactly who I am when I wake up. I do not feel the need to employ people to keep watching me all night in case my body disappears. As far as I am concerned, my body might have disappeared during the night, and I would never notice. So my sense of being the same person cannot depend just on my having the same body all through the night (or a continuous series of closely connected bodies either). So it seems I can live with temporal gaps.\n\nIf that could happen for an hour or a night, what about a year? Or a million years? Just to make it worse, could I cease to exist for a million years, and reappear as the same person in quite a different body? Or would that be pushing the notion of personal identity too far?\n\nBefore we dismiss such an idea on the grounds that it is not normal, we need to remember that there is a very widespread human belief in reincarnation. Reincarnation offers a solution to the Parfit\u2013Garbo problem. In some other life the merged persons, Parfit and Garbo, would demerge again, and both would get their due deserts in different bodies. But does it make sense to say that the same person might live again in a different body? Is reincarnation possible?\n\nThe philosopher Bernard Williams has argued that reincarnation is not even logically possible. Neither is the rather similar idea of resurrection \u2013 the idea that we might be resurrected, perhaps in a rather different or at least (we hope) reconstructed and improved body, after a huge temporal gap. It would need a very strong argument to show that reincarnation or resurrection could not possibly occur. But Williams does bring out some problems with the idea.\n\nFor instance, there are at this moment about three hundred people who claim that they used to be Napoleon Bonaparte. When, if ever, would we believe them? One vaguely alarming possibility is that they could all be Napoleon. The General has split into three hundred copies, rather like a human stem cell dividing into thousands of copies.\n\nSome quantum physicists believe this actually happens, since every time one possible future is realized in one universe, an alternative possible future is realized in another universe. So Napoleon divided every time he did anything, and there are now millions of Napoleons in existence. But at least they are in different universes, and in any case they are all now dead (unless in some far away universe one Napoleon discovered the secret of eternal life).\n\nBernard Williams argued that none of these would be Napoleon, because you cannot have two identical things existing at the same time. Yet all these people would claim to be identical with the original Napoleon, and therefore they would all be identical with each other.\n\nBut what if one of them was the real Napoleon and all the others were fakes? That, says Williams, is impossible. Because of the lack of bodily continuity, they must all be fakes. And, he says, following this up with remorseless logic, if they are all fakes, then anyone who claims to be Napoleon but exists at a different time from Napoleon must be a fake too. The trouble is, that includes Napoleon himself, who, when he was forty, existed at a different time from Napoleon when he was thirteen. So Napoleon is a fake copy of himself. To be more precise, he is a long series of fake copies of himself. Not only is he a fake, he is not even a very good fake, because he looked quite different at forty than he had done at thirteen. He would not fool anybody.\n\nPeople, as they get older, are never very good copies of their earlier selves. After a certain age, parts begin to drop off, and wrinkles begin to appear where there were no wrinkles in the original (or, if you live in America, parts are added on where there were no parts before). Of course reincarnated people are not physical copies at all, and the three hundred reborn Napoleons look nothing like Napoleon. Quite a large number of them are women, as it happens. So it looks as though I can continue to be the same person even if my body changes considerably. Adding a few temporal gaps would not seem to make such a crucial difference. So reincarnation and resurrection, the change of bodies with physical and temporal gaps, seem to be at least logically possible.\n\nBut how can you know that one person is really the same as a person who used to exist some time ago, perhaps in a different body? Buddhists are the greatest experts at detecting reincarnations, as they have to find reincarnated lamas every few years to run their monasteries. They test candidates by seeing whether they recognize objects or places that dead lamas had known well. And they look out for especially wise words, good behaviour, and mental calm and mindfulness, which suggest an advanced spiritual state suitable for a dead lama.\n\nTheir appeal is to memories and to unusual mental dispositions suggesting wisdom, compassion, and controlled mindfulness. The interesting thing is that Buddhists specifically deny that there is any permanent self which endures through successive incarnations. What they are interested in is a succession of mental acts and events which, they believe, is the result of long and strenuous moral striving and mental training on the part of some past successions of mental events.\n\nDoes it really matter whose mental strivings caused the present set of mental events to exist? The idea is that the present succession does not just come into existence for no reason. It has a cause or a long series of causes. Those causes are not primarily physical causes. They are successive acts of attention and effort, of attending and intending, which have gradually built up a tendency to generate mental states of deep understanding and compassion for all beings. Such states do not just occur. They are brought about by intentional actions. Other chains of mental action have brought about states of ignorance and indifference to or even hatred of other sentient beings.\n\nAll chains of intentional action bring about states of increased or decreased understanding and empathy. To comprehend the nature of such states we need to comprehend how and why they have come into being, for they carry within themselves the causal history of their origin. My present understanding of the world is essentially an understanding that has been developed through a long succession of past acts of insight or obtuseness, and I do not fully understand what I am (my co-present consciousness) unless I understand how this consciousness has come to be.\n\nAs Proust, or someone very like Proust, might say, the reason I like the taste of little cakes like madeleines may be found in experiences in the past which lie in some deep recess of my memory. A full self-understanding would unlock that past succession of memories \u2013 which is no doubt why the Enlightened One, the Buddha, is said to have full recollection of his many lives.\n\nSo I do not just say, \"Someone (it does not matter who) in the past meditated for forty years, and I am now reaping the benefits of that by being calm and collected.\" I say, \"I am continuing a particular causal succession of mental acts and experiences, even though I have a different body and there has been a long temporal interval between the past succession and its present continuation.\" Someone can be Napoleon now, if their dispositions and mental states have in fact been caused by and continue in a different context the succession of mental acts which made up the inner mental life of Napoleon.\n\nThere could be three hundred incarnated Napoleons. But if there were, something would have gone wrong with the causal process. The reason we reject all these putative Napoleons is that they do not have the memories, thoughts, and intentions of the original Napoleon, and in addition they suffer from other behavioural and mental problems that render them subject to delusions. But if they were perfectly capable of ordering their own lives sensibly, and if they did remember things that only Napoleon could have known, we might begin to be impressed. It is because the evidence is not good enough that many people reject reincarnation or resurrection of the dead, not because it is a logical impossibility.\n\nIf, however, there were three hundred reincarnated Napoleons, we would have good reason to doubt the intelligibility of the causal processes of the universe. Whereas the life of Napoleon, insofar as it was the result of free and intentional mental acts, should have generated just one megalomaniac of militaristic and domineering disposition, it would instead have generated three hundred such unfortunate individuals. While that is logically possible, that would be morally unfair both to all the three hundred people who had to suffer because of the acts of just the one previous Napoleon and to everybody who had to put up with these incorrectly processed Napoleons.\n\nThe priority of the mental\n\nThings can go wrong with the universe, and if they do go wrong, we will just have to put up with it. But if things do not go radically wrong, it makes sense to say that I continue to be the same person if I have the same knowledge, memories, thoughts, dispositions, and intentions, even if there were spatial and temporal gaps between the person I used to be and the person I now am, and as long as there exists no other person now who is identical with me (which would complicate, but not completely undermine, the story).\n\nSuch a possibility gives priority to the mental over the physical or bodily. It denies the necessity of having some continuing identical substance to join two sets of conscious events together. And it places enormous importance on the conscious free intentions and efforts of sentient beings, which will affect the future in fundamental ways. It allows for the possibility of reincarnation or of other forms of life after bodily death. But of course its cogency depends upon there really being the sort of mental causality that the theory posits, and that is not at all obvious.\n\nWhether or not we accept the possibility of reincarnation or resurrection (though it is difficult to dismiss them as absolutely impossible), we can hold that at least in this life chains of mental causality are normally (and perhaps always) mediated through temporally continuous physical bodies. This takes account of the fact that fully free intentional acts are probably much rarer in human life than we think. Most of our acts may well be the result of physical hard-wiring and habits established over millennia of evolutionary trial and error. Most of our characters and dispositions may well be due to the adventitious mixing of our parents' DNA, rather than to purely mental causes in the life of some person in the past. So while mental effort does have real effects on our mental life, and while that is of the utmost moral importance, humans are also socially and physically embodied and are subject to physical chains of causality that make any direct causal link between some past life and a present life very difficult to establish. Conscious intention is only one part, though morally by far the most important, of that complex of elements which goes to form a complete human person.\n\nPart of the moral lesson here is that we should never say of some poor or relatively disabled person that it is \"their fault\" they are that way, because it must be due to something wrong they did in some past life. If that were so, we would expect that all millionaires would be past saints and all paupers would be past serial killers. Without trying to be too judgmental, that does not look quite right.\n\nThe conclusion of this Napoleonic episode is that we might agree that the world is made up of successions of events and acts, of processes, ordered in accordance with complex causal laws. Yet in the case of human persons these successions fall into distinct groups of cumulative subjective experiences. And a fairly clear way of distinguishing one such group is to say that, since its parts are subjective experiences, they are the experiences of one common subject of experiences, the \"subject\" being constituted precisely by that unique unity which binds these experiences together in one succession.\n\nWe might also agree that mental acts are very important parts of such processes, and that mental acts are different from passive objects or states and from purely physical or material events. Mental acts, unlike physical acts, normally form successions of causally related private experiences and intentions which work out progressively over time. Constantly renewed mental discipline and effort, attention and intention, result in states of mind and in actions that otherwise would not have existed.\n\nJust as there is one \"subject\" of experiences, which binds them together in a uniquely subjective way, so we can say that there is one creative causal agent that continues to act over time through a succession of experiences. As long as we do not say that this subject and agent of experiences and actions exists separately and quite apart from the flow of events that constitute the life of the mind, it looks as though a \"Cartesian\" view of mental substance (as the subject of experiences and acts) is not in opposition to a process view of personal life. In fact, it is the concept of a continuing mental substance, rightly understood, that enables us to distinguish different sets of mental events from each other, and to see mental events as (at least in part) cumulatively and intentionally built up over time.\n\nThis is the very opposite of Ryle's concept of mind, because it privileges private states over publicly observable ones, yet it seems to follow from a consideration of what is morally important about personal identity.\n\n## Chapter Six\n\n## The place of human minds in the cosmos\n\nIt is important to stress (as Descartes mostly did) that human minds are fully integrated into an evolving material universe and do not inhabit some separate mental world. This very naturally leads to seeing the universe as a purposive process aimed at the progressive realization of intrinsic and objective values in and by finite minds within the universe. Human persons have a positive and responsible role to play within this process, so they are integrated into a material, bodily context and that is their proper environment.\n\nI have argued that the mental is of primary importance in human personhood, but I am in no doubt that in humans the mental and the physical are mixed together in a closely integrated way, and both are implicated in the causal network that drives the world into the future. The problem is to say what this integration is. Whitehead's solution, shared by many philosophically minded scientists, is to say that the mental is the inner life of the physical. All physical phenomena have an inner or \"private\" aspect, in addition to what can be observed by public perception.\n\nThere are process thinkers, like Charles Hartshorne, who have argued that even electrons have free will, and they decide when to jump from one orbit to another within the atom. But it is hard to see why they should jump at one time rather than another or what the point of jumping is anyway. Intelligent consciousness as we know it does seem to depend on the very complex structure of brains, and on the interaction of millions of neurons. Electrons have no complex structure, and they seem to have rather limited opportunities for personal development or for really interesting and adventurous choices.\n\nNevertheless, it can seem plausible to think that consciousness cannot just arise out of nowhere, and be joined onto a brain in a completely accidental and unpredictable way. For many scientists it makes more sense to see consciousness as a natural development out of simpler elements, as an unfolding of potentialities inherent in matter from the first. Consciousness is the phenomenal appearing of things, together with thoughts that interpret those appearances. So maybe even the simplest sorts of things have some sort of phenomenal appearing (some way in which objects are represented), and some sort of interpretative or at least subjective reaction to such appearing. That is certainly what Whitehead thinks.\n\nWe do not have to be committed to the rather elaborate edifice of process philosophy to be attracted to this way of seeing consciousness as a natural development of simpler properties inherent in all material things. Philosophers like Rom Harre of Oxford and scientists like John Polkinghorne of Cambridge accept a very similar view. That is to say, as well as their publicly observable appearance, the basic elements of matter have an inner structure that is not publicly observable, but that drives their causal route through space-time. Materialists (Theory 3) might even say as much, at least insofar as they accept that many forms of material reality (at the subatomic level, for instance) are inaccessible to sense-observation. But materialists wish to remove any even embryonic hint of consciousness, value or purpose from matter. Epiphenomenalists (Theory 5) accept that consciousness emerges from matter, but they typically deny that minds could possibly exist without matter, and that minds have any real causal role to play in the cosmos. So again minds have to emerge by accident, or unintentionally, from a material universe without consciousness or purpose.\n\nIdealist philosophers do not usually think that there are little fully conscious minds driving atoms around. But they do think that even \"material\" processes are not totally random, directionless, mechanistic or wholly determined by absolute and arbitrary laws. Purpose or teleology may be built into nature from the first. The material universe is perhaps more like an organism than like a repetitive machine. Whereas an older generation of scientists and philosophers thought the universe was rather like a watch, many now regard the universe as more like a large organism. It grows and develops, and its first stages can only be properly understood when its completely developed state is perceived.\n\nA human embryo does not unexpectedly and accidentally become an adult person, and it can only be properly understood as a potential adult. So we might think that the primitive elements \u2013 be they quarks or superstrings or something as yet undiscovered \u2013 of the universe do not unexpectedly clump into atoms, which surprisingly form molecules, which accidentally generate proteins, which unforeseeably build organisms, which by pure chance produce brains and societies of organic beings, so that the whole present universe is a totally unexpected accident. On the organic view, this trajectory of development, of increasingly integrated complexity, producing new sorts of properties, and eventually the ability to comprehend and consciously shape the future of the universe, is implicit in the universe at the moment of the Big Bang or in whatever gives rise to that primordial explosion.\n\nFrom this point of view, it is a basic mistake of reductive materialism to try to explain everything in terms of its simplest elements \u2013 as though a large enough group of such simple elements just had to be mixed up at random for a long time, and would then produce brains, thoughts, and the theory of relativity. The main alternative to such reductionism is holistic explanation. Simple elements are explained in terms of the wholes of which they are constituent parts, and of the fullest realization of all the possibilities of a dynamic and developing system.\n\nIt remains a deep mystery how a fully realized society of intelligent and purposive agents (which is what we actually have in this corner of the universe) can be potential in the simple state of infinite density and mass which was the Big Bang. But it may be helpful to think of the space-time universe, not just as a set of separate parts, but as a completed whole.\n\nThe universe does not consist of discrete temporal slices, all isolated in their own little bubbles of time. Causal tracks and connections extend back and forward through time, and a present moment of consciousness can contain echoes of the past and premonitions or anticipations of the future. So we might see the universe not as a set of atomistic time-slices accidentally stuck together, but as one interconnected or entangled space-time whole. We do not see what objects are by seeing just one temporal slice of their existence. That would be like trying to understand a person by looking hard at them when they are asleep. We need to see them from beginning to end of their temporal existence and within the whole context in which they exist.\n\nAn \"object\" is what physicists call a world-line in space-time. The early stages of its temporal existence are properly seen as parts of a whole world-line which adequately describe the object only when it is seen as a whole. Albert Einstein thought that the whole of time, with all its constituent world-lines, actually exists, from the first moment to the last. We only seem to move through it one moment at a time. In reality both our past and our future are timelessly existent and never come into being or pass away. He apparently found great consolation in the fact that his dead friends were not really non-existent. They all exist timelessly, and they only seem to be dead to the rest of us.\n\nI suspect that you would have to be a very advanced mathematical physicist to be consoled by the thought that dead people all really exist, because time is an illusion. Most of us will continue to be more impressed by the thought that we will never meet them again in time. Even if in some strange way we could meet them outside time, we would still not be able to talk to them, since talking takes time, and if there was no time, there would be no time for a good conversation. We would just have to stare at each other, frozen in changeless immobility. That might be all right for Einstein, but it would be very frustrating for most people, especially for the talkative ones.\n\nA \"supernatural\" origin for the cosmos\n\nWhether the passing of time is real or not, it might be just wrong to think that at the moment of the Big Bang nothing existed except a very simple physical state of infinite density. Most cosmologists suppose that there would also have been a whole set of quantum laws, and perhaps those very complex and precise balances of energy that would constitute what is called a \"quantum vacuum\". In modern cosmology, there is something outside space-time, from which space-time originates, which has a rich mathematical structure. There is, in other words, a \"supernatural\" reality; a more fundamental layer of reality beyond space-time.\n\nMaterialists are really shocked at this turn of events. Some of them simply ignore it and say that it is not really science. David Hume held that it was absurd to think that the puny human mind could speculate about the \"origin of worlds\", when nobody had ever observed such things. Nevertheless, there are chairs of this \"absurdity\" in most major Western universities.\n\nWhat is that supernatural reality like? Some think that at least the basic laws and principles that existed at the beginning of the universe must have been very simple \u2013 largely because, they think, if we are going to explain the origin of the universe, the explanation will have to be simpler than what it explains or it will not be an explanation.\n\nThis, however, is plainly false. It is doubtful if it even makes sense. Quantum field theory explains the behaviour of events in a particle accelerator. But in what sense is quantum theory \"simpler\" than very small things smashing into one another at immense speeds in a large hollow tube? Of course it is nice to have an elegant and simple theory if it does the same work as an ugly and complicated one. But the important thing about a scientific theory is that it produces general equations from which the behaviour of physical particles can be predicted. If those equations turn out to be complex \u2013 and they are already so complex that very few people can even understand them \u2013 that is life!\n\nWe have no right to expect that there will be stateable equations that govern all physical behaviour or that they will be simple and elegant \u2013 though we have been very lucky to find there are many such equations (like Newton's laws of motion). We are in no position to lay it down as a necessary truth that there will be simple elegant laws to explain the Big Bang. What we need are laws and principles that will explain the whole space-time structure of the universe, not just some initial state of the universe \u2013 which may turn out to be the least interesting thing in the universe, except insofar as it is the starting-point for the whole cosmic story.\n\nThere might, then, be laws that help to explain how and why this universe was generated 13.7 billion years ago, in terms of the much later realization of complex states that were only implicit in the first state of the universe. Such laws would set out a direction of development, culminating in a completion of initial potencies, a set of possible goals that can be seen as fulfilments of tendencies inherent in the universe itself.\n\nA goal is a future state that is rationally choosable by an intelligent conscious being. A fully intelligent conscious being is one that would choose states that are intrinsically worthwhile \u2013 good just for their own sake and not for any other reason. If anything is ever worth choosing, then there must be some states that are intrinsically worthwhile. If we try to think of the sorts of goals for a universe that could be rationally choosable, we might think of such things as the ability of a material universe to come to understand and shape its own being and to generate communities of organisms that can themselves, as Aristotle put it, find happiness in the pursuit of states and processes that are worthwhile for their own sake.\n\nWe might think of a universe generating beings with conscious capacities such as those for creativity, understanding, appreciation, and free relationship. If this might indeed be the fullest flourishing of the cosmic organism, then the initial laws of the universe will render it inevitable that this, or some very similar, cosmic organism will exist and will come into full bloom before, like all organisms, it decays and dies. The initial laws will, in that case, not simply exist without any point or purpose. They will have a good reason for existing \u2013 the reason being precisely the generation of intrinsically worthwhile states that can be known, appreciated, and produced by intelligent agents. The initial laws will be, in other words, purposive or goal-directed. Purpose has been ejected from scientific explanations for almost four hundred years. Perhaps, in modern cosmology and in idealist philosophy, it is making a comeback.\n\nWhat I have tried to do in this chapter is to suggest how conscious personal life and the material structure of the universe fit together in a coherent way if we suppose that the physical universe has the purpose of producing personal consciousness as the natural realization of its inherent and original capacities. Consciousness is not just an alien substance injected into the material universe at an arbitrary point \u2013 a picture which Cartesian dualism, if interpreted unkindly, may suggest. Rather, consciousness results from the natural generation of capacities inherent in the structure of matter itself, as it develops forms of organized complexity over time. A picture of cosmic evolution that portrays responsible and intelligent minds as a natural, possibly inevitable, outcome of the growth of an organic material universe could be the key to understanding how spirit and flesh, mind and matter, soul and body, can be integrally intertwined, and yet how the primacy of spirit, as the ultimate purposive driving force of an evolving universe, can be maintained.\n\nCould the universe have a goal?\n\nAll this could be seen of course as a piece of human arrogance. Those values of creativity, understanding, and so on \u2013 are they not just the preferences of a small number of rather prissy human beings, projected improbably onto the universe? If you walk into your local bar and say, \"What I'm looking for is creativity, understanding, appreciation, and free relationship,\" the odds are that everybody will ostentatiously look the other way. With luck, somebody might say, \"Well we have darts, and we can probably find some dominoes if you like. How about some pickled eggs?\"\n\nIs it really plausible to think that the universe, so vast in extent, exists just to produce beings like us? Did it really take 13.7 billion years just to produce Big Brother and the Wimbledon Tennis Championships? There aren't, it may be said, any universal or cosmic values. There are just things that people in bars, bus queues, shopping malls, and offices happen to like at the time. And that hardly seems grand enough to merit the title of the goal of the cosmic process, the ultimate reason for the Big Bang. Or would you really want to say that the answer to the question \"Why does the universe exist?\" is \"So that I can enjoy a pint of beer\"?\n\nActually, you might. Some physicists have estimated that, starting from the initial Big Bang, and allowing the known laws of nature to take their course and gradually build up heavy atoms, complex molecules, and central nervous systems, the emergence of intelligent carbon-based life-forms would have taken about 13.7 billion years. Since the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding as fast as it can, so that by now it extends for billions of light-years. Therefore, the reason there is so much empty space around is that it has to exist in order to produce me (assuming that I am a pretty good example of an intelligent life-form. I am certainly a good example of a beer-drinking life-form).\n\nIt seems that I am much more important to the universe than you might think. Or if you think I am a rather disappointing specimen, hardly worth 13.7 billion years of effort, you could say that at least intelligent life is worth having, and if it takes billions of years to produce it, does that really matter? The process itself is not pointless; it is not just a means to an end. It has immense beauty and elegance, and it is worthwhile for its own sake. But that beauty and elegance can only be appreciated when conscious life-forms come into existence (unless there were consciousnesses existing outside the universe, which could appreciate its development).\n\nWe should not think that it took the birth and death of millions of star-systems and the extermination of millions of now extinct organisms, just to produce one man drinking beer in a pub. However, in one sense that man is more valuable than all those galaxies, because there was no one to appreciate their beauty, whereas at least he enjoys his pint. The greatest beauty that passes unknown and unappreciated is in one sense of less value than the enjoyment of a pint of beer, just because there is no one to put a value on that beauty. There is no one who values it, and so in a real sense it has no value \u2013 until it is known and appreciated for what it is. There are no actual values unless someone values them. So consciousness is necessary for there to be any actual values in the universe.\n\nStill, I do not suppose anyone but Homer Simpson would think that drinking beer is the greatest value in the universe. Maybe humans are just one small primitive part of cosmic history. What would be really impressive as a goal for the universe would be the genesis of a consciousness, or perhaps a society of consciousnesses, that understood and could control the cosmos itself, which could devise endless creative purposes and experience unlimited types and intensities of feeling. That such an existence would be of value is not just a projection of a few arbitrary human likes and dislikes onto the universe. It is a goal, a desirable state, which any conscious intelligent being would choose, whether it drank beer or not. It might prefer beer in its present state, but it could at least see, when sober, that a really intelligent being would choose the goal of a cosmic consciousness that could be endlessly creative and that could experience infinite states of enjoyment and beauty \u2013 and then it could have endless kinds of beer whenever it wanted, without any of the ill-effects that beer usually has.\n\nIf we can see humans as only the beginning of the development of intelligent consciousness in the universe, consciousness that will exist for untold billions of years, then it makes more sense to see the long development of cosmic evolution as oriented toward a worthwhile goal. We may think we exist on the last half-page of the many-volume book that is the history of the universe. But if there are even more volumes still to come, that changes the picture entirely. Admittedly this is speculative. It is a sort of ideal utopianism, constructed by thinking what things would be like if there really were ultimately worthwhile goals for the universe that all fully informed intelligent beings would desire. Things might not be like that, though I rather hope they are.\n\nIdealists need not be committed to such a utopian and ultra-optimistic idea. In the Indian traditions there is an infinite series of universes, each of which eventually ends with an age of increasing chaos and evil (a Kali Yuga). The goals of the cosmos are realized only beyond the cosmos, either in absorption into the Supreme Self or in some spiritual realm rather like Western ideas of paradise. Even Hegel, though he remained typically ambiguous, speculated that the final goal of \"reconciliation with Absolute Spirit\" might not exist in this physical cosmos. And Whitehead explicitly denies that there is any realizable final goal of the universe.\n\nWhitehead thinks of the basic directional laws of the cosmos and the states to which they lead as primordial \"aims\": a timeless set of possible goals and of possible tracks to realizing them in many ways and in many forms. He does not think of there being just one final consummating and unsurpassable state. He certainly does not think that human life is it. He rather thinks of the process of creativity as being unending. It is also always compromised by conflict between different organic forms that pursue different aims, and by the fact that some aims will be so limited as to be destructive rather than creative.\n\nWhichever of these varieties of idealism we prefer, for all of them chance, impersonal laws of nature, and creative freedom play an important part in the complex processes of the universe. There may be no final perfection for the universe. Its tendency toward truth, beauty, and goodness is real, but may be always qualified by the existence of elements which resist that tendency, though they too are parts of the cosmic structure. This may be thought of as a modern version of the world of Platonic \"forms\" being imperfectly realized in the material world, though it differs by stressing the importance of time and of evolutionary development, thereby giving the universe a history of which Plato could scarcely have conceived.\n\n## Chapter Seven\n\n## Dual\u2013aspect idealism\n\nIf there is purposive causality in the universe, it will obviously make an enormous difference to what happens. Events will not occur just by chance or accident, but the whole universe will be directed toward the existence of persons and the realization of personal values. Since the natural sciences normally set aside questions of value, they cannot as such establish whether the universe is directed toward the existence of specific values or not. But the findings of the natural sciences are certainly relevant to the question of whether there is direction or progress of any sort in the observed universe. It seems to me that it is a reasonable hypothesis that there is. If so, this helps to confirm the form of idealism I am defending, which could be called dual-aspect idealism, because it stresses the importance of the material aspect as a means of allowing the potentialities of mind to be expressed.\n\nMany modern evolutionary theorists are so opposed to the notion of direction and purpose in cosmic history that they insist on stressing the totally fortuitous and random nature of biological evolution. This is rather odd, because they mostly also think that the basic laws of physics are not at all fortuitous and random. Indeed, many of them are physical determinists and think that at a physical level things must obey the laws of nature and could not be other than they actually are. This is the opposite of randomness!\n\nThere seem to be four main reasons for this resistance to directionality. First, there is too much waste and suffering in evolution for it to be planned. Second, many organisms like bacteria do not evolve, but stay happily as they are, so there does not seem to be a \"universal striving\" in evolution. Third, the evolution of humans depends on a number of freak accidents, like the meteor impact that may have destroyed the dinosaurs and other disasters that turned out well for humans but rather badly for every other form of life. And fourth, the mechanisms of Darwinian evolution, random mutation and natural selection, do not seem to allow for any sort of intelligent or purposive selection. Ideas of direction or purpose smack too much of \"vitalism\", the exploded view that there is some sort of \"life force\" at work in addition to natural mechanisms in evolution.\n\nThis is precisely where basic philosophical beliefs influence what are supposed to be strictly scientific theories. I am not against such influence. On the contrary I am all for it. But in my opinion this is the wrong influence from a false philosophical theory \u2013 or at the very least, from a highly disputed one.\n\nThese arguments of evolutionary naturalism can be very easily dismissed. In response to the first argument, we can say that talk of waste and suffering is completely irrelevant to the question of whether there is direction in evolution. If there is a direction, it is from simplicity to complexity, from unconsciousness to consciousness, from lack of any appreciation of value to the understanding and appreciation of many moral, intellectual, and aesthetic values, and from chance and necessity to intelligent purpose. We can observe this progress in the evolution of human beings from unconscious and unintelligent stardust.\n\nThere is no reason why such a progress should be without blind alleys and eddies which do not lead in the requisite direction, as long as the process as a whole inevitably leads to the \"higher\" states. In fact, one rational structure for such progress is a system which generates a number of alternative possible tracks, where all possibilities are tried and only some lead to cumulative progressive tracks. That may lead to waste and suffering, but that does not make the structure less rational.\n\nIn response to the second argument, it is not at all necessary that every item in the structure should be seeking to mutate in a positive direction. Indeed, it is necessary that most items should not mutate, but should preserve their structure, to provide a solid base on which new mutations can be built. The structure must provide, therefore, for the repetition of dependable elements, with mutations that do not lead to great structural changes. But some, perhaps a small number, relatively speaking, of mutations must lead to structural changes \u2013 and that is what we see.\n\nWhat about the third argument, stressing the role of genuine accident in the evolutionary process? Quantum physics is usually taken to undermine a wholly deterministic interpretation of the laws of nature. But of course it does not undermine the fact that there are laws of nature. What it suggests is that the laws will in general produce predictable results, but at the subatomic level we will have to work with probabilities where not all details are predictable \u2013 and sometimes this will result in larger scale unpredictabilities. In other words, there are elements of genuine randomness, but even they are governed by laws of probability, and most probabilities cancel out at higher levels to leave the inevitability of the general processes of nature intact. Only occasionally, and usually at times not directly observable by humans, will genuine alternatives at the macro level appear. But some of those occasions might have decisive and dramatic consequences.\n\nIt is also a generally accepted rule of quantum physics that physical phenomena are entangled, so that basic physical elements affect one another in non-local ways, and no phenomenon can be considered totally in isolation from other phenomena in the universe. This fact also places constraints on what possibilities are open within the system. As Michio Kaku says, \"Einstein often asked himself whether God had any choice in creating the universe. According to superstring theorists, once we demand a unification of quantum theory and general relativity, God had no choice.\" This is a rather picturesque way of saying that if there are going to be intelligent carbon-based organisms in the universe, then the general structure of the universe, including some of its unpleasant features, could not have been other than it is.\n\nThe limits of human observation mean that we are unlikely ever to know in detail what the necessary constraints on the universe are. We cannot observe the whole universe every time we want to assess the probability of an event occurring, and so we will never know all the laws and constraints that govern the occurrence of any event, much less the structure of the whole universe.\n\nSuppose, then, as a general hypothesis, that there is a basic teleology in nature: a dynamic process, involving elements of chance and also a large element of repetitive law-like behaviour, nevertheless ensures that specific \"developed\" states will inevitably be realized in the cosmic process. This is not the idea of some sort of person interfering in the process from outside. It is the idea that the process itself has inherent direction and goal, set by the fundamental and timeless laws of the cosmos. The existence of such a teleology will make a difference to specific events that occur, for it is part of the laws of nature, not an interference with them.\n\nThe demise of the dinosaurs\n\nWhen an astronomer says that the formation of planet earth and the genesis of organic life on its surface was the result of a fantastic series of hugely improbable events, this has to be seen in the light of the fact that the cosmos may be set up inevitably to realize organic life forms. In that light it is not at all improbable that events conducive to the genesis of life should occur, though the presence of chance elements does mean that some events destructive of life and purpose will also occur.\n\nThe choice, in other words, is not between perfect design and complete chance. It seems more likely that the cosmos moves inevitably toward intelligent consciousness through a partly free (and because free, partly undetermined and therefore partly random) and partly determined (because otherwise there would be no reliable structure) creative process of trial and error.\n\nThere was nobody who specifically planned that a meteor should be dispatched to exterminate the dinosaurs 65 million years ago (assuming that it was a meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs) and open the way for humans to evolve. But it may not have been just a by-product, unfortunate for dinosaurs, of totally blind forces of nature. Dinosaurs, after all, flourished for many millions of years. They had their day in the sun, and perhaps they existed for much longer than humans may. But they did not seem to be going anywhere, and they probably ate anything that looked as if it might be going somewhere. They were blocking the evolutionary development of the universe. They were, to put it bluntly, a creative experiment that had run out of steam. To put it more kindly, the process had succeeded in producing impressively large reptiles, but they had reached a dead end. If they had got any larger, their brains would no longer have been able to communicate with their legs in time to run after their prey.\n\nWe may think of the destruction of the dinosaurs as a state that presented itself as possible but not inevitable on one of those relatively rare occasions when decisive selections between options are likely. What is required to make sense of this is to think of present situations as containing a number of alternative futures. There will be many constraints on which alternatives can be selected, and on which of them might have decisive consequences. But one causal factor in these complex situations, idealists think, will be the general teleological tendency of the cosmos. This of course will be too much for materialists, who have a paranoid fear of any causal factors in addition to the \"blind\" laws of nature.\n\nEven materialists have to admit, however, that according to quantum theory there can be alternative futures, and that we do not know the causal principles that select between them. Materialists can always say that these alternatives cancel out on the molecular scale, that purely Darwinian principles are quite sufficient to explain all evolutionary changes, and that anyway there are no \"mystical\" non-Darwinian principles, so there! This is the fourth argument that sceptics about purpose often produce.\n\nAn appropriate reply is that quantum indeterminacies do not always cancel out, and they may in the right conditions amplify into major changes (as with the \"butterfly effect\", which keeps weather forecasters in a job even when they get everything wrong). Indeterminacy may not be confined to the subatomic world. Quantum theory has shown that physics does not have to adopt a wholly deterministic view of nature. So there may be indeterminacies \u2013 that is, alternative futures without one of them being wholly determined by physical events in the past \u2013 at many points in the physical world. Unless we adopt the dogma that the laws of nature have to determine the future in only one way, an element of indeterminism in nature seems very likely. Why should universal laws completely determine everything that happens?\n\nSpecifically, the intentions of conscious beings may help to decide what happens in the future of the universe, and such intentions, being mental and not physical, may be in principle unpredictable and not wholly determined by previous physical events. Any scientist who says we know all the causal principles there are, and that those principles are sufficient to determine everything that happens, is not being wholly honest. So there is plenty of room in our universe for events that are influenced not just by general laws of nature, but by conscious goals and intentions. There may be general teleological principles built into nature which will help to explain the apparent direction of evolutionary change toward intelligent consciousness and the fully purposive direction of events.\n\nWhen someone resorts to saying, \"This event was just an extremely improbable occurrence,\" we need to remember that science is in the business of making the apparently improbable less improbable. If we cannot do so, that is a defeat for Darwinian theory, not a success! Teleological explanation would render the extinction of the dinosaurs more likely than it would otherwise have been \u2013 always assuming that small mammals were more likely to evolve intelligence than T. Rex was. So while dinosaurs may not like the thought that they were holding up the progress of cosmic evolution, it could be the case that their extinction, while not specifically planned by a dinosaur-hating God, was not wholly an unpredictable accident. Sooner or later they would have been replaced, and the proximity of a meteor provided one way in which this could occur, naturally though not inevitably.\n\nI conclude that modern evolutionary theory, when it is not infected by materialist philosophy, does allow for direction or purpose in the cosmic process. It compels us to include a place for chance in the process, but when combined with physics it sets the operation of chance within limits that are imposed by the fundamental laws and constants of the physical world. That is just what seems to be required for the generation of stable and yet limitedly free intelligent persons. To that extent, evolutionary science, especially when set in the context of a general evolutionary cosmology, is wholly consonant with the hypothesis that there is a goal for the material cosmos.\n\nPurposive explanation and idealist thought\n\nBut is teleological explanation scientific? Final causality was ruled out of science in the seventeenth century, as appealing but fruitless and obstructive \u2013 \"like vestal virgins\", Francis Bacon said. Contemporary science does not deal with purposes in nature. That does not mean there are none. Contemporary science does not deal with the taste of tomato soup either, but there is one. So perhaps purposive explanation exists, but is not part of modern science.\n\nThere is a good reason why not. If you are going to talk about purpose, you have to talk about the goal at which a purpose aims. Then you have to evaluate that goal as good \u2013 nobody aims at something because they regard it as bad. Even masochists, who repeatedly harm themselves, are doing so because (to take just one possibility) they think they deserve it, and it is good to get one's just deserts \u2013 and probably also because they get a sense of sexual pleasure out of it. Some people have very unusual desires. But I am not going to go there.\n\nThe point is that science tries to discount personal evaluations. It tries not to say whether something is good or bad, but to give a neutral description of what happens. It is therefore not the job of science to talk about worthwhile goals, and that stops it from talking about purposes. Teleological explanation does talk about worthwhile goals, and supposes that cosmic processes may be directed to achieving them. But purely descriptive science cannot say what those goals are or use the fact that processes seem to be directed to attain them in order to construct mathematical equations that give predictions that can be publicly tested. Aiming at goals is too infected by creativity and freedom to be captured in mathematically exact predictions. So it is not part of modern natural science.\n\nTeleological explanation, in short, belongs to philosophy, not to science. Ah, materialists may say, so it is just a matter of personal opinion? Indeed it is, just like materialism. None of us can avoid taking up a philosophical position, if we think hard enough. That is very irritating, if you dislike philosophy and think it a waste of time.\n\nThe basic motivation for positing teleological explanation starts from an analysis of human experience. We have purposes and we act intentionally. Then it proceeds to probe the nature of the world as it is experienced by us and finds (perhaps!) that it is an appearance of a veiled and mysterious reality, not accessible to sense-observation. It discovers the positive activity of thought in constructing the world of appearances and so posits that constructive thinking is part of reality as it is in itself. Constructive thinking is intentional; it is freely aimed at the goal of understanding the world. So teleological (intentional) explanation is part of the real world. It is at that point that we may be led to ask whether we can find traces of it in the observed world of appearances and in the general structure of that world rather than just in human experience.\n\nSince materialism has been abandoned at the very beginning of this process, there is no reason to exclude teleology in principle from the general structure of nature. It is a viable option. When we ask how consciousness originates very late in the history of a universe that begins with a Bang, it can become a compelling thought that it is not a total surprise, but a natural realization of the initial potency of matter itself. So now we look for some more primitive states that can naturally give rise to finite consciousnesses through a long emergent process, and idealist philosophy begins.\n\nDual-aspect idealism \u2013 the truth at last?\n\nThe basic laws that structure the universe do not have to be merely mechanical principles with no inkling of the consequences of these mechanical motions. They may include possible goals and processes of value and the future genesis of consciousness as the fruition of matter itself. One way to think about this is to imagine, as some mathematicians do, an abstract space of possibilities, laying down future tracks to future goals and determining, with much room for individual creativity, how the universe will proceed. The actual goals and tracks that are \"chosen\" may depend on many factors, but evolutionary views of the cosmos suggest that there will be an emergent and developmental process in which finite parts of the cosmos become more and more capable of envisaging and pursuing their own creative paths.\n\nIt is consistent with modern quantum theory to regard the whole cosmos as a web of interacting energies, of spatially and temporally located powers. Each part is not, like Leibniz's unfortunate monads, isolated and closed in on itself. Each part is essentially open to the totality of the space-time nexus. Each receives stimuli from all the others that surround it, integrates those stimuli into a unity of being, and actively responds in accordance with its own specific powers. At the simplest level, for instance that of subatomic wave-particles, both stimuli and responses are more or less algorithmic \u2013 they behave in accordance with regular and largely predictable routines, described by the basic forces of nature like electromagnetism, gravity, and nuclear forces. Only in this way can they form stable atoms upon which more complex unities can come to exist.\n\nAs atoms form into molecules and they in turn form long chains of RNA and DNA, patterns of stimulus, integration, and response grow more complex. Primitive sentience is a function of complex organic forms, which increasingly act as individuals, though they essentially function as parts of a larger integrated whole.\n\nProbably at the point when brains begin to exist, there is a radically new form of complexity, for which stimuli are registered with intensities of feeling and responded to with some creative agency. In human beings, the most complex form known to us, the conceptual or interpretative element predominates, and responsive actions become subject to causality by envisaged outcomes (intention). The sense of a continuing and active self emerges, interpreting the stimuli received from \"outside\" as appearances of a world of objects, and intending to modify those objects in accordance with consciously formed purposes.\n\nHumans have private perspectives on, feelings for, and thoughts about, phenomena interpreted as expressions or mediations of external objects (including other persons). They express such feelings and thoughts in external ways, like language. But humans know that language or physical gesture may conceal inner thoughts or fail to state them adequately or be interpreted in many ways, some of them quite mistaken, by those who perceive only the observed expressions. Thus each thought or feeling is known in two ways \u2013 as expressed physically and as experienced internally.\n\nIt is important to note that the physical expression is itself in a sense an \"internal perception\" of some observer, a subjective appearance of something taken to be objective, though it does not exist objectively as it appears to the observer. In that sense, the conscious event has logical priority and primary importance, though it is natural to see it as emerging from a long process of physical development.\n\nIn the first four chapters of this book I argued for a general philosophical position somewhere between dualism and idealism, and suggested that some form of dualism and some form of idealism probably converged on an acceptable view. That would mean that matter would not merely be an illusion or a content of some mind or minds, but would have its own form of reality. Yet matter would ultimately depend for its existence on a mind-like reality.\n\nA pressing problem for modern philosophy is how to relate matter and mind in a satisfactory way. An evolutionary view would find much to resonate with in Whitehead's view of the world as a succession of transitory events, each of which has an \"inner\" aspect as well as an outward physical appearance. For idealists, that inner aspect is the causal driving force of a cumulative and creative process of increasing organized complexity, generating richer forms of consciousness and purposive causality.\n\nI call this a form of idealism because the engine of the process is not the mechanical movements of non-purposive physical entities, but the potentially mind-like reality or realities that are creatively and progressively expressed in the physical cosmos, and in the gradual unfolding of values that were implicit from the first in that cosmos. It is sometimes, however, called monism, because it insists that \"feelings\" (the inner aspect) and matter are bound together as aspects of a unitary reality. I argued that this is actually identical with a form of dualism that sees mind as the individuating agent of the unity and cumulative development of different streams of individual consciousness and purposive agency, but which allows that such streams of consciousness are firmly embodied in (bound together with) a physical cosmos.\n\nIt may seem confusing to mix idealism, monism, and dualism in this way. But perhaps what that shows is that we should not pour our theories too strictly into neatly labelled jars. What I am suggesting is a form of qualified absolute idealism. It could be called dual-aspect idealism. I do not mind the name, as long as it is clear that I mean to argue in favour of two hypotheses. First, that the most important feature of human persons is that they are streams or chains of mental acts and events, streams that are distinguished from one another by each containing experiences of one and only one uniting and cumulatively shaping subject. Second, that these streams of consciousness are the inner aspects of complex organized physical systems, with a long evolutionary history and an inherent potentiality for generating and realizing consciously created and appreciated values.\n\nThis provides a general picture of what human persons are that I think is philosophically plausible and consistent with the best modern science. Yet it is undoubtedly the case that many people feel that any sort of dualism or idealism, even or perhaps especially a dual-aspect idealism, is somehow incompatible with contemporary science. This is my cue to return to the work of Gilbert Ryle and re-examine why he thought Cartesian dualism was a myth. It may be that Ryle actually helped to invent the myth, and that Ryle's own account is capable of a much more idealistic interpretation than he ever dreamed. Of course Professor Ryle never actually had any dreams, since such things are private events, which do not, he thought, exist. So I will have to dream for him.\n\n## Chapter Eight\n\n## Metaphysics and common-sense philosophy\n\nGilbert Ryle's arguments aim to undermine both dualism and idealism. In the rest of this book, I seek to assess just how strong his arguments really are. It is necessary first of all, however, to examine Ryle's general view of philosophy. For he thought that metaphysics, in the sense of a general theory of the nature of reality, is a fairly useless or even impossible undertaking. That would make my project superfluous. I try to show that no thinking person can really escape some sort of metaphysics (some theory of what kinds of things really exist), and that Ryle himself actually had one, which was some sort of common-sense (or ordinary language) philosophy. So the question of metaphysics is important and unavoidable \u2013 and I think the reason why many people are materialists is that they do not take the metaphysical question seriously enough.\n\nI may seem to have come a long way from Ryle's The Concept of Mind. But the point has been to see how Ryle's denial of inner processes is almost the exact opposite of the idealist claim that it is just such inner processes, culminating in intelligent consciousness, that form the core and the inherent teleological aim of reality.\n\nMost of our ideas and beliefs are pretty much determined by the very first steps of thought we take. Ryle starts The Concept of Mind with a set of philosophical assumptions or premises that are going to guide everything else he says. What I have been trying to do is to show that those premises are far from obviously true. For lots of philosophers, they are obviously false. Only if you accept them as true will the rest of Ryle's book seem convincing \u2013 in fact, it will come to seem pretty obvious, and we might wonder why nobody thought of it before.\n\nBut you can get out of Ryle's system by rejecting his first assumptions. What I have done is to set out some alternative assumptions that other philosophers make. There are living philosophers who still follow each of the alternatives that I have outlined. I myself am convinced that some version of idealism is true, and I am attracted to some key ideas of process philosophy. I am pretty sure that materialism is false.\n\nPhilosophy, it must be said, is not good for decisiveness. If you have a reasonably open mind, you will probably be persuaded by every new philosophy book you read \u2013 at least for a day or two. But as you get to know more and more theories, and you see all the good arguments philosophers can find for them, you get less and less able to decide which one is true. I once asked a very well known philosopher of religion whether he believed in God. \"Well,\" he said, \"as a Catholic I do, but as a Buddhist I don't.\" \"But are you a Catholic or a Buddhist?\" I rather foolishly asked. To which his reply was, \"Sometimes.\" I suppose that in his Buddhist moods he could have quoted the Buddha and said, \"I am and I am not, and it is not the case that either I am or that I am not.\" But that would not have been much better.\n\nI actually find the indecisiveness of philosophy rather helpful. Sometimes you just have to make decisions and stick by them. But it can be helpful to remember that we are rarely as certain as we think we are, and our own basic philosophical beliefs are rarely as obviously true as we pretend they are. Maybe the best we can do is to say which beliefs seem to us most obviously false and which seem most appealing, and admit that not everyone is going to agree with our decisions.\n\nSo I suppose the minimum thing I would say about Ryle is that his view is not as obviously true as he thinks it is \u2013 although it is not quite clear that he always thought it was obviously true. He did confess to me that on one occasion he thought he might have had a mental image. But then he recovered his composure and decided that he had only formed the belief that he had nearly had a mental image, without actually having nearly had one.\n\nGilbert Ryle was a common-sense philosopher \u2013 except that, because he was after all an Oxford man, he probably thought that only the members of Oxford Senior Common Rooms really possessed common sense. Most other people are superstitious and deluded most of the time. And that is the trouble with common sense. It is just not very common. What most common people think is mostly nonsense. But there is no system of philosophy that calls itself \"common-nonsense\" philosophy. At least the nonsense talked by philosophers is not common. And the common sense that philosophers share is very unlike what common people think.\n\nRyle was a leading member of a common-sense school that is sometimes called \"ordinary-language philosophy\". We must remember that this is Oxford ordinary language, and it uses words that most people have never heard of. Philosophers of this school do not try to find out exactly what common-sense beliefs might be. Instead they talk about how people actually use language. They do not of course actually go out onto the streets and listen to ordinary people talking. The unwritten union rules of British universities state that only sociologists are allowed to do that. What philosophers must do is to sit in armchairs and think about people talking.\n\nIt turns out that as long as these imaginary people keep talking, everything goes reasonably smoothly. But when they start to think about what they are saying, things go horribly wrong. Then they start to ask questions like, \"What did I mean by what I just said?\" But in order to answer this question they first have to know what they mean by meaning. As they cannot work this out, because they are not quite sure what the question means, what they say quickly becomes meaningless. And philosophy is born.\n\nIt is a bit like riding a bicycle. If you just keep peddling, you will get along nicely. But if you ask yourself exactly how you keep your balance, you will probably fall off while you are trying to work it out. Most philosophers are like cyclists who fall off their bicycles, because they cannot work out exactly how they manage to stay on them.\n\nSo the job of ordinary-language philosophers is to stop people asking philosophical questions. Wittgenstein, a leading exponent of this type of philosophy, though regrettably he was based at Cambridge, thought that it was ridiculous to claim to be a professional philosopher \u2013 it was equivalent to claiming to be a professor of nonsense and grammatical mistakes. Unfortunately he was a professional philosopher and so were many of his pupils. They remained sane, when they did, by claiming that all other philosophers were talking nonsense, but that they had seen through the nonsense, and their job was simply to stop people being deluded by philosophers. They largely succeeded and in consequence they have largely become extinct. There was nothing left for philosophers to do.\n\nOn trying not to have a philosophical theory\n\nRyle and Wittgenstein both wrote so beautifully and were such commanding personalities that this became a dominant form of common-sense philosophy in mid-twentieth century Britain. It is common-sense because it refuses to invent grand theories about the universe just as a result of sitting in an armchair and thinking, and it insists on the diversity and flexibility of language, not as a clue to the ultimate nature of reality, but as a natural expression of human social behaviour.\n\nThe killer question, however, is this: it is said that philosophical theories arise out of misinterpretations of language use. But isn't that a philosophical theory? It is, after all, an important insight that language has many different functions, that we learn it from others in a particular social context, and that a large part of its use is practical or action-guiding, not theoretical or descriptive. That is a view about what language is and about how it relates to the real world. It is a pragmatic theory, implying that the relation is one of usefulness, that there are many sorts of usefulness (depending on what we want it to be useful for), and that preferences and interests may well differ from one society, time, and place, to another.\n\nThis theory also claims that most traditional philosophical problems, like that of materialism versus idealism, determinism versus free will, passion versus reason or the subjectivity versus the objectivity of values, result from misinterpretations of language. I guess most philosophers who take one of these positions would be annoyed at being told they had merely made some kind of grammatical mistake. They think they are disagreeing about what is the case, even though with these sorts of question it does not seem possible to decide with certainty what the case is.\n\nPhilosophy deals with undecidable yet apparently factual questions, which sometimes have great practical consequences. One of those, which I spent some time on in earlier chapters, is whether observed objects remain the same when they are not observed. Ryle might say that is an unreal question, since it only arises in philosophy seminars, which can seem pretty unreal occasions. Professor Ayer, however, believed that the answer to that question was very important. Ayer agreed with the realists that what we see is what there is, but added that what there is is nothing except what we see. The idea of a world of unobserved physical objects is a logical construct, invented for pragmatic reasons \u2013 it helps us to find our way around the world if we pretend that it is really there. But if we realize that it is not really there, we will see that there is no point in talking about it or in discussing its hidden nature. All our language will be concerned with what we see, hear, touch or smell, and not with supposed hidden or \"'supernatural\" realities.\n\nAyer summed this up with what he called the \"verification principle\" \u2013 the meaning of a statement is the method of its verification. To put it another way, if you cannot see or smell something, it makes no sense to talk about it. This is no doubt why Ayer never paid much attention to what other people thought. He couldn't smell their thoughts, so it was meaningless to talk about them. This philosophy got rid of most traditional philosophical questions by showing that they were not just grammatical mistakes; they were actually meaningless.\n\nIt follows that both Ryle and Ayer thought that each other's beliefs were mostly meaningless. Ayer was sure that it was nonsense to talk about unverifiable objects (like Ryle's unvoiced thoughts), and Ryle was sure that it was nonsense to talk about \"sense-data\" (like Ayer's smells). It is not surprising that they could not understand each other. They each thought the other's beliefs were not just mistaken. They were literally nonsensical.\n\nThis situation provides a clue to the real nature of philosophy. Philosophers do not deal with particular factual questions, where everybody agrees what a \"fact\" is, and how to decide whether something is a fact or not (for example, whether light moves in a straight line or not). Philosophers deal with questions about what general scheme of concepts most adequately makes sense of the world. They deal with general conceptual frameworks for understanding and interpreting the world. Anybody who has a different conceptual framework will seem to them to be talking nonsense.\n\nSuch frameworks differ considerably from one another. Some think that in the end we should rely on common-sense beliefs and not be led astray by weird theories. Others (sometimes the same people on different days) think that many common-sense beliefs are actually based on linguistic mistakes and that we need a bit of linguistic hygiene to eliminate such mistakes. Some think that, whatever common sense says, we should only trust our sense-perceptions, which tell us how things really exist. Others think that only sense-perceptions really exist and there is nothing else to tell. And yet others, influenced by modern physics, think that we should not rely on either common sense or on sense-perception, since the real world is very much stranger than we think and wholly unrepresentable by the senses.\n\nWhat is the evidence for the truth of such views? There is nothing that would conclusively settle a dispute between them. However hard Ayer tried to get Ryle to have some sense-data, Ryle would refuse to have them. Not only that, Ryle would deny that there were any such things, even though Ayer was having them all the time. This is clearly not a matter of evidence. It is a matter of which most basic or general concepts we are going to use to interpret our experience. Of course arguments can be presented for and against such basic interpretations, and those arguments seek to show that one favoured view presents an interpretation of the data of human knowledge that is adequate, comprehensive, consistent, fruitful, elegant, and appealing, while all other views are nonsensical \u2013 or, it might be more tolerant to say, less adequate interpretations of reality.\n\nMy dispute with Ryle, which I probably only have any hope of winning because he is safely dead, is a philosophical debate in this sense. It is not about the ordinary usage of words or about how best to tidy up the informal grammar of our language. It is a dispute about what human persons really are. It is about whether what is of unique importance about human persons is their possession of a rich inner mental life, over which they have some degree of responsible control, and which is quite different in character from and irreducible to the law-governed motions of physical particles in space. It is, to put it in more traditional (though almost universally misunderstood) terms, about whether it is helpful to speak of the human soul as what makes humans of distinctive value and significance.\n\nRyle and dualism\n\nThe Concept of Mind is largely devoted to arguing that the \"Cartesian myth\" of humans as \"ghosts in mechanical machines\" is nonsensical, and to proposing a different model of human beings as social animals exhibiting distinctive kinds of intelligent behaviour. The stress is on the primary importance of publicly observable behaviour. But it is not empiricist in the narrow sense that confines all knowledge to immediate data of the senses. Indeed it regards talk of \"immediate data of the senses\" as artificial and misleading jargon invented by philosophers, when we should just say that sometimes we hear and see things without using telescopes or microscopes.\n\nIf Ryle's book convinces, it is not because it provides hitherto unconsidered evidence. It is because it gives a convincing model for understanding human beings as evolved social animals. This fits well with evolutionary biology, with an interest in social psychology and anthropology, and with a general loss of belief in a \"soul\" which is only possessed by human beings, marking them out as totally different in kind from all other animals. It is also a very non-mechanistic and non-reductionist view, and so makes it possible to retain a form of humanism, stressing the distinctiveness and importance of human capacities and excellences.\n\nRyle's view, largely shared by Wittgenstein, is proposed as a perspective from which to perceive human nature, and it has been influenced by many converging strands of new factual knowledge, new capabilities, and novel evaluations in rapidly developing social systems. Philosophy changes as previous basic interpretations are felt to be inadequate in some way. It is the fate of each philosophical insight to become the nonsense of its succeeding generation. Descartes celebrated the birth of the new science in the seventeenth century, but Ryle set out to show that the Cartesian philosophy was nonsensical. Perhaps Ryle knew that the same thing was bound to happen to him.\n\n## Chapter Nine\n\n## In defence of dualism\n\nI begin with the question of whether there are inner experiences to which persons have privileged access and which may not be material objects with spatial location. These would be experiences like sights, sounds, smells and so on (they have been called \"sense-data\" or \"qualia\"). Against Ryle, I argue that sensible dualists do not think the mind is a separate hidden world, connected arbitrarily to the body. It is the inner aspect of the material person, but it is a realm of partly unverifiable privately accessed data, and its rich, value-filled complex of feelings, thoughts, and intentions (its \"inner life\") is a key element of human personhood. Moreover, it is logically possible that this inner aspect could, very unusually, exist without the body. But its proper and normal place is precisely as the inner aspect of a material body and brain, situated in a shared social environment.\n\nDualism, the original sin of Descartes, is not yet dead. Dualists can be found hiding in the philosophical undergrowth, slightly cowed perhaps but still defiant. The heart of dualism, in the sense relevant to this discussion, is that mind and matter are two distinct sorts of thing. Minds do not exist in space, whereas matter is defined in terms of its location and extent in space. Minds think, feel, and perceive, and matter does not. I have suggested that this is just as much common sense as is Ryle's view, though it is quite possible that common sense may change its mind, if it has one.\n\nIt has to be admitted that there is almost a consensus among many modern writers that common sense should give up belief in dualism. Malcolm Jeeves and Warren Brown, both distinguished neuropsychologists who write about the philosophical implications of their work, say, \"We believe it is no longer helpful or reasonable to consider mind a nonmaterial entity that can be decoupled from the body.\" We should no longer consider the \"I\" to be a separate inner agent, but we must accept that the mind is \"a functional property of our brain and body\".\n\nI can see what they mean, but I think that what they say is not quite right. In fact, the rest of their excellent book shows just why it is not quite right. It is, to put it bluntly, a bit of undigested anti-Cartesian prejudice. They say that the mind is not a \"nonmaterial entity\". Yet they also say that consciousness, intelligent thought, and moral decision-making are emergent properties of a complex material system. \"The basis of consciousness,\" they write, \"is a dynamically self-organising complex system within the cerebral cortex.\" But they are careful not to say that consciousness is a system in the cerebral cortex and nothing more.\n\nThat consciousness is nothing more than physical brain-behaviour they call \"reductive physicalism\", and they distance themselves from it. They espouse what they call \"non-reductive physicalism\". Complex systems generate new properties that are not just combinations of properties possessed by the simpler parts of such systems. Nevertheless, they hold that such emergent properties do not introduce any new \"stuff\" into what the universe is made of. The only stuff out of which things are made is material stuff \u2013 fundamental particles or waves or vibrations in a fifth dimension or whatever the favourite basic material stuff may be. (It is not insignificant that physicists are not agreed about what it is. It is not after all totally convincing to be told that everything in existence is definitely made of something, but we are not quite sure just what that something is.)\n\nAn example of an emergent property might be the sound of an orchestral chord in a Beethoven symphony, which is an emergent property from the arrangement of fundamental particles which makes up an electromagnetic set of wavelengths. The only physical stuff around is electromagnetic waves at a specific frequency whose physical properties can be specified accurately. Those properties do not include any reference to what a chord sounds like or to its beauty. But when those waves hit the ear and get transmitted to the appropriate area of the brain, hey presto, a beautiful sound appears!\n\nBut is the sound of a chord not a kind of stuff? If it exists at all, it is stuff. Could it be just mental stuff? Conscious minds hear specific sound waves as having a specific timbre, pitch, and emotional tone, though none of those properties exist when the sound waves are unheard.\n\nHeard sounds do not appear to be objective physical properties. They are what humans experience sound waves to be, when such waves cause stimulation of the brain. We say that some sounds are beautiful. But what we mean is that we experience them as beautiful. This new property of heard sound, with a pleasing or displeasing character, is not some new behavioural principle that applies to complex arrangements of fundamental particles, whether or not they are being perceived. It is an actual occurrent feeling of something being experienced as emotionally resonant. If that heard sound is not a physical property (one that exists in the absence of conscious beings), then it follows that there must be at least one non-physical property. So this is not a form of \"physicalism\" at all, either reductive or non-reductive. It has introduced at least one piece of non-physical stuff.\n\nIt is true that complex organized physical systems behave in different ways from simple, relatively isolated physical particles. The laws governing the behaviour of such systems cannot be deduced from a study of fundamental particles alone. We could say that the laws of complex organized systems are not reducible to laws governing the behaviour of fundamental particles considered in isolation. Yet that would not license anyone to talk of \"new occurrent properties\". The properties would remain the same; they would just behave in different ways.\n\nFeelings of wetness, perceptions of colour, and sounds of sonority are occurrences that do not exist in the absence of minds. These are what Ayer used to call \"sense-data\", though many modern philosophers call them \"qualia\", and recognize that they are logically distinct from physical properties. They do not just emerge from complex physical systems. They emerge when such complex systems give rise to perceptions. For this reason, Professor John Polkinghorne, from whom I have learned almost all that I know about physics, nevertheless does not seem to me to be quite right when he says, \"We can accept a structural reductionism... the units out of which all the entities of the physical world are constructed are just the elementary particles studied by fundamental physics.\"\n\nHe is right when he says that in the physical (unobserved) world there are only elementary particles (or whatever), in various more or less complex arrays. But he is wrong if he means that all that exists is part of the physical world. Perceived sound is not a bit of \"meaning\" or \"information\" stuck onto physical particles. It is something we perceive and feel as what the physical world is like when it is apprehended by us.\n\nThe obvious conclusion is that perceived properties are caused by physical processes, including brain processes, and those processes must be functioning correctly for us to perceive correctly. But the perceived properties are not out there in the physical objects. They are additional properties caused by complex organized physical systems, and they exist only for and in consciousness.\n\nWe assume, most of the time, that effects are different from their causes, and that cause and effect could, logically, exist apart. They could be decoupled. So the \"non-reductive physicalists\" are really saying that mental properties are caused by physical properties, that when a certain sort of complex organized physical system comes into existence, it causally generates new sorts of conscious stuff. Minds or mental properties emerge from matter. That is a very important thing to say. But it implies that minds are different from matter. They therefore could in principle be decoupled from matter, as any effect could in principle be decoupled from its cause. Causal connections are, after all, contingent. They may hold universally in our universe. But they could have been otherwise. Therefore if the brain\u2013mental state relation is causal, the brain state and the mental state are not strictly identical. Whether Jeeves and Brown like it or not, mental states could in principle be decoupled from brain states, and minds are more than just functional properties of our brains and bodies. We may just have to wait and see.\n\nDo zombies exist?\n\nSome philosophers, who obviously have a liking for horror films, address this point by asking whether there could possibly be zombies. A zombie, for philosophical purposes, is a human body that acts and talks exactly like a human, but has no consciousness, no mental states, at all. It would obviously pass the Turing test \u2013 that is, after talking to it for as long as you like, you would still not be able to tell that it was a zombie. You would probably think that it had thoughts and feelings and sensations, just like you. But it might not have.\n\nIs such a thing possible? I have to say that I think it is \u2013 and not just because I really suspect that some of the people I meet are zombies. I prefer to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Yet I can think of borderline cases. For instance, do ants possess consciousness? Do they feel anything or like and dislike things? I tend to think ants operate solely by reacting to chemical stimuli \u2013 by stigmergy or programmed behaviour caused by previous behaviour that has changed the immediate environment, and that looks as though it is intelligent (like termites building a rather complicated nest).\n\nIf someone built a robot that was more or less indistinguishable from a human being, but the creator knew that his robot consisted just of integrated circuits and programmed routines, she would have good reasons for thinking she had built a zombie. Descartes infamously thought that animals were all zombies. How do we know that they are not? Well, their physiology is very like ours, they have central nervous systems and brains, and their behaviour seems to suggest awareness of pleasure and pain.\n\nA number of experiments by the physiologist Michel Cabanac claim to show that animals and humans both act, at least in laboratory conditions, not to maximize their biological fitness, but to maximize their sensory pleasure. The feeling of pleasure, he holds, is the cause of many behavioural and physiological changes. This suggests that animals are similar to us in being conscious \u2013 they feel pleasure. Of course you could still maintain that the feeling is a by-product of the release of chemicals in the brain, which is the real cause of behavioural changes, thereby preserving a materialist view.\n\nThere is no experimental way of resolving the issue. It is natural to think that the more like us something is, the more it will share the same sorts of property, including conscious properties. I conclude that zombies are possible, but it is a good thing to extend a personal set of interpretations of and reactions to the world as widely as possible. We take a particular moral stance toward something when we regard it as a conscious agent. Perhaps, as Kant suggested, this is a basic attitude we must adopt to the world if we are to be fully moral agents ourselves, even though it cannot be based on conclusive evidence.\n\nThough we cannot refute Descartes' view of animals, most of us probably now feel that our greatly increased knowledge of the genetic, biological, and psychological properties of animals leads us to adopt a more morally concerned attitude to them. Zombies are possible, but it is a moral failure to assume that they are actual without a very good reason. This shows that moral failures can be failures to interpret the facts, so values and facts are not as distinct as some philosophers have claimed. It also shows that some of our most basic philosophical attitudes are not based on evidence, in the sense of publicly accessible data that can be publicly observed and agreed upon by all competent observers.\n\nThere are some widely, though not universally accepted, beliefs that Alvin Plantinga has called \"basic beliefs\". I will adopt this term for beliefs that are not based on agreed evidence (since we all agree on the available evidence), but for which reasons can be given, reasons that argue for particular beliefs as conditions of a general conceptual scheme that we (some of us) think it right to adopt. They include the belief that people (and animals) are not zombies, that they have an inner consciousness; the belief that the laws of nature will continue to operate, and that there is no event without some sort of cause; the belief that I am a continuing agent of experience and action; that there is mental causality or freedom of action; that I can remember my dreams; that human embryos have a right to life; and, for people like me, the idealist belief that reality is ultimately mind-like.\n\nCommon-sense philosophers are right to think that some of our fundamental beliefs are like this. But they do not always see that such beliefs are not all universally agreed, and therefore need not be as common as all that. The reasons given for such beliefs may depend on deep underlying ways of seeing and responding to human experience. But there is no way of gaining universal agreement on such basic ways of seeing and believing. One of these beliefs \u2013 the one I am concerned with at present \u2013 is that other people are not zombies, but that zombies are possible, and one might in future be constructed in a laboratory.\n\nSeeing faces\n\nMalcolm Jeeves and Warren Brown say they have a rather different basic belief, a belief in the truth of physicalism. They would not like saying that zombies are possible; it entails, after all, a form of dualism, that mental properties are different and decouplable from physical properties. Yet they do say something that strongly implies their possibility. For, they say, their work in neuroscience suggests that subjective experiences often exert a causal influence (a \"top-down\" influence) on the physical system and its parts.\n\nThey stress, for instance, that the cerebral cortex of young humans is plastic or partly unformed and continues to organize and reorganize functional networks of neurons \"through experiences, learning, imagination, and thought\". They quote Nancy Kanwisher of MIT as saying that \"evidence indicates important roles for both genetic factors and specific early experience, in the construction of the Fusiform Face Area\". That is, the ability of the adult human to recognize faces depends in part upon the subjective experience of interacting with other people's faces in the first few months of life. Such experience actually modifies the face-perception neurons in the brain to enable them to function more efficiently. Subjective experiences or acts (thoughts) cause changes in the physical structure of the brain. Emergent mental properties and experiences \"have a real influence on behaviour\". How, then, can they continue to say that \"humans are taken to be entirely physical\"?\n\nPerhaps they mean that humans are physical entities that possess nonmaterial properties, but that there are no nonmaterial entities. Unfortunately, that would require a clear distinction between entities and properties that would be very hard to defend. Properties just are entities that coexist with or depend upon other sets of properties.\n\nThey could still say that nonmaterial properties (like conscious experiences) could not exist without the brain properties which are their basis. But what is the force of such a \"could not\"? We might say that there is a strong causal connection between them \u2013 though, as I have noted, this causality runs both ways, from brain states to subjective experiences and from thoughts to neuronal connections in the brain. Where there is a causal connection in fact, there need not have been or there could have been a different one. We could have brains without consciousness or consciousness without brains. Those who believe there is a God who knows what is going on in the world actually believe that there is a consciousness without a brain \u2013 God is conscious, but has no brain. Admittedly God is very different from human minds, but the point is that many people at least think they can conceive of a consciousness without a body. If they are right, we cannot rule out the possibility of a human consciousness existing without its normal body by saying that such a thing is inconceivable.\n\nThe world would be decidedly odd if causal connections between brains and experiences kept breaking down. This is another basic, unevidenced attitude we take to the world \u2013 we trust that causal laws will not break down for no reason. Nevertheless, in extreme situations, like the death of the body for example, such connections may well break down. We cannot refute the hypothesis of continued consciousness after death, without a brain, just by saying it is impossible. Philosophers sometimes do say that, admittedly. But even philosophers should not deny possibilities a priori, just because they seem peculiar to them.\n\nThe embodied mind\n\nI conclude that minds, subjects of experiences and intentional acts, are after all nonmaterial and can be decoupled from specific brains. Moreover, that is entailed by any genuinely non-reductive physicalism, which is not, when analysed more closely, really physicalism (materialism) at all. Yet what Jeeves and Brown are saying is important. Minds need an environment to provide experiential data, and also to provide an arena in which to perform actions and to interact with other minds. Our physical world is not the only possible form of environment for minds. There may be other universes different from ours, with different kinds of minds in them. But human minds need to be genuinely embodied and embedded in some sort of environment. Minds are directed upon a world of objects, both by attention and by intention. Our minds may be causally limited to this physical world and they have certainly emerged within it by a long process of evolutionary development. They are not self-contained and only externally related to the physical world.\n\nWe can thus say that minds read or interpret the configuration of neurons which store information that the brain has received from its environment. They may then influence this configuration by thought and further experience. The configuration is stored in the brain (as a symphony is stored on a CD) and is ready to be read again (remembered) at a later time.\n\nThis way of putting the matter requires that the brain functions properly. Configurations and interpretations can go wrong, and if the physical basis is blocked or damaged, they will go wrong. So it is not at all surprising that brain damage will cause predictable mental defects or that particular mental processes are often found to be localized in specific areas of the brain. Such facts are to be expected by sensible dualists, who of course believe that minds think about objects in the world and try to perform actions in the world, and have never believed that minds only contemplate special mental objects and perform special mental actions in a special mental world. There are mental objects (like images) and there are mental actions (like thoughts). But these are derivative from the physical objects toward which minds are naturally and properly directed. That is just what poor maligned Descartes actually thought.\n\nWhat is important about dualism is that it retains belief in the moral primacy of personal experience and morally responsible action. But it does not deny that human experience is primarily of a physical world and that free acts are performed in a physical and public world.\n\nLiving in two worlds\n\nIt is possible that our subjective mental life may not in fact be separable from the activity of our bodies. I think that is a matter that argument alone cannot resolve. It may be that the interweaving of mind and body is so close and complex that it would not make sense, if we fully analysed it, to speak of a mental life anything like ours continuing without the very same physical world in which it has developed and lived. Then what Jeeves and Brown say would be correct. But I do not think we can be sure of this, and I think it is wiser to remain open to the possibility of a continuation of mental life after bodily death.\n\nIn dreams we experience the possibility of conscious knowledge and action which does not take place in an actual physical world. Admittedly dream images seem to be constructed from past experiences of a physical world. But it is fairly easy to conceive of images that occur in the mind without any physical cause and which might be shared between different minds. We can conceive of image-worlds that some groups of minds share, but which do not form the sort of objective causal nexus that exists in our physical universe.\n\nThe philosopher H. H. Price has sketched such an image-world in his little book, Lectures in the Philosophy of Religion. In his image-world, persons meet in rather flexible image-bodies (rather like avatars in a video game) insofar as they are psychically attracted to one another, and the causal laws are such that desires directly cause desired \"physical\" states to exist. This may sound very attractive, until we realize that always getting what we want may turn out to be a disadvantage, as King Midas could tell us. And also the people we would be psychically attracted to might turn out to be as horrible as we are, which could be very uncomfortable. Indeed, it might be a sort of hell.\n\nAnother idea of an image-world is presented by the Oxford philosopher Anthony Quinton, who sketches the slightly alarming possibility that every night when we go to sleep, we may have such coherent dreams that we actually seem to live in a quite different world. After a hard night's work in the other world, we go to sleep, and immediately dream of being back in this world. That seems a coherent idea, though it also threatens to be a very tiring one. When, if ever, would we get a good night's sleep? Anyway, if this happened which would be the real world? I suppose they would both be equally real, and we would be the same person, not just in two different bodies, but in two different worlds.\n\nSuch possibilities require some mechanism by which images could be generated or by which minds could continue to exist with new forms of experience and capacities for intentional action. In the absence of such a mechanism, it will probably be true that even if minds are immaterial (or contain important sets of non-physical properties), they will not in fact be separable from the bodies and brains that form their physical substrata.\n\nThere may, however, be various mechanisms that could ensure the decoupling of minds from bodies. The most obvious one is a supreme cosmic mind of some sort that could arrange for appropriate experiences to occur to \"decoupled minds\", perhaps as moral consequences of what they have done in their physical bodies. Or, as in some Buddhist philosophies, there could be an impersonal moral law (karma) which brings into existence image-worlds (detailed in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, for example) in which the moral consequences of human life-choices can be worked out. Yet another possibility is that, if there are many alternative universes which have sprung from the primal quantum vacuum, we might not need to travel through a black hole to get into another universe. We may just have to go to sleep \u2013 a very economical form of travel.\n\nThe philosopher Professor Ayer, one of the most vociferous philosophical atheists of his day, was extremely surprised to find that he continued to have experiences after he had died. He came back to life after being clinically dead, and his experiences, though they were odd in the extreme, were momentous enough for him to accept the possibility of life after death. This he found very disappointing personally, as it conflicted with most of his previous philosophy. Yet for anyone who is not a materialist, some kind of existence after death remains a possibility, disappointing or not.\n\nThat possibility requires that either dualism or idealism is true. So I do not think we should give up the idea that there is an immaterial self, in the sense outlined in chapter five, a subject of experience and action that is not bound to the conditions of this earthly body and that could be decoupled from this body and brain. But we should certainly accept the overwhelming evidence from neurological research that our minds are emergent realities from physical processes and are strongly embedded in physical environments through brain, body, and networks of social-historical relationships. Such evidence is quite compatible with sophisticated forms of both dualism and idealism, and it even points to the need for a more holistic view of minds as embedded in networks of social relationships, rather than as isolated units confined to individual skulls. That is where the work of Ryle and Wittgenstein provides a healthy antidote to materialism.\n\nIn this chapter I have argued that there is a real question of whether minds and contents of consciousness are special kinds of entities (\"stuff\") that are not reducible to material properties. This is not a pseudo-problem or one that could be resolved simply by appeal to how we ordinarily use words. Yet it is also not a question that can be resolved by appeal to evidence, in the sense of publicly accessible and decisively verifiable data. It is more a question of interpreting the data we have in the most adequate way \u2013 and what is most adequate is itself not universally agreed or conclusively decidable.\n\nI suggested that it is partly a moral stance to adopt the basic belief that other persons are genuine moral agents, not zombies. But the existence of qualia or \"private\" experiences, and the seeming existence of \"top-down\" causation in neuropsychology can lead to adopting the belief that minds are more than brains. It seems to follow that the mind\u2013brain connection is causal and contingent, and that minds could logically exist without brains. However, this may be only a bare logical possibility, and it certainly seems that human minds emerge from and are closely integrated with brain-events. It is not essential to Cartesian dualism that minds actually do exist in a disembodied state. What matters is that, even if human minds are essentially embodied, what is morally important about human persons depends upon their uniquely appropriated experiences and responsibly free actions; that is, upon distinctively mental properties.\n\n## Chapter Ten\n\n## Consciousness, value, and purpose\n\nA crucial question is whether human persons are morally free and responsible. This is a question which there seems to be no possibility of resolving empirically, yet to which arguments, like the ones discussed in this book, are relevant, and which it is important to decide in practice. The psychologist Benjamin Libet has tried to put the issue to experimental test, but the tests do not really seem to touch on the issue of moral freedom, and they do not appear to resolve the issue. I accept Immanuel Kant's view that we need to decide the issue on practical grounds \u2013 it is morally important to treat persons as free and responsible, even if we cannot theoretically prove they are.\n\nIn addition, we experience ourselves as envisaging possible futures, evaluating them, and choosing between them. It is reasonable to take these experiences as telling us what is true of reality \u2013 we really are free and able to cause physical changes by thought and intention. No relatively abstract theory should cause us to renounce these deliverances of experience.\n\nThe real threat to Ryle has not been a revival of dualism. It has been the rise of materialism. The development of neuroscience and of artificial intelligence has suggested to some philosophers that consciousness is not as important as we used to think. Computers can be built to perform intelligent operations. They (or at least one of them) can even beat the best human chess-players in the world, and they can think millions of times more quickly than humans. But they do not need to be conscious.\n\nStudies of the brain have shown that humans do not need to be conscious either. Experiments with patients with brain damage have shown that they can tell the location or movements of objects in their vicinity with an accuracy well above average even when they are not aware of any visual stimuli \u2013 that is, when they cannot see them. This remarkable phenomenon, known as blindsight, seems to show that the brain can respond to stimuli without being conscious of them. Some experiments seem to show that the brain can \"make decisions\" before any conscious decision has been made. These experiments have been hailed by materialists as showing that awareness and free will are by-products of physical brain processes, and that the belief that I can make decisions freely is an illusion.\n\nThe best-known experiments in this respect are those by Benjamin Libet. In his most famous experiment, he put human subjects in a laboratory, attached EEG electrodes to their skulls to measure electrical activity in their brains, and attached an electromyograph (EMG) to their arm muscles. He then asked them to press a button at any time selected by them within a short period of time. The EEG measured when a particular sort of cortical activity occurred (called the \"readiness potential\", which generally occurs as pre-motor planning of volitional movements). The EMG reading measured when the button was actually pressed. And the subjects were asked to note the moment (as measured by a dot moving around a huge clock) when they made the decision to press the button.\n\nThe results, confirmed over many experiments, were that the readiness potential occurred in the brain about 300 milliseconds before the stated decision to act, which in turn occurred about 200 milliseconds before the button was actually pressed. Libet's conclusion was that the brain initiates movement, and the apparently \"free\" decision comes after movement has been initiated. So it seems all causation happened at the unconscious level of the brain, and the conscious decision to act played no part in the proceedings at all. Free will has been disproved!\n\nIf this were true, it would be very worrying indeed for anyone, like an idealist, who thinks that the mind can initiate actions in a non-physical way, and that such decisions have physical effects. It seems to show that all real causes are physical, and that the sense of \"acting freely\" is totally superfluous and, in fact, illusory.\n\nAs we might expect, however, this sort of experiment is very controversial, and what it really shows is not very clear. One major consideration is the very artificial situation of the person being asked to press the button. When we are interested in free decision-making, we are mostly concerned with important moral decisions, when someone has to choose between right and wrong and can be held responsible for their choice. Or we might be concerned with the nature of creative choices in painting or music or with reasoning activities in mathematics or philosophy. These are real-life issues where we want to know if mental states can make a causal difference, which might have been otherwise, to what happens in the physical world.\n\nAll such factors are missing in the Libet experiments. The subject is asked to press a button at a completely arbitrary time, and say when he or she was \"aware of the urge to act\". In fact, the primary intention has been completed before the experiment begins. That intention is to execute a slight and pointless physical movement at some arbitrary time in the near future. There is no moral or rational or artistic significance in the action; it really does not matter when or how often it takes place.\n\nSince we know that a great many bodily actions \u2013 like breathing or eating \u2013 are virtually automatic, it is hardly surprising that the mind (whose job it is to find reasons for acting) hands over the task of pressing a button to the automatic brain, because there is no reason for choosing one time over any other time. The intention is to press the button at an arbitrary time. There is no reason to press it or not press it at any particular time. The brain has been instructed to do that, so it does.\n\nWhen the conscious mind \"becomes aware of the urge to act\", which has been arbitrarily selected by the unconscious motor system of the brain, there is no reason to suppress that urge. The mind assents and records the time at which it does so. It may seem as if the mind is merely following the dictates of electrical activity in the brain. But the fact is that the mind had already agreed to do precisely that when it formed the intention to take part in the experiment and to press the button arbitrarily (that is, for no reason). The only point at which a significantly free decision was made was at the point of deciding to participate in the experiment. So all the experiment shows is that some fairly arbitrary \"decisions to act\" are parts of behavioural routines that proceed automatically, but which may themselves be initiated by real mental decisions.\n\nLibet himself was a believer in freedom of the will, and argued that the mind could always veto the \"urge to act\" if it had reason to do so. But my point is rather wider than that. It is that experimental situations are very special. They abstract from real-life situations, and introduce artificial factors like \"moving a finger for no reason\" to substitute for really significant factors like \"deciding whether to kill someone for personal gain\". Naturally we do not want to construct experiments that will put such real-life questions to the test. But that means the results of the experiments we can do, fascinating though they are, do not address the problem of human freedom in any really illuminating way.\n\nExperimental tests on human persons mimic real-life situations in a distorted and artificially restricted way. They do not show what \"really happens\" in real-life situations. They show how some abstracted aspects of real-life situations can be mimicked in a laboratory. Much useful information about the brain can be obtained from such experiments. But it should not be thought that laboratory results show us what really happens in real life, where a huge variety of complex, interconnected, and unmeasurable factors contribute to our conscious experience of acting and intending to act.\n\nIs consciousness useless?\n\nThere is good reason to think that conscious states are real and causally efficacious, but it could be argued that consciousness is a disadvantage, an evolutionary mistake. If we were not conscious, we would not feel pain, we would not get depressed, and we would not waste time by asking silly questions like \"Why am I here?\" or \"What's it all about?\" Consciousness helps animals to see and try to escape their predators. But it would be more efficient to have an automatic stimulus-response-escape mechanism. Possibly ants have. They hardly have big enough brains to be conscious, yet they manage to fight, reproduce, and communicate very well. So we might have survived very well as communities of unfeeling robots. Information could have been processed, long molecules of DNA could have reproduced, and vast banks of knowledge could have been built up \u2013 but no one would have understood such knowledge or would even have been aware of it. It would just have been there, coded in complex systems of condensed algorithms. It would have been a universe in which CD-ROMs of amazing complexity would have been assembled, encapsulating every possible word and melody and thought that ever could exist, but without those thoughts and notes ever actually occurring to any consciousness. All the great literature of the world would have existed, but would never have been read or understood.\n\nIf you ask, \"What would be the point of that?\", the point is that there is not, and never has been, any point. It just is. Of course there may be no point in the existence of consciousness either. But the existence of consciousness introduces evaluation into the discussion. There may be no ultimate point in anything, but some things are more pointless than others. Counting the number of hairs on my legs is more pointless than trying to alleviate a headache. Since consciousness involves pleasure and pain, there is always a point in ending pain and obtaining pleasure.\n\nPleasure can be pointless, too, but it is always preferable to pain \u2013 unless the pain is a warning of greater pain to come. The greatest pleasures, according to philosophers as diverse as Aristotle and John Stuart Mill, are those which engage the human faculties in active and creative ways. People are happiest when they do things they are good at and interested in, with a reasonable degree of success, and when others appreciate what they are doing. Consciousness is essentially bound up with intentional action, because conscious beings seek to avoid pain and pursue pleasure. The very complex physical structures of the brain that make awareness possible also enable intentions to guide the physical movements of the body.\n\nComputers do not feel pain or seek to avoid it. They are designed (programmed) by humans to do specific tasks, information is inputted by humans, and outputted information is then interpreted by humans. Computers, like telescopes, are instruments designed to enable conscious beings to achieve new knowledge and to modify the world in new ways. Computers are tools and take no pleasure in winning chess games. They will win if they are programmed well, and if they are instructed to, and that is it. Computers are very bad models for human beings, as they lack awareness, evaluation, and purpose, the very qualities that are distinctively personal.\n\nThis is the enormous difference that consciousness makes. Consciousness may not be necessary for complex organisms to develop, but it does introduce a new element to reality, the element of understanding and appreciating a state of affairs. This element is quite different from any purely physical state, and it cannot be reduced to or described in terms of any purely physical state. It also introduces a new purposive form of causality, based on the envisaging and evaluation of future conscious states and activities. In having a purpose, minds have to envisage a possible state as a future state. This representation of something as future is a distinctively mental property. The occurrent state, which of course exists now in some mind, represents a state that does not yet exist. Knowing that some state is about the future, or even about the non-existent, is not itself a physical property. It is the \"aboutness\" that makes the difference. It is what has been called an \"intensional state\", a state that symbolizes something other than its own physical properties.\n\nThe evaluation of a possible future as good or bad, desirable or undesirable, is similarly a mental property. Machines can be programmed to reach specific physical states and then stop. But there is no sense in saying that they think about such states and are pleased when they reach them. \"Goodness\" is not a physical property of anything. To say that something is good is to say that it is the object of rational choice, choice directed by the thought that something would be pleasant or otherwise desirable. There is no place in any physical science for such concepts.\n\nThe formation of an intention to do something in future is also not a physical property, as it signifies that a future state will be brought about by intelligent action. The idea of final causality, of acting in order to obtain a desired future, as a cause of action through ideas, is a distinctively mental idea of causality. Bacon was right; there are no final causes in a purely material world.\n\nThe natural sciences presuppose the basic postulate that there are measurable and intelligible law-like regularities in nature. This postulate is confirmed by experience and is the basis of scientific explanation and prediction. In a similar way the experiences of practical reasoning, creative imagination, and moral commitment presuppose the basic postulate that there exists free and reason-based action. This postulate too is confirmed by experience and is the basis of personal relationship and understanding. Any adequate account of our world must include both postulates in a coherently related framework.\n\nThe idea of purely physical causality is a very sophisticated concept that remains almost wholly mysterious in nature. It could be said that our primary sense of causality, the one that we most directly and commonly experience, is that of bringing something about for the sake of a desired goal. Personal causality is something we experience and have to assume if we are to live as persons. Physical causality is, by comparison, a stripped-down abstract idea of regular law-like connections between physical events considered in artificially isolated conditions. In physical causality, one thing follows another, but nothing is actually brought about by any active power, and there are no goals set by any being. It seems strange, then, that anyone should think that personal causality may be an illusion, whereas only physical causality is objectively real. Such a counter-intuitive belief can only be accounted for by a strong prior commitment to a strictly materialist point of view that ignores the all-pervading evidence of personal experience.\n\nWe can make a meaningful distinction between behaviour that blindly executes a routine without any goal being actually envisaged, and conscious pursuit of an envisaged goal. Even those who think that the idea of intelligent design in nature is an illusion have to know what an intelligent, purposive action would be or they would not be able to say what it is that does not actually exist. Once that possibility is allowed, it is a matter of experience to determine whether it is actual. It is our own experience that we envisage, evaluate, and intend, and it would take an overwhelmingly strong theory to overturn that experience. I do not believe there is any such theory.\n\nWhy consciousness is essential\n\nIt is only with consciousness that the concepts of value and purpose, which are central to our social life, to living as persons among other persons, make sense. I doubt if these concepts make any sense for a ruthlessly materialist view of reality. They would, it may be said, be purely subjective. But even in that case purely subjective realities would exist, and that is just what a materialist denies.\n\nThe philosopher G. E. Moore asked people to envisage a very beautiful and elegant universe that was not consciously perceived by any being and to compare it with a very ugly and chaotic universe, similarly unperceived. He thought the beautiful universe was obviously better. But only philosophers can seriously claim that objects that no one has ever seen or will ever see are beautiful. It is rather like saying that ice cream that has never been eaten tastes wonderful. It might taste wonderful if someone ate it. Otherwise it has no taste at all. Most of us know that conscious experience adds properties \u2013 like beauty and pleasure \u2013 to the universe that otherwise would never exist at all.\n\nI have discussed the fact that many philosophers, beginning with Galileo, make a sharp distinction between \"secondary qualities\" like colour, taste, smell, pleasure, and pain, that only exist in consciousness, and \"primary qualities\" like mass, position, and momentum, that exist in non-conscious reality. Yet such primary qualities in turn seem to dissolve into spatially located or extended fields of force or even into the completely \"veiled reality\" that Kant and d'Espagnat postulate.\n\nThis is a long way from materialism, which claims that primary qualities are pretty well known and are the only constituent elements of reality. For some quantum physicists, like Niels Bohr, one of the fathers of quantum physics, the primary qualities of the physical world are almost wholly mysterious and seem more like mathematical abstractions from the directly experienced world of colours, sounds, smells \u2013 and of beauty, elegance, pleasure, and pain.\n\nIt may well seem that the \"real\" world is the experienced world, the world that exists in conscious experience. This is the view taken by idealist philosophers, who completely reverse the materialist hypothesis. For materialism, the emergence of awareness, evaluation, and purpose from unconscious, unfeeling, and purposeless physical processes is a puzzle, and a pretty pointless one at that.\n\nIdealists hypothesize that fundamental reality includes awareness, evaluation, and purpose \u2013 that mind is more basic, more causally efficacious, than matter. For an idealist, the existence of a material world is not such a great puzzle, because finite minds need physical expression if they are to relate to one another; if they are to have objects of knowledge that can please or displease them; and if they are to have goals that they can try to achieve in a partly pliable but partly resistant environment. Moreover, minds give an additional sort of explanation for why physical laws exist as they do \u2013 namely, they exist in order to allow a wide variety of worthwhile states to be realized and appreciated.\n\nMost idealists think that since the universe existed long before any finite minds came to exist within it, there is something mind-like at the basis of the physical universe itself. There is a cosmic awareness that envisages all possible states, ranks them evaluatively, and has the purpose of realizing its nature by generating societies of minds in an emergent universe \u2013 minds of many grades of awareness and intelligence, which can act in many creative ways to generate new forms of awareness, of beauty and intelligibility. This cosmic awareness is often called God, at least by philosophers.\n\nIt sounds a little too personal or anthropomorphic to some idealists, and they prefer to speak in a more Platonic way of an eternal realm of possibilities, beyond even mind or consciousness as we understand it, which necessarily realizes itself through the emergence of conscious and purposive beings, by processes of complex integration between simpler spatio-temporal elements. This is generally known in the German and early twentieth-century British idealist tradition as \"the Absolute\", and in the Indian Advaita tradition as Brahman. Consciousness as we know it then is emergent rather than primordial, but it is still an irreducible and causally efficacious element of reality, and it is the inherent goal or purpose of the cosmic process.\n\nThat seems to me the most satisfactory picture of the cosmos that can be obtained both from philosophy and from modern science. It may seem that Ryle would disagree completely with this picture, as he seems to deny that inner private conscious events exist at all. But it is not quite so simple. A different, more sympathetic way of interpreting Ryle is that he is saying (and this is even more so in the case of Wittgenstein) that inner conscious events need to have public and physical expressions, and could not exist as they do without being parts of networks of social relationships. Persons are only persons in community, not in isolation. That is why we might want a \"dual-aspect\" view rather than an outright dualist one.\n\nThe inner reality exists, but it could not exist fully and properly as it does without the outer expression. Materialism and idealism both err if they deny any existence to mind or to matter. Both must go together, but for an idealist the driving force of the whole process is in the end the mind-like, the conscious and intentional, with its values and purposes. It is to that existence that the material cosmos points, and in which it finds the fulfilment of its inherent potentialities.\n\n## Chapter Eleven\n\n## Thoughts and perceptions\n\nThoughts are an integral part of human consciousness. Without thoughts we would be unable to interpret or reflect upon our sense-experiences. Of course we learn the language in which we usually think from others. But what we think, the way in which we think, and the specific content of our thoughts, is often hidden from others. This does not mean, as Ryle says, that our thoughts take place in a hidden parallel universe that can never be discovered at all. It means that there are important elements of our inner lives that remain unique to us and that build up, if we are fortunate, an integrated and structured perspective on the world that imparts to our lives a unique value and significance. It is our inner lives of thoughts and feelings that make us what we are.\n\nFor Ryle, who thinks that the Cartesian myth of substantial minds imagines ghosts hiding inside bodily machines, idealists sound as if they are saying that there is a huge super-ghost (a cosmic substantial mind) in the cosmic machine or perhaps that lots of ghosts flit around its more complicated parts. In one sense Ryle is right. There is no cosmic machine and there are no ghosts hiding in its works. Idealists think that the universe includes an important dimension of awareness and purpose or perhaps many sorts of awareness and many diverse purposes. Perhaps these are present as real potentialities in a realm beyond space-time, and space-time is the expressive medium in which they develop to their fullest realization. This might very well suit Ryle's vision of humans as neither angels nor machines, but as intelligent beings whose behaviour expresses their natures in social and creative interaction.\n\nYet Ryle is also importantly wrong. There are few real dualists who have believed in ghosts. They do not usually believe that there are two completely parallel worlds, one visible and one invisible. What Ryle attacks are often straw men, or straw ghosts, after all. His own language discloses that he is, paradoxically, nearer to the Descartes of reality, not of myth, than he suspects.\n\nConsider what Ryle says about the intellect, in chapter two of The Concept of Mind. He opposes the claim that if we speak of an \"intelligent\" action we are referring to occult episodes in which intelligent minds contemplate a set of true propositions. On such a view, intelligent overt acts are the effects of such unobservable acts of inner contemplation. Ryle wishes to maintain that assertions about intelligent action are explanatory-cum-predictive assertions that can be publicly observed and tested.\n\nBy an occult episode he means some invisible action, like assenting to a theoretical truth, which is complete in itself, but which then contingently happens to cause some physical movement of the body. So we could give a complete account of occult actions without mentioning the body at all. It is an almost accidental truth that I think, \"If I move my arm I will catch this ball. I want to catch the ball, so I will need to move my arm,\" and then my arm moves. Ryle believes that on such an account, the intellectual act and the physical act just coincide \u2013 though if we are not well coordinated they may not coincide very often. Every physical act is preceded by an invisible piece of syllogistic reasoning, and the link between that reasoning and my bodily movements is wholly mysterious. Life is a perpetual surprise, as my thoughts are often followed by bodily movements, though I have no idea how or why. Most actions also take rather a long time, as I have to go through a series of internal arguments before I do anything. Dualists of this kind are likely to be very slow-moving creatures, who will probably be eaten before they have gone through the arguments in favour of running away.\n\nDoes anyone seriously think this, however? Humans are organisms, constantly receiving stimuli from their environment and actively responding to them. Catching a ball is usually pretty automatic and takes no thought at all. But I can pay attention to my technique and improve it through practice. Is that \"paying attention\" an occult episode? Of course calling it occult is meant to make it seem weird. The occult is the secret and slightly crazy. And my paying attention is not occult in the sense of being completely unknowable by anyone else. I know when you are paying attention. You stare fixedly, you do not just look out of the window, your body is tensed. That is because attending is not a purely private act. It guides bodily processes, modifying their natural responses by targeted mental effort. The mind directly affects the body, to increase the amount and quality of information the senses provide.\n\nNevertheless, attending is not just bodily behaviour. If attending \"consisted in\" the presence of testable predictive assertions about behaviour, then it would not matter if I was conscious or not. Yet, as Ryle says, \"There are some things which I can find out about you only... through being told of them by you.\" They include facts about exactly what you see when you attend, what it looks like, and how clearly you see it.\n\nSo Ryle amends the account that attending consists in specific sorts of bodily behaviour, and retreats to saying that attending is normally expressed in bodily behaviour. But he holds that our private internal imaginings are only a small part of human lives, and that only for the mentally ill do they play more than a very minor role. If that is so, there are many more mentally ill people around than Ryle supposed. The richness, complexity, and variety of what I see when I attend is known to me, but cannot be conveyed with any adequacy either in words or in behaviour. Poets and novelists are better at it than philosophers, and they are the first to say that no words can capture the sheer exuberant profusion of sensory experience.\n\nWe can observe people attending, but we cannot observe what they see when they attend. Similarly, we observe people intending, exerting efforts, and trying to perfect their actions. But we cannot observe just how much their efforts contribute to their behaviour, how difficult it is for them or what degree of freedom they have to modify their actions by strength of will.\n\nPersons have hidden lives, which others know nothing about and could never learn from their behaviour, which is often ambiguous or even dissimulative. Where Ryle is right is in seeing that the hidden is capable of being disclosed, and that it is essential that it should normally be disclosed. Our mental acts do not take place in a different parallel world. They take place in this shared and physical world, as experiences of it and actions within it. The unspoken thought and the uttered word are two aspects of the same reality, and though they may exist apart, it is natural for them to exist together, and for each aspect to be modified by the other. I learn a language from others, but I can then modify the way language is used by my own creative deployment of words. This, I think, is what Descartes actually thought, though it seems that his thoughts did not get expressed in words that conveyed his thoughts clearly enough for some other philosophers.\n\nThinking of coffee\n\nThe statement that I am now thinking about a cup of coffee is, despite Ryle's denials, an untestable categorical proposition, and is not just an improbably large set of testable, hypothetical \"if-then\" statements about how I am liable to behave in proximity to coffee cups. No one can know whether I am lying about my thought or not. You have to take my word for it. It is a prime example of a factual claim that is not capable of public verification.\n\nI could say, as Ayer did, that I can privately verify it. But is that really so? After all, my thought passes very quickly, and my memory is very bad. By the time I get round to verifying whether I am thinking about coffee, I have stopped thinking about it, and instead I am thinking about verification. So I have to depend on memory, and I have no way of checking that my memory is correct. The truth is that I cannot even conclusively verify my own experiences. I can only say that it seems to me that I had them. I am certainly the best judge of whether or not I did have them, but I am not wholly reliable. There is no reason why introspection should be infallible, but that does not mean introspection does not exist. I just have to put up with saying that it seems to me that I thought about coffee \u2013 and if I did not believe myself most of the time, I would be in deep trouble.\n\nMaybe we have to drop the verification principle, in the sense of proving the truth of a statement by being confronted with an undeniable sense-experience. We could replace it with something like a fiduciary principle. I have some thoughts or perceptions, and I just have to trust that I have identified them and remember them correctly.\n\nThe amazing thing about natural science is that many people have very similar perceptions, and they can produce descriptions that predict some future perceptions pretty well, because perceptions happen to recur in regular ways and in partly controllable conditions. But when we come to our own thoughts, some of us have highly unusual ones. They are not widely shared by others, they do not occur in accordance with some general law, and they do not recur in experimentally controlled conditions.\n\nConsider Einstein thinking of the theory of relativity. This was a totally new and unique thought at the time. There is no law that will make it occur to people in regular ways. And there is little you can do to make it occur to others at all. You can teach them of course but that is conveying the thought to them, not causing it to occur in their brains by creating the right conditions. Nobody doubts that Einstein thought of the theory of relativity. Yet nobody, not even Einstein himself, can verify that he did. All we can do is to claim that he was the person who first wrote it down, and trust all those who have told us that, and that they got it right.\n\nSo there are millions of facts the occurrence of which is not strictly verifiable, either privately or publicly. They include all factual claims about our own thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. We just make a claim on the basis of personal experience and trust that we are probably right. If our behaviour conflicts with such a claim \u2013 if, for instance, we say that we hate smoking, while at the same time inhaling a cigar \u2013 we have a problem. But it is not obvious that the behaviour should always overrule our personal report. We may indeed hate smoking, but have decided, just once, to be bloody-minded and do something completely unreasonable, just to show that life is absurd. Thoughts and perceptions are different from and not reducible to behaviour.\n\nIn a similar way, my thoughts and perceptions are normally, and perhaps always, accompanied by or \"expressed in\" electrochemical activity in my brain. Yet no amount of electrical or chemical terminology will tell anyone the contents of my thoughts. It may be possible to say what kind of experience I am having when a particular part of my brain displays enhanced blood-flow or electrical activity. I can tell whether it is a visual experience or an aural experience, for example. But to find this out I have to ask the brain's owner what sort of experience is occurring, and then assume that similar brain-events will correlate with similar experiences in future. I may be able to tell that Einstein is thinking in abstract mathematical terms about space-time. But I will not be able to state the theory of relativity just by inspecting Einstein's brain.\n\nEinstein's brain\n\nEinstein's brain was for many years kept in a jar by Dr Harvey of Princeton Hospital, perhaps in the hope that it might one day be stimulated to produce a new and revolutionary physical theory. But if it did, how would we understand it? If we had a neurological dictionary correlating each brain-event with some word or letter, we could write down all the words the brain uttered, like reading a morse-code message. As long as the brain spoke English (or some other known language), we would understand Einstein's brain.\n\nThis assumes that there is a one-to-one correlation between phonemes and identifiable and discrete brain states (which is not at all obvious and almost certainly not the case), and that thoughts are always formulated in some grammatically correct language (which is even less obvious). Still, it may be possible to \"read thoughts\", as long as people are happy to stay connected to brain scanners while they are thinking. That would not be very different from telepathy, an alleged direct knowledge of what someone else is thinking. It would certainly not show that thoughts and brain states were identical. We would just have to assume that each brain state correlated with a specific thought or part of a thought. Whether or not this is so is a factual question, the answer to which cannot be decided by a mere verbal definition. Yet we could never check that or verify it. The best we could do would be to use the fiduciary principle and believe what the brain said when we asked it.\n\nI suspect it would say, \"Get me out of here!\" or \"Leave my brain alone.\" There might be problems in getting it to concentrate on problems in physics, if it realized its rather unusual situation. But the stubborn fact is that while we can observe neurons firing in the brain, we cannot observe what the brain is conscious of when its neurons are firing.\n\nThere is an additional problem. Presumably brains function in accordance with the laws of physics. But Einstein's brain also functions in accordance with the laws of logic and of mathematical deduction. Could we, just using the laws of physics, predict what Einstein's brain would say next? Or would we need to know how to do differential equations before we could say what state his brain would be in when he had finished solving such an equation?\n\nComputers, functioning entirely in accordance with the laws of physics, can solve differential equations \u2013 but only if the rules of deduction have been put into them by intelligent minds. Physical pathways can be constructed to produce results in accordance with stateable rules, of logic or of anything else, such as chess. But computers will not know that they have reached a result. They simply follow the rules and then stop, without any idea of what they were trying to do, and without any knowledge that they have solved anything.\n\nThis shows that \"trying to achieve a goal\" and \"succeeding\" are not ideas that occur in physics, though they can be expressed in purely physical events, if those events are organized in a specific way.\n\nA Brahms symphony can be fully expressed in the physical structure of a compact disc. But a recital of the string of binary digits that make up the compact disc would not sound as attractive as hearing the symphony. Brahms was not trying to write strings of binary digits. He was trying to write beautiful music. That could be put into binary strings, but then some device is needed (a CD-player) to turn those strings back into sounds, which can be heard as violin, not just binary, strings.\n\nIf I suggest that the binary strings just organize themselves without even having any conception of what music is, and by chance they happen to play a Brahms symphony, it would be hard to take me seriously. It is the same with the brain. People do not try to make various sets of neurons fire. Most people do not even know what neurons are exactly, much less how to start firing them. Someone may try to solve an equation. The mental acts they perform in the course of doing this can be translated into physical brain states, but it is the purposefully directed acts that decide the order in which brain states occur. They do not just put themselves into a certain order, which miraculously makes me argue in a correct deductive way. The brain states then have to be translated back into mathematical symbols, understood by a human mind to be an argument with premises and a conclusion.\n\nOn this account, the brain is a highly organized mechanism for performing mathematical operations, for storing them, and for translating them into occurrent thoughts \u2013 axioms, operations, and conclusions. The brain's operations are all purely physical, but its structure, the ordering of its successive states in a logical argument, and the understanding that what has gone on is an argument, and not just a succession of physical states, are all non-physical.\n\nThe brain from the inside\n\nRyle insists that it would be a mistake to think that there is some inner replica of the brain which structures the brain, and which orders and understands its physical states. He is right; the mind is not an inner replica of the brain. It does not repeat what the brain does on an invisible inner stage. Yet the brain has an inner aspect. Not only does it appear to others as an electrochemically active lump of porridge, but it also is known to itself as a set of thoughts, feelings, and intentions.\n\nThe structure of the brain has evolved from simpler stimulus-response structures, as organisms come to have more complex and sensitive responses to their environment. Rocks do not have a rich and vibrant inner life. They do not even have the complex organization that would make such a life possible. It is not until central nervous systems develop that anything like consciousness appears in some sort of feeling-life, the nature of which we can hardly imagine. Intelligent consciousness is the inner aspect of the complex organized physical systems we call brains.\n\nAt that stage, the organization itself becomes a new phenomenal and causal factor in the behaviour of organisms. At simple inorganic levels the laws of nature are fairly simple, routine, and repetitive in their operation. The laws of mechanics are almost sufficient to describe what is going on. But at complex organic levels new laws come into operation which are more subtle, and exhibit novelty and creativity. The inner life of organisms is not captured by simple physical laws \u2013 that is the mistake of reductionism. More complex laws of psychology, of social relationship, and of personal creativity, must be added to the simpler physical bases of behaviour in order to understand human life. Some behaviour will not fall under general laws at all, because of its unique complexity.\n\nWe need not think of mind as a complete substantial entity, which mirrors the activity of the brain or body. We can think of it as developing various degrees of awareness and creative responsiveness, as the inner aspect of what appears to us as the physical organism. We might say that there are two modes of access to the same reality, which is active and emergent. There is no threat to this view in saying that all mental operations are strongly correlated with brain processes. But we might want to stress the importance of the inner mental aspect of such processes. That aspect is what contributes value to being, what adds understanding to existence, what adds individual uniqueness to what otherwise might be universal processes, and what adds purposive direction to quasi-mechanical routines.\n\nThis is what after all Ryle himself believes. He says that when people concentrate on what they are doing, they do not perform two operations, but what they do has to be described \"in terms of semi-dispositional, semi-episodic epithets\". He is not saying that human behaviour is just a series of \"if-then\" statements. There are inner episodes of attending, being careful, and so on. I think that it is slightly misleading, and that it actually did mislead Ryle on occasion, to say that these episodes \"do not signify the concomitant occurrence of extra but internal operations\". For there are extra internal operations, which make a real causal difference to what happens in the external world \u2013 intelligent action is observably different from inattentive action. The point is that these internal operations and episodes are precisely the inner aspects of external operations, not intrusions or interferences from some other quite separate spirit-world.\n\nVolitions and the will\n\nDoes the inner aspect of attending, concentrating, and intending make any causal difference to what happens in the world? The whole of human life assumes a positive answer. We are commanded to pay attention. We have to concentrate in order to improve our tennis strokes or our violin playing. We are blamed if we do not try our best. And we are usually praised if we try really hard, even if we fail. My school reports used to say: \"He has done everything that we could have expected from him.\" Fortunately my parents always thought that was good, as they assumed that my teachers' expectations were high. I knew better, but I said nothing. The point is that my teachers did expect me to try, knew that what I did was limited by my abilities, but assumed that I could improve them by exerting a little more effort.\n\nEducation would be very different if we knew that everything people did was controlled by their brains and so could stick them into a brain scanner for half an hour and modify their brain states in the desired way, without them having to revise for days on end. Some schools seem to work on a principle rather like this, but we still think we can tell the difference between people whose brains have been efficiently modified by rote learning so that they know all the answers to standard examination questions and people who show originality and ingenuity, even though they have never even heard of the standard questions.\n\nMore importantly, perhaps, when it comes to moral issues, we assume that people generally know the difference between right and wrong and can stop doing wrong if they choose. There are exceptions of course. In France \"crime passionnel\" used to allow you to shoot your wife's lover if you found him in her bed. In England, however, this has never been allowed, since the English are expected to be able to control their passions or, more probably, it is assumed that they do not have any passions to control.\n\nRyle is adamant that there are no such things as \"volitions\", special mental acts that precede and cause physical acts. Yet of course he recognizes the difference between acting purposefully and acting inattentively or without thought. The difficulty is to capture that difference.\n\nWe should begin by recognizing that it is not brains who act, but persons. Persons have brains, just as they have fingernails, but neither fingernails nor brains act. A person is a very complex structure, including a brain, a body, a context of social relationships, and a place in history. Ryle stresses that we cannot count volitions. We do not know how many volitions we made this morning and whether they were hard or easy, painful or pleasant. But we cannot count how many actions we did this morning either. The mistake is not in positing mental acts. The mistake lies in thinking of mental acts as countable, discrete episodes.\n\nThe answer to the question \"How many volitions did you have when you wrote this book?\" is that that I was voliting continuously. There are no quanta of voliting. There is just a stream of volit, which I could split up in various ways. I can certainly decide to do something, but even then my decision may not be one identifiable action. It is a sort of redirection of attention, and it may occur over a long period of time.\n\nIt is a bit like asking, \"When you were looking at that painting, how many looks did you have, and were some of them longer and more painful than others?\" I probably looked at the painting for some time, more or less attentively. I certainly intended to look at it, which is to say that I directed my attention in a particular way. I am, when I am awake, continuously attending and intending. These are continuous mental processes. They are inner, if you like \"occult\", acts, though they normally have behavioural symptoms and perhaps always have correlative brain states.\n\nThe deepest argument for mental action is that without it there would be no knowledge of the world at all. Indeed, the world as a phenomenon would not exist. For I construct the phenomenal world as a sort of inner simulation of external reality. Some say that it is the brain that constructs such a reality-simulation. But they forget that the brain is part of the simulation. What appears to us as the brain is part of the phenomenal world that \"we\" construct. So the \"we\" cannot be the brain as it appears to any of us. It can, however, be the hidden reality of which the brain is an appearance, a reality not accessible to the senses, to which my conscious awareness of perceiving and thinking and feeling gives a distinctive mode of access.\n\nThat hidden reality, however, does not just consist of whatever gives rise to the physical brain. It is expressed in the brain as it exists in a specific body and in a wider social context and in a still wider set of historical and cultural occurrences. All these relationships go to make up that complex structure that gives rise to a simulation of reality, as it perceives and responds in feeling, evaluation, and action to the world from its own unique perspective.\n\nWhen I say that persons act, I mean that there are centres of perception and innovation which exist within a many-layered web of physical, organic, personal, social, and historical relationships. They reflect that web from their own point of view, and they initiate changes in that web in response to their evaluations of what they perceive.\n\nThe brain has a central focal position in the web, but to simply concentrate on the correlations between brain and mental state as if they existed in isolation is to omit most of the rich complexity and diverse forms of relationship which go to form the content of mental states and the principles of causal change that are initiated within such complexes.\n\nPerception itself is already a principle of causal change. It selects and integrates simulated sensory data from a surrounding environment. The fact that it occurs changes the causal, integrated, relational structure of which it is part. My perception of the world changes my response to the world. This happens continuously while consciousness exists.\n\nIs this not just what Ryle thinks? In a way, yes. But not in the way he thinks. For he concentrates on the public, on the phenomenal, to the virtual exclusion of the private, which exists beyond the reach of sensory observation. Yet what is really important about persons, what we value about them, is their inner unique reflection of and response to the wider reality of which they are part. Persons have a unique series of experiences, which they integrate into their mental life in a unique way. That integration governs how new experiences are interpreted and builds up patterns of reactive action that become established as exercises of attention, practice, and achievement. The process is a continuous one of reception, integration, and response.\n\nPersons are essentially responsive to a wider reality, not isolated in private asylums. They are essentially active causal agents in modifying that wider reality in response to their own perceptions and feelings. The inner life of a person is what drives the behaviour of a person. While it is correct to stress the vital importance of behaviour, of social context, and of active relationships within that context, it is radically misleading to deny that any unique inner perspective, evaluative feeling, and agency exist.\n\nThe inner life\n\nPsychiatric counselling is the activity that most clearly reveals the importance of such an inner mental life. A good psychiatrist will try to empathize with patients, to be sensitive to what it is like to think and feel as they do. This requires a non-objective view of patients, an attempt to understand their inner lives, though without either approving of or condemning those lives. It takes years of training and skill to do this, and to make sense of the weird-sounding beliefs of some psychiatric patients demands a high degree of imagination and sensitivity. Yet the attempt can be made to understand how they see the world and interpret their experience, and why they see it as they do.\n\nSometimes, at least, patients can be encouraged to deal with their obsessions or neuroses by using specific techniques. They may be invited to take active control of their thoughts and habits, and it is assumed that they may be able to control such things. Psychiatrists know that there may be severe limits to such self-control, and sometimes there are physical pathologies of brain function that need to be dealt with medically. Nevertheless, an important area of self-analysis and reflection may remain, and to acknowledge that is part of respecting the proper personhood, the real if limited responsibility patients have for much of their mental lives.\n\nPatients may be asked to consider their goals and the means to achieving them, and in that process they are invited to guide their thoughts (and thus their brain states) and actions by conscious focussing and effort. If such psychiatric counselling is valued at all, it presupposes that reflective thought can have a causal role in influencing future behaviour, whereas it would be considered invasive to simply modify the brain directly in a physical way, without attending to the wishes and desires of the patient.\n\nThere is no question that sometimes physical intervention with the brain is necessary. The brain can malfunction in many ways, and this may produce irrational thoughts and feelings. But we speak of behaviour being determined physically only when patients cannot exercise rational control, when there is something abnormal with their behaviour. In normal cases we assume that conscious thought can modify brain states, though we have no idea of the mechanics of this process.\n\nBut this is not unusual. We have no idea of the mechanics of how causes bring about effects in the publicly observable world either or of how it happens that causes are regularly followed by specific effects. That is just the way things are, and we have to accept it. The slightly different thing about thoughts causing brain states is that there is no public access to a person's thoughts, and there is no way of measuring thoughts quantitively. Thus we cannot set up equations describing the interactions of thought and brain, equations that could be checked experimentally. We cannot set up equations describing how brains give rise to thoughts either, but it is obvious to most of us that they do.\n\nOne way to think of this is to think of mental and physical events as two aspects of one composite reality, which taken together form a single whole. It is that single whole which is the causal complex that gives rise to the whole that succeeds it (the effect). It seems natural that the causal properties of such a composite whole will be significantly different from the causal properties of non-sentient matter, not organized in such a way as to generate mental events.\n\nAt the simple inorganic level there are very regular and repetitive laws, which can be plotted, at least in relatively isolated situations, with a high degree of simplicity and predictive accuracy. This simple scheme breaks down at the subatomic level, where indeterminacy and entanglement introduce much more complicated factors. But it operates at the level of everyday observations, where wave-functions collapse into observable events. At the level of highly structured brain states, operating in organic bodies and rapidly changing social contexts, the operation of laws is much looser and permits novel, unique, and unpredictable occurrences. Subjective evaluations and a relatively free choice of goals, social constraints, and learned and modifiable behaviour patterns become factors that economists and social scientists have to take into account in explaining human conduct.\n\nIt is not that ethereal minds follow one set of laws (where evaluations, reasons, and goals rule), and brains follow another set of laws (where only charge, mass, and spin rule), and each must in some mysterious way mesh with the other. Rather, when complex brains come to exist and operate properly, the sorts of laws that govern their behaviour expand to include new factors of subjective evaluation, creative response, and empathetic relationship. Rocks and planets do not evaluate things, adjust their behaviour accordingly, and react to the perceived feelings and purposes of other rocks. Rocks have no feelings or purposes. But people, complex organized physical organisms, do. There are not two separate worlds. There is one world, existing at various levels of emergent complexity. At the higher levels, the behaviour of objects is modified by the presence of feelings and purposes, which add new causal influences that shape the immediate future states of that part of the world.\n\nRyle puts this by speaking of the \"bogy of mechanism\". The ghost is not in the machine; it is in the thought that the universe is a machine. Mechanical laws only apply to a certain sub-class of physical events \u2013 namely, mechanical events. But there are lots of non-mechanical events, including, most obviously, people, who are not machines. So \"the discoveries of the physical sciences no more rule out life, sentience, purpose or intelligence from presence in the world than do the rules of grammar extrude style or logic from prose\". Exactly so. Unfortunately, Ryle goes on to say that sentience and purpose do not imply extra entities which have any causal properties \u2013 that would, he thinks, be dualism, a very horrid thing.\n\nYet an intention is often an occurrent thought that causes physical changes to occur, and sentience is almost always a set of occurrent feelings and perceptions that affect the way observers behave. Thoughts and feelings are parts of the complex whole from which an immediately succeeding state is generated. They make a difference to what happens next.\n\nRyle argues that it is not true that I first of all do something (have a thought) which causes my body to act. For then my doing something mental would have to be preceded by an earlier act that caused me to do that thing, and so on ad infinitum. But that is not so. Not all my doings have to be preceded by prior doings. I can just do some things straight away (Ryle obviously agrees, because he says so). Very often, though not always, what I do straight away is form a thought about what I might do next. Not all my acts need to be preceded by theorizing explicitly. But some do, when I wonder what I am going to do next. Such wondering often does take place, and it involves some occurrent yet occult acts, which can issue in a later physical action (though it may not, since I may change my mind). There is no infinite regress here, just the fact that sometimes I think before I act, though quite often, unfortunately, I do not.\n\nRyle and I agree that it is misleading to speak of minds as knowing propositions and producing hidden volitions in a quite separate mental world, which is then mysteriously causally connected to this physical world, in which the body resides. We agree also that it is very important to see human beings as intelligent agents with purposes and values, living in a social world, developing or failing to develop their abilities and dispositions, and interacting with others, whom they know more or less well. We disagree about whether our ordinary human actions in the world have a vitally important aspect which is private, capable of being completely hidden from others, and which has an important causal influence on some purely physical movements. And we disagree about whether philosophical reflection can cast any light on this mental aspect by bringing out its metaphysical foundations and implications or whether philosophy simply asks us to attend closely to how we actually apply words to observable human behaviour. Behind these differences lies a different view of what human persons are, and of what the place of consciousness, value, and purpose is in the world. I think Ryle's rejection of materialism and mechanism, and his affirmation of distinctive human values, is entirely correct. My only complaint is that he does not bring out the philosophical underpinning of the humanist understanding he wishes to defend. In the end, an appeal to common sense is too arbitrary and insubstantial to support a totally humanist view.\n\n## Chapter Twelve\n\n## Minds and moral values\n\nFeelings are not just, as Ryle seems to say, tickles, urges, and tinglings. They are our deepest forms of response to the world in which we find ourselves, and they are closely connected with our most basic evaluations and active responses. As Aristotle said, what is distinctive of human personhood is the ability to pursue human excellence in relation to what is good \u2013 that is, the pursuit of virtue. The distinctive virtues of a human life are intelligent freedom and creativity, conscious appreciation and understanding, and the fostering of social cooperation and compassion. These are the objects of intelligent and informed moral choice, and they involve the cultivation of feelings that can more fully realize the possibilities of a good human life.\n\nIn this chapter and the next I want to explore further just what it is about the inner lives of human persons that gives them unique moral value; what enables them to live a genuinely human life, a life that is good for human persons as such. I want to argue that it is very largely their capacity to have a rich and complex feeling-life, in which states and objects are felt and evaluated, and become the basis for intentionally aiming at future goals. Moreover, this is not just a matter of purely subjective feelings, which can vary indefinitely between different people. There are some objective goals that are rationally worthy of choice, and the moral uniqueness of human persons lies in the ability to choose or to ignore such goals. Without the capacity to feel, to evaluate, and to choose future goals, humans would not be the morally responsible agents, worthy of special respect and compassion, that most of us take them to be. Human moral dignity does not lie, as many materialists suppose, in pursuing actions that have proved conducive to survival in the long evolutionary past of humanity. It lies in the capacity to choose goals of action that are (whatever their past or present relevance to survival) objectively good, and that are known to be good by rational reflection upon inner human experience. That is why an affirmation of dualism (or dual-aspect idealism, as I have called it) is of the greatest practical importance.\n\nI believe that almost everything that we value about human beings belongs to our inner lives. Of course we like having bodies, and we are very sorry when bits of them do not work. But even then what is important about bodies is that they give us pleasure or pain \u2013 conscious feelings \u2013 and they enable us to perform some interesting activities and pursue some of our purposes and desires.\n\nEverybody would prefer to be happy than to be in intense pain \u2013 well, almost everybody. For most of the time, and for most people, pain is bad. So straight away we find that good reasons for action involve feelings of pleasure and pain. It is reasonable to avoid pain and seek pleasure; pain is bad and pleasure is good \u2013 that, for most people, is just obvious.\n\nI do not think that seeking pleasure and avoiding pain are the only good reasons for action, by any means. Such a view fails to distinguish personal, human life from that of other animals. But the notion of reasons for action only begins to make sense when some form of consciousness \u2013 minimally, sentience, or the capacity for feeling pleasure and pain \u2013 exists.\n\nSome philosophers think that is all there is to morality. Jeremy Bentham, who had himself stuffed and put on show at University College, London, once said that the only good reason for acting was to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Presumably he thought that seeing him stuffed would make a lot of people very happy.\n\nThe best hope of personal happiness may lie in fulfilling our natures as human beings, as essentially related and interdependent and social agents. We are not machines that accumulate as many units of pleasure as possible, and who see other human machines as competing pleasure-units who are primarily useful to us as providers of our own pleasure.\n\nWe like things, states or activities that make us happy. But, as Ryle says, there is not one thing called happiness that we can seek just for its own sake. When I enjoy gardening, I do not experience two distinct things: gardening and a feeling of pleasure. I feel pleasure in gardening. But of course pleasure does exist in addition to digging behaviour. It is the subjective feeling I have when I dig. I certainly know the difference between having that feeling and not having it when digging on a cold and rainy day.\n\nPeople feel pleased or disgusted by different things. Bentham hoped that we could measure pleasure and so calculate just how much pleasure any action might bring to everybody concerned. But, he said, \"Pushpin (pool or snooker) is as good as poetry.\" Five units of pleasure from lying in a jacuzzi is five times as pleasant as one unit of pleasure from reading Dostoevsky. This finding may seem to be corroborated by the unfortunate (or perhaps very happy) monkeys who had their brains electrically stimulated to produce orgasms whenever they pressed a red button on a desk in front of them. What happened was that they pressed the red button repeatedly all day until they were completely exhausted. But maybe that was because they couldn't read Dostoevsky.\n\nOrgasms may be very pleasant. But even Jeremy Bentham might hesitate at the thought that we ought to aim at the greatest number of orgasms for the greatest number of people. Most philosophers tend to agree with that other great utilitarian philosopher, John Stuart Mill, that the \"higher pleasures\", pleasures of the mind, are worth more than sensual pleasures. They engage the mind; they require learning and practice; they require concentration and skill; they extend understanding and creativity; and they seem to be worthwhile in themselves, not to be just ways of filling in the time. Even orgasms, for many of us, are enriched when they occur in the context of a relationship of genuine love and personal commitment. They are not just bodily sensations.\n\nWhatever arguments may be used to speak of distinctively human pleasures, they essentially involve types of human consciousness and understanding, in which feelings of many different sorts are involved. Feelings are, as Ryle rightly said, specified by their objects, by the sorts of activities that evoke them. Such activities are often chosen because of the feelings associated with them. To the extent this is true, the feelings that only an individual can experience are real elements of reality, with real causal influence. They add a vital element to observable behaviour, and they belong to the inner life of socially engaged human animals.\n\nGilbert Ryle's peculiar feelings\n\nGilbert Ryle was basically an Aristotelian, who agreed that true happiness is to be found in the exercise of distinctively human skills and excellences (in the pursuit of virtue, as Aristotle put it). Strangely, however, when Ryle came to say what feelings were, he provided the following list: \"thrills, twinges, pangs, throbs, wrenches, itches, prickings, chills, glows, loads, qualms, hankerings, curdlings, sinkings, tensions, gnawing and shocks\". One can only assume that his inner life was a succession of more or less alarming episodes of chronic indigestion.\n\n\"How are you feeling?\" we can imagine his colleagues at Magdalen College asking. \"This morning,\" he might reply, \"I had three twinges, a small curdling, and two throbs.\" If he did, we might imagine them backing away with a slightly alarmed expression. This is certainly a very odd list of feelings. When listening to Mozart, one may be overcome by feeling, without being able to identify any pangs or itches.\n\nThe \"myth of feeling\" that Ryle opposes is the myth that feelings occur in some hidden world, and that they cause actions in the physical world to occur. Whereas, he says, feelings or emotions are primarily dispositions to behave in certain ways. Dispositions are not causes. To be vain, for example, is to be liable to say vain things and to parade around in front of people when the opportunity arises.\n\nIt is true that there is not such a thing as a feeling of vanity that may unexpectedly descend upon you when you are walking down the street and that suddenly causes you to say things like, \"What a handsome person I am.\" Vanity is a personality trait, a disposition to say vain things, to preen yourself in the mirror, and so on. But part of this behavioural disposition is that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you do have a feeling of pleasure in your own handsomeness. Those feelings may not be causes of your behaviour, but they are important parts of being vain. Vanity is not in itself a feeling, but there are feelings of vanity, which may be characterized as the sort of feelings you are apt to have when you think unduly well of yourself in relation to other people.\n\nRyle is right; feelings are not usually causes. Yet he is wrong to imply that feelings are not occurrences that are quite different from physical behaviour, and that are very important to a person's life. Such feelings are part of a very complex integration of many factors \u2013 the brain is in specific states. The body exhibits physical symptoms and behaves in characteristic ways. That body exists in a specific social and historical context, which makes evaluative comparisons with other people possible \u2013 the vain fop must have the belief that he is better than others, he must perceive himself in a specific way, and then there must be that sort of \"puffed up\" feeling that consists in the felt awareness that one is better than others. The cause of vanity, insofar as there is one, is a specific sort of awareness in a social context, which gives rise to evaluative beliefs that have a felt emotional quality, a distinctive sort of pleasure that is naturally expressed in bodily sensations and physical behaviour of a peculiarly obnoxious kind (to others).\n\nIt is the evaluative element that is important to feelings and emotions. We feel pity if we feel pain at the suffering of others, and evaluate such suffering as bad and to be avoided where possible. Pity is a very natural feeling. It involves the perception of another, the belief that they are suffering, and the evaluation that it would be better for them if they were not. The feeling of pity is the felt awareness of another's suffering, coupled with some desire to alleviate it if possible. There is good reason to seek states that bring pleasure and avoid states that bring pain. But one kind of pain is the pain you may feel at the perception of another's suffering. Humans are so bound together as social animals that good humour is infectious, and so is sorrow. We are well aware of how one person can cheer up a whole gathering, while another person might spoil any part by their depressed utterances. It would be very hard to have a great party while one of the guests was noisily expiring in a corner. There may be sadomasochistic parties where that would be regarded as adding to the fun. But they are not the norm. Because most of us are taught to laugh by our mothers and soothed by them when we feel pain, it is entirely natural to respond to the happiness or gloom of others by mirroring their state in ourselves.\n\nIn our emotional inner lives we naturally appreciate beauty of various sorts and are repelled by certain smells and sensations. When we perceive the mental states of others \u2013 and Ryle is entirely correct to say that we do so normally by interpreting their behaviour \u2013 we appreciate their happiness or intellectual acumen, and we are repelled by their pain or vanity. There is a social dimension to most feelings, as we evaluate the evaluations that are made by others (we see that they dislike pain, and so we dislike their pain too).\n\nThe emotional lives of humans are governed by the evaluations we make of the complex world we encounter in awareness (perception interpreted by thought). That world includes the dispositions and intentions and feelings of other persons and of ourselves. Our evaluations are not arbitrarily subjective \u2013 that is, they are not correlated contingently with the objects of awareness. We do not see the aurora borealis and say, \"What a horrible green mess.\" Of course we might. It is reported of Dr Johnson that when he first saw a hillside of gorgeous heather fully in bloom in Scotland, he simply said, \"What horrid blotchy purple hills.\" There is no accounting for taste. But we can learn to appreciate purple and many other things too. Or at least generations of musicians and artists and literary theorists think and hope we can.\n\nTo dislike the music of Wagner is one thing. But to say that it is trivial or superficial or devoid of merit is another. You can learn Wagner's place in musical history, how harmonic traditions grew more complex, and how Wagner developed one operatic tradition to express it in a richer way, which was outstandingly excellent of its kind \u2013 and you can still not bear to listen to The Ring. But you would have to say that it displays outstanding excellence, and that it develops a tradition in a profoundly creative and distinctive way. You may not like that tradition \u2013 but you will have to admit that others do and are deeply moved by the music, and that it meets superbly certain criteria of excellence, which you may not like very much.\n\nThere are seemingly irreducible differences of taste. For decades no one liked the music of J. S. Bach, and then he became, for many, the greatest of all musicians. Who is right and who is wrong? Or is everyone's opinion as good as everyone else's? Maybe these are the wrong questions. The fact is that some people will never like Bach \u2013 too austere, too intellectual, too tuneless, some would say (except for one or two favourite pieces). Yet there is much to appreciate in Bach, and you can be taught to appreciate it better if you have the initial \"feeling for it\".\n\nIt is a bit like wine-tasting. Some people will never drink wine. Some do not like it. Some like it, but cannot tell which wines are good and which bad. But we might all admit that some people have a more discriminating palate, and can distinguish between different vintages of the same wine with no difficulty. They are the people we would consult if we had an initial interest in wine. They are the experts, even if they are experts in areas that nobody else is interested in (like philosophy).\n\nSo maybe the bottom line is this: you cannot help your initial feelings, your basic likes and inclinations. But you can cultivate them and have a \"refined palate\" or a \"refined musical taste\" \u2013 and then you might get a job as a wine or music critic. Of course different critics will still disagree very strongly about many things. But they will, however grudgingly, have to accept that there are degrees of expertise, of knowledge, experience, and skill in appreciating wine or music or art.\n\nIn these areas, strong disagreement and generally accepted degrees of skill or competence go together. I have to admit \u2013 I gladly admit \u2013 that Gilbert Ryle was a learned, wise, skilful, and innovative philosopher. But I think he was blind to the rich evaluative and emotional life of human beings, and so I disagree strongly with some of his conclusions about such things.\n\nWhat makes human life worthwhile is our rich emotional inner life. Our perceptions are integrated and interpreted by thought, evaluated by feeling, and responded to by intention and creative action, within a social community of other beings with thoughts, feelings, and intentions. It is interpretative thought, evaluative feeling, creative intention, and cooperative empathy that distinguish human persons as autonomous moral agents and give to human life a special sort of value. Such a thought may, thank goodness, be implicit in much common-sense thought. But it can be undermined by a critical reason that overlooks or even denies the importance of the subjective personal life of feeling and intention. To that extent, Ryle's objections to Cartesian dualism may, however unintentionally, undermine a reasonable commitment to the moral value of human personhood. For such commitment is founded on a perception of the moral priority of the embodied mind.\n\nThe objectivity of values\n\nRyle says, \"A person can usually... tell without research whether he enjoys something... but so can his associates.\" What is right about this is that we naturally express our thoughts and feelings in our behaviour and in the things we say. Yet our behaviour may be misleading, and what we say often does not express what we mean. There may often be no behaviour at all \u2013 which is why, when I am thinking deeply and profoundly, my wife thinks I have gone to sleep. Also, our feelings vary in tone and intensity. They can inhibit or enhance our actions, but no one else can know just how intense my feelings are or what their complexity and quality is.\n\nUndeterred, Ryle goes on to say that if we want to find out about our feelings when they are concealed, other people are more likely to succeed than we are. It is true that we often deceive ourselves and do not admit that we are vain or ambitious or aggressive. But these are, as Ryle says, not so much feelings as dispositions or character traits, and we often conceal our characters from ourselves \u2013 probably because we do not like ourselves very much. We can, however, practice self-knowledge and explore what our feelings are like in ways that others cannot. Admittedly we do not have many linguistic resources for doing so. If I look into myself and try to describe my feeling-state at this moment, I may say something rather feeble, like \"There is a pang of contentment, with a few twinges of lassitude around the edges, a dollop of resolution, and two throbs of anticipation.\"\n\nThat is why introspective psychology came to a halt in the early twentieth century \u2013 people just didn't have the words to describe what they felt. And when they did describe, it was of no scientific use \u2013 it did not help to predict or explain causally. It just reported, in very boring ways, what was going on in someone's mind. Some philosophers concluded that there was nothing to describe or that \"what went on inside\" was irrelevant. But poets and novelists, musicians and artists, manage better by finding ways to express feelings that communicate in a special way to others or at least to those who are initially sympathetic. Even the most peculiar examples of modern art express a personal vision of the world that communicates a certain feeling toward it. That feeling could be one of disgust or alienation or sadomasochism, which is why art is so powerful. It communicates a feeling, evaluative response that is part of the artist's awareness and personal interpretation of the world and that arouses a responsive (not identical) feeling in those who are able to resonate with it.\n\nFeelings differ enormously in different people and are not separable from individual awareness, interpretation, and responsive actions. We cannot sensibly aim at having feelings as discrete items isolated from the states or activities they are feelings about \u2013 that is the utilitarian mistake. Yet without feelings we would be automata, and it would be hard to give any value to human awareness or any purpose to human actions. Human life is largely concerned with the kinds of feelings we seek or avoid, with the activities that evoke or sustain them, and with the social relationships that enrich or destroy them.\n\nAre feelings of this sort just matters of purely personal taste? Or are there some feelings that would be accepted by all reasonable people as bad and others that are good?\n\nIn the arts it is difficult to claim that there are absolute standards of good and bad \u2013 though we can distinguish different levels of skill, originality of vision, creativity, and expertise in a specific tradition or style. Within classical harmonic music, Mozart stands out as particularly skilful, original, and expressive of profound feeling. Anyone who appreciates that sort of classical music should be able to recognize Mozart as an outstanding composer. Within a particular tradition of creative art, there are standards of excellence that it would be insensitive not to appreciate. But we are perhaps prepared to accept that some people simply do not like classical music. So objective evaluations do exist in the arts, but they are tradition-specific, and it does not make much sense to say that classical music is better than romantic music or jazz. That is why it does not make sense to say that anyone, even Mozart, is \"the best composer ever\". He is the master of a specific style, but we are not required or expected to appreciate every style of music there ever was.\n\nThere are some things, however, which every reasonable person has a good reason to avoid. It would be hard to understand someone who said, \"I am really looking forward to an agonizing toothache.\" If some religious fanatic said that, we might understand that he thinks if he endures the toothache he will get some great heavenly reward. Even then he would not look forward to the toothache for its own sake, and if he did not think it was a necessary means to some greater good, he would soon change his mind.\n\nReligious fanatics apart, we would expect everyone to think that agonizing pains are to be avoided wherever possible. That is to say that pain is bad. It is objectively bad \u2013 every being that can feel pain has a good reason to avoid it, and if we care about other beings at all, we have reason to help them avoid it. Why should we care about other beings? We don't always. Little boys routinely torture insects or small animals. But because we are social animals, we do care about some other beings, if only our own children or parents. We find happiness in making them happy, on birthdays and holidays. Even if we do not care about people we have never met, we can see that they have a reason to avoid pain, and we have no reason to cause them pain, unless it will produce some good for us (which, alas, it often does).\n\nOther things than pain are objectively bad. There are very good reasons to avoid ignorance, since ignorance can lead us to make disastrous mistakes. There are good reasons to avoid powerlessness, which can cause us to fall prey to the whims of the powerful. There are good reasons to avoid hating other people, since that will usually cause them to hate and harm us if they can.\n\nThese are not absolutes. Sometimes we may prefer to be ignorant \u2013 about the time of our death or about our chances of getting diabetes, for instance. We may prefer to be slaves, if we can get a fairly easy life with a lax slave-owner. We may successfully hate other people, if we can terrify them into doing what we want. Nevertheless, in general and for most of us pain, ignorance, slavery, and hatred are things to be avoided. They are prima facie evils \u2013 things which in general there are good reasons to avoid.\n\nWhere there are prima facie evils, there must be prima facie goods. Pleasure, knowledge, freedom, and sympathetic feeling are objective goods. We will train children to seek them, and will reckon that most people will have a happy life if they achieve them or a reasonable degree of them.\n\nThese are very general values, and in human lives they will be filled out in a huge variety of ways. As I have noted, pleasure is not one thing that everyone will pursue in the same way. Happiness is to be found in many mental states and in many activities, and such states will be very diverse. But it is not an accident that knowledge, freedom, and sympathetic feeling are objective values, things that humans have a good reason to pursue and sustain. For these values point to the distinctive character of human consciousness. They are states or acts that make us fully and distinctively human. If we lack them, our distinctive humanity is impaired. A suffering, ignorant slave who hates everyone is a diminished human being, not exercising the capacities that make humans what they are. It may not be the slave's fault, but it is still a life that is objectively frustrated in many ways. Conversely, a happy, wise, free, and compassionate person is living a life which is fully human, because it exercises the capacities that are distinctive of human beings.\n\nHuman animals, supremely among all species on earth, are capable of abstract intellectual understanding and of delight in beauty and in artistic artefacts. They are able to be creative in their thoughts and actions, transforming their environment in new ways. They are able to empathize with the feelings of others, and to cooperate in learning and in action, so that they can share in the experiences of others and work jointly with them to devise new cultural projects.\n\nThese capacities are not discrete and isolated from one another. They are intertwined, so that understanding and appreciation of beauty are creative acts that involve cooperation with others. They suggest an ideal for human personhood that consists, as Aristotle put it, in the unimpeded exercise of distinctively human capacities. To understand and appreciate fully, to act creatively, to be compassionate, and to cooperate with others \u2013 these are the virtues of a genuinely human life. Each human being is born into a unique situation and faces problems and possibilities never shared in detail with anyone else. Nevertheless, there are goals for human life as such, and in every historically particular situation the mind can be disciplined to love those excellences that are distinctive to human personhood.\n\n## Chapter Thirteen\n\n## Acting for the sake of good alone\n\nIn the end, the essential capacity of human persons is the capacity to choose the good for its own sake (in Christian terms, to love God with mind and heart and strength). The privacy of inner experience and the importance of introspection and growth in self-knowledge is of crucial moral importance for human personhood. That is why Ryle's attack on dualism, implicitly on idealism, and on the inner life as primarily distinctive of human personhood, despite its many insights, should be resisted.\n\nIf we are disposed to think of mind as having ontological priority, it will be natural to think of the fullest development of mind as the innate goal of human history or even of the cosmic process as a whole. Human beings could well be only one of many forms that personhood or mind takes in the cosmos. But the development of personal powers embodied in a particular species \u2013 homo sapiens \u2013 provides an objective goal for human life and feeling.\n\nThe goal is founded upon the distinctive capacities of human nature, which characterize what is rationally good and desirable for a being with such capacities, and what is bad or diminishing and is to be avoided. This moral ideal is concerned with feelings, but feelings considered as integrated with social and personal activities, with knowledge and understanding, and with rational evaluations of envisaged states and acts. Feelings are not, in other words, twinges, tingles, and throbs. They are affective and reactive evaluations based on inner experience of the complex world with which we consciously interact. They give to human lives a sense of value and a sense of purpose (to realize objective values), which is perhaps the most important and distinctive feature of being human.\n\nMental discipline is not easy. Knowledge may be a good thing, but anyone who has taught in school knows that it is quite hard to get some pupils to learn. Interests and abilities vary enormously, and some lack the interest to learn very much. They may also lack the motivation and application that is necessary to learn. Moreover, humans are very prone to exaggeration, gossip, and rumour. Lies and misinformation spread easily, and very few of us have the time and patience to gain full information even about topics we are interested in. The ideal might be truth, but the reality is often a mixture of hearsay, deceit, and ignorance. Even those who sincerely seek for truth can have a very limited view of where truth is to be found and of the best way of finding it.\n\nSome religious movements, for instance, think that believers must be prevented from reading anything that would disturb their beliefs. That attitude is not confined to religion. Ruling political parties may \"massage the truth\" so that it presents a one-sided and distorted message, and they may censor opposing opinions. In fact, it is entirely typical of human communication in general that it distorts truth and propagates prejudice and hatred.\n\nWhy should people lie? That is simple. Lies are usually more interesting than the truth. The imaginary adventures of Baron Munchausen are much more interesting than the daily drudge of an assembly-line worker. People like good storytellers. And if the storyteller can claim to be the hero of his own stories, this will add considerably to his reputation. Good liars can increase their social status enormously, as long as they are not found out \u2013 which usually requires a constant stream of even bigger lies to conceal the much less interesting truth.\n\nReally big liars will do almost anything to prevent being found out. In such a world the pursuit of truth may be difficult, even dangerous. Partly for that reason, some people who wish to pursue truth try to leave the world behind and live in relatively closed societies where truth of a certain sort is valued. Unfortunately, this policy does not really work, for most truths have to be discovered precisely in that ambiguous social world where truth and deceit are inextricably mixed up. The renunciation of secular knowledge is not, after all, a very reliable path to knowing as much about reality as possible. It is possible that cloistered contemplation does disclose very important facts about the inner life of the mind, about mindfulness, equanimity, and universal compassion, for instance. But it does not disclose much about quantum physics or genetic mutation. If we are really to comprehend the world in its fullness, we must know both about our inner lives and about the nature of the world, including the evil that is in it. The life of meditation may be one way of discovering truth, but it cannot be the only way. The pursuit of the human ideal of comprehension of truth involves many different kinds of knowing. We may only be able to pursue some, but we should not deny the existence of the others, and we should encourage their pursuit as much as we can.\n\nThe quest for truth, then, is difficult and often requires prolonged struggle against strong opposition. The same is true of the search for the other basic personal values \u2013 of appreciation, creativity, compassion, and cooperation. They require effort and sometimes sacrifice in a world filled with indifference, the will to power, hatred, and conflict. It is not surprising that a fully human life is rare and attained only by few. Is it reasonable to demand it of any human being?\n\nMany philosophers have held that there is an ultimate moral choice in every human life. We can choose what is good for its own sake or we can choose what is good for us, regardless of others. We can put goodness first or we can put ourselves first. Reason cannot decide between these choices. Neither can desire, for we must decide which of our desires to follow. Nor can the choice be seen as an arbitrary decision of will, without cause or reason, for such a choice would be absurd. No, we decide whether to subordinate ourselves to the good or to subordinate the good to ourselves. That choice determines the sort of person we are, and so is of fundamental importance to our lives, yet no further reason can be given for it than that one ought to choose the good (or alternatively that one ought to choose one's own long-term good). This is the truth behind Kant's dictum that we must do our duty for its own sake.\n\nDuty and desire\n\nKant is often misunderstood on this point. He is supposed to have said that you only know you are doing your duty if you act in opposition to your own desires. Otherwise you might be acting in accordance with desire, not because it is your duty. So you are only really good if you are doing what you do not want to do. It is as if you are really desperate for a drink, yet you know you ought not to drink because you are going to drive. Being English, you pass a pub every few yards. Every time you come to a pub, you have a huge craving for a drink, and you have a huge struggle to overcome that craving. After a few heart-stopping minutes, the sense of duty wins, though the struggle leaves you emotionally exhausted. Heaving a sigh of relief, you walk on \u2013 only to come to another pub, where the same process takes place again. By the time you get to your car, nine pubs later, you are a quivering wreck. Having done this every day for a week, you might decide it is better never to go out at all. Except that it might be your duty to go out. So every day you have a nerve-racking struggle about whether to leave the house or not.\n\nTo be fair to Kant, he did warn against \"moral fanaticism\", which is the mistake of letting your life be filled with crucial moral decisions. As Aristotle said, it is better just to become the sort of person who is habitually good. Then you can pass all the pubs with equanimity, because, once you have made a firm decision not to drink and drive, you are not even tempted to have a drink.\n\nKant said that it was just about impossible to tell if you were acting from a purely moral motive (because it is right) or from long-term selfish desire. Maybe we should not agonize about that, but just get on with trying to do things because it is right to do so, without worrying about what our deepest motives are. There are people who will say that all human actions are really self-interested. Even if we give all our money to the poor, we really do so because we gain some inner satisfaction or some social approval from doing so. You can never refute that argument. But you could equally well say that all our selfish actions are really altruistic, because they are aimed at the happiness of someone who does not yet exist. I exist now, but people who exist in the future are not identical to me, and so even my selfish actions are aimed at someone other than me (some future person who happens to share some memories and character traits with me and who happens to have a body very like mine), which is a form of altruism. I don't suppose that argument seems very convincing, but it is no worse than the argument that the more altruistic I try to be, the more selfish I actually am.\n\nThe upshot seems to be that reasoning can tell me what things are good, in general. But the decision to do things because they are good is not made either by more reasonable people or by people who just happen to have the most altruistic desires. Moral action is not unreasonable, and it is not necessarily opposed to desire. But it is quite distinct from both reason and desire. It is a basic option that determines what sort of person you are.\n\nIt was for this reason that Kant felt it would actually be harmful if you knew there was a life after death, where you would be judged for what you had done during this life. That, he thought, would turn moral action into long-term prudence, and so it would undermine the whole point of morality. You have to do your duty without thought of personal reward. In fact, if you do things out of self-interest, you will go to hell. So everybody who does things because they want to go to heaven will land up in hell. And only people who do not care whether they go to heaven or not will get there. It seems that hell will be full of people who have spent their lives trying to get to heaven, while heaven will be full of people who do not particularly want to be there. There must be something wrong somewhere.\n\nKant's suggestion actually is that you should do things because they are right. But it is all right to hope that it will make you happy in the long run, as long as that is not your main motive. He even, notoriously perhaps, argued that the hope for \"happiness-in-accordance-with-virtue\" was a condition of the possibility of rational moral action. Perhaps that is a way of saying that it is pointless to aim at a just society if such a thing will always remain impossible. A reasonable action will only aim at something that is at least possible, even if very difficult.\n\nBut the reply to that is that moral action can always make things better than they would have been, even if it will never achieve a perfect society (whatever that would be). If the world is like that, it is tragic \u2013 good people will often die in vain, unknown, unrecognized, and unappreciated. Naturally, we would wish the world not to be tragic. That is probably one major motivation for some religious beliefs. It does not make such beliefs true, but it may at least ground them in reasonable and humane and comprehensible human desires, rather than in irrational, vindictive or self-centred motivations.\n\nIt may be said that Kant makes an unduly subtle distinction between hoping for heaven and believing that there is a heaven. If you can hope for heaven without undermining your moral motivation, then surely you can believe there is a heaven without making that your main motivation for acting. After all, even believing that there is a heaven is not absolute theoretical certainty. It is a belief that may easily be mistaken. And that may be Kant's main point \u2013 though even then I am not sure that absolute theoretical certainty about rewards and punishments would make it impossible to act purely for the sake of goodness. It would just make it more difficult to distinguish that from long-term prudence. It is a relief to find that religious people can be really good and also to find that non-religious people can be genuinely good too, just because they feel goodness is worth aiming at for its own sake, and that a genuinely human life is one that acts for the sake of good alone.\n\nThat is the main conclusion of this chapter, which has been chiefly concerned to affirm that the capacity to act for the sake of goodness, and for no other reason, is one of the most important capacities of human persons. That capacity cannot be reduced to, or exhaustively described in terms of, any genetic account of how moral awareness originated through evolution or any purely material description of what human beings are. The commandingness of morality requires an affirmation of the uniquely individual appropriation of inner experience and the responsible freedom of moral agents. That requires that human persons are more than matter, and in that \"more\" lies the significance and meaning of their lives.\n\nInner experience as evidence for idealism\n\nPart of Ryle's goal is to escape from what he thinks of as the Cartesian myth that each person has a totally private and hidden mind which has to be inferred from bodily movements in a completely uncheckable way. Ryle suggests that humans are not either ghosts or machines, much less ghosts in machines. They are social animals. Their minds as well as their bodies have a physical, genetic, evolutionary history, which is an important component of what they are. And humans are essentially social, finding themselves in a particular society with a unique history and culture, and defining themselves in relation to other people with whom they continually and directly interact.\n\nSo far so good (except that Descartes did not himself believe the \"Cartesian myth\"). But humans are also essentially morally responsible agents, capable of pursuing goodness for its own sake and of shaping both the world and their own characters in the light of their moral ideals \u2013 or, more often, failing to do so. They have a rich inner life, in which understanding, feeling, evaluation, and intention play a major role, a life and quality of experience which is not open to others to inspect.\n\nThis inner life is known by introspection, by a form of self-examination which inspects a person's feelings, beliefs, evaluations, and motives without the use of the senses. Introspection is non-sensory knowledge of one's own states of mind, and it is an important part of coming to know if and to what extent and in what ways one is pursuing a life which is wholly good.\n\nIt is quite difficult to work out exactly what Ryle thinks of introspection. He did not really like being called a behaviourist \u2013 someone who denies that there are any causally relevant mental states \u2013 though he thought it was a fairly harmless appellation. And he speaks of \"semi-episodic\" dispositional states, which include talking to oneself or knowing that one has a toothache. But he leaves a strong impression that such inner states are parasitic upon observable bodily states, like talking to others or crying out in pain, and that they are not of primary importance in human life.\n\nThis impression is strongest when he speaks of mental images, the existence of which he seems flatly to deny. I would sit in his study and say, \"I am now having a mental image of Big Ben.\" \"No you are not,\" he would reply. \"You are just imagining that you are seeing Big Ben. You are pretending to see it. There is no image there. There cannot be any image, because there is nowhere for it to be. It is not inside your skull, and it is certainly not in front of your eyes, because I can see what is in front of your eyes, and there is nothing there. This supposed image is nowhere. And that is not surprising, because you are just imagining that it is there.\"\n\nIt was very hard to think of a satisfactory reply, since I was sitting there having the mental image, and Ryle simply couldn't see it. Of course he couldn't. It was a mental image after all, and he wasn't supposed to see it. But how could he deny that I was seeing it? He was quite right that I was just imagining that I was seeing Big Ben. That is what having a mental image of Big Ben is! I did not think I was magically transported to London and was standing in front of the clock tower. I pretended that I was in London, looking at Big Ben. But I was not looking at the actual thing. I was constructing a picture of Big Ben, without actually drawing and without leaving my armchair. And there was something there \u2013 a mentally constructed picture of Big Ben, in full colour. I was imagining it. But there was an object that I imagined, and it was an object that only I could observe, not with my physical eyes, and not in any publicly observable space.\n\nRyle was so opposed to the idea of a private inner space that he had the confidence to tell me that I was not really having a mental image when I quite clearly was. As a matter of fact, I could also hear music \"in my head\", but I did not tell him that, as he might have given me an aspirin and called a doctor.\n\nI am quite convinced that I have non-sensory knowledge of mental images both visual and auditory, including dreams, and that I also have thoughts and feelings that I am careful never to tell anyone about. Ryle seemed to think that I could tell anyone about them if I chose, and that I could not know anything about them if I had not first learned from others what my thoughts and feelings were. In addition, other people are better at knowing what my thoughts and feelings are than I am. All these claims seem to me to be mistaken.\n\nHidden knowledge\n\nThere is, as usual, something important in what Ryle says. One main purpose of self-examination is to review your behaviour in the recent past and ask if it was motivated by selfish interests or if it was genuinely altruistic and compassionate. It is true that others may see aspects of our behaviour that we might miss. We are mostly prejudiced in our own favour and tend to put our behaviour in the best possible light. It is true that it is not easy to see ourselves honestly, and that we repress many feelings and motives that may be obvious to others, but that we disguise from ourselves. Psychiatrists exist partly in order to make this very clear.\n\nNevertheless not all our behaviour is overt. The \"smiling depressive\", for example, is someone who shows no outward signs of depression at all, but who may unexpectedly try to take their own lives, to the surprise and consternation of their friends. We might be well-advised to keep many of our thoughts and daydreams, many of our hopes and ambitions, to ourselves. While we may often disguise them, some of them are obvious enough to us, but to no one else. As Machiavelli pointed out, the wish to be rich and famous is best hidden from others, while we publicly express only the desire to help others and to bring about world peace. Successful hypocrisy is never discovered; it is only that most of us are not very good at it. But practice makes perfect, and if we try really hard, we can probably manage it.\n\nIt is not that we have perfect knowledge of our own feelings, while others have no access to them at all. We normally do express our feelings in observable ways, and we often do not recognize our own feelings for what they really are. We learn to formulate our thoughts about such feelings in language we have learned from others, and that may be felt inadequate for what we want to convey. Nevertheless, we do have a mode of access to our feelings and thoughts that no one else has. That mode of access is non-sensory, and it is required for full knowledge of a person. Without it, we would not be able to discipline ourselves in the love of virtue, and our lives could not be completely centred on the good and beautiful, as they could and ought to be.\n\nWe would not believe someone who said, \"I know the answer to this mathematical problem; I just cannot express it very well.\" The proof of a thought lies in its written expression, and if the expression is nonsense, then probably the thought was nonsense too.\n\nDoes that show, however, that there are no non-expressed thoughts? Surely not. Fermat's last theorem, despite having now been proved by Andrew Wiles, remained without a proof for decades. Did Fermat actually have the proof, though he never wrote it down? We shall never know. But he might have done.\n\nMany of us know that we enjoyed a performance at a theatre even if we never told anyone we were even there. We could have said so. But if we did not, and if no friends were there to see us grinning inanely from time to time, no one might ever know. Even if our friends had been with us, they might have thought we had indigestion. We might even have cried with happiness. Unless we explain ourselves, no one will never know we are happy.\n\nAnd would it make sense for us to say, \"I think I am really enjoying this play. But I could be wrong. Perhaps I dislike it intensely\"? As Ryle says, this is not a matter of watching the play, and then watching ourselves intently on some inner stage to see if there is some enjoyment there. It is a matter of watching the play in an enjoying sort of way. But that enjoyment, though often expressed in behaviour or in language, may remain wholly unexpressed and unobserved and yet make all the difference to our view of the play.\n\nSo there are forms of knowledge that may have no linguistic or behavioural expression. The test of whether it is knowledge will be some public expression \u2013 obviously, for that is what a \"test\" is, publicly observable evidence. But the introspectionist claim is precisely that there is some untestable knowledge. And it seems that the only test of that claim is to have some yourself. Such a test will itself fail the test of being publicly observable, since no one else can test whether you have had some untestable knowledge. So it is a paradoxical sort of test; it is a \"suck-it-and-see\" test, which depends on assuming what is to be proved \u2013 that there is untestable knowledge.\n\nThe importance of memories\n\nThat is not such a strange idea as it may at first seem. Most of our memories, particularly of things that only we have seen, are in practice untestable. We simply have to believe that they are trustworthy. Although Ryle does not believe in introspection, he does believe in retrospection. We may not have special inner access to what we are doing now, but we may know what we did a few moments ago. Ryle says, \"The fact that retrospection is autobiographical does not imply that it gives us a Privileged Access to facts of a special status.\" We know what we did five minutes ago in the same way that anyone else does or could do, Ryle claims. He says that our knowledge of what we did in the past is \"of the same kind\" as the knowledge anyone else may have of what we did five minutes ago.\n\nIs this so? For it to be true, we have to make the extraordinary assumption that if I had spoken my thoughts out loud, and if there had been anyone there to hear me, and if they remembered what I said, then \u2013 and only then \u2013 their knowledge of what I did would be of the same kind as my knowledge of it. In fact I did not speak out loud, and there was no one there to hear or remember what I actually did not say, and yet I remember what I thought. I can remember unspoken thoughts when no one else is there. Nobody else can ever do that with my thoughts. Here, then, is a \"kind of knowledge\" that nobody else could ever have, in principle.\n\nAnyway, what is the point of a test that can never in practice be carried out? It is like saying, \"If I were as small as an electron, then I could observe electrons buzzing busily about.\" In a similar way, if I had been at the Battle of Waterloo, then I could have observed Napoleon looking worried. But I was not there, and I never could be there. Does a purely hypothetical and indeed impossible hypothesis make an actual memory claim more reliable? Not at all.\n\nMy memory claims about the past are of the same kind as other people's memory claims about the past \u2013 they are both often untestable. Having two or more untestable claims does not strengthen the evidence for anything. For if I cannot trust one person's claims, the situation cannot be helped by trusting the claims of lots of people, none of whose claims we can trust! It would be rather like asking a twelve-year-old student to state the theory of relativity. Just to check what he says, we ask all his classmates to give their version of the theory. That is only going to make things worse. So if we distrust one person's memory claims, it will not help to ask lots of other people what they remember, because we have no good reason for preferring their memory claims. Adding many untrustworthy memory claims together, so that we get them to agree with each other, is not a guarantee of reliability.\n\nThe fact is that we just have to trust uncheckable memory claims. Then, if many people make the same sorts of claims, that does increase our general confidence in their claims. If many fallible people agree, that does not make them infallible. But it normally increases our confidence in our own claims if others make very similar claims (even though we know crowds are more subject to illusions than single individuals).\n\nSo we just have to accept, for the sake of our own sanity, that memories are in general trustworthy \u2013 which means that we have good reason to accept the memory claims of others. Far from other people's memories serving as necessary confirming evidence of our own memories, it is in fact our belief in the reliability of our own memories that gives rise to the thought that other people's memories are in general reliable too. That thought is then confirmed by our agreeing about the same things, when those things have been publicly observable. But if we have memories about things that nobody else observed, we are still justified in thinking them reliable, other things being equal. Ryle's preference for retrospection over introspection does not work, because many retrospections are about introspections, and both rely on the untestable but wholly reasonable claim that our memories are reliable in general.\n\nWhat goes for memories goes for inner experiences in general. Some non-sensory untestable knowledge turns out to be essential for human knowledge in general, and such knowledge can and does influence behaviour. Self-knowledge, obtained through introspection, can cause major changes in behaviour and can be of decisive moral importance for a human life. We do well to take the advice of others when assessing our own characters. But we would do very badly to take their advice as the only or last word on what we are and know. Our behaviour is a good clue to what kind of people we are. Yet our unspoken thoughts and feelings should often modify judgments based purely on behaviour in important ways. In a perfect world, we might perhaps express our thoughts and feelings in an uninhibited and open way. In the world as it is, only a very silly or a very saintly (or possibly a very rich) person would do so.\n\nWhat is most important about a human life is the unique quality of experience a person has and the unique moral choices that a person makes. A person's life is normally the result of a whole series of unique perspectives and choices about what to attend to, what to do, and how to do it, and of a complex of evaluations and feelings in regard to the varied situations that person has encountered and responded to. Those responses are unknowable in many respects by anyone else, and even if they sometimes remain unrecognized to the agent concerned, that agent has an access to them that no one else could have.\n\nThe ability to know oneself fully and to direct one's own actions freely to a personally chosen goal in positive cooperation with others is what defines a fully human life. That ability is rarely exercised to any great extent, and it remains for most of us a distant ideal rather than an actual achievement. Ryle is importantly right in drawing attention to the importance of behaviour and of conscious personal interactions with others in human life. He is right to oppose the thought \u2013 whether or not Descartes believed it \u2013 that human minds are isolated private and ethereal worlds where invisible levers are pulled to make bodies move. But he tends to minimize or, at his worst, to deny that which makes human behaviour and relationship personal \u2013 the inner experience and feeling that is what is expressed and shared in personal behaviour and social relationship, and the inner choices and motives that are only partly manifest in outward actions. Human life carries with it the possibility of a fundamental option for the good. That option is often deeply hidden by the ambiguities of our lives. But it may be what defines us as fully human beings.\n\n## Chapter Fourteen\n\n## The idealist view of life\n\nSo I propose philosophical idealism as the most adequate, consistent, and plausible metaphysical view of reality. It carries with it a theory of human persons as experientially unique, morally free, and fully embodied subjects of experience and action, living in an interpersonal world of similar beings \u2013 a community of social and self-realizing conscious agents. Idealism is not to be accepted because it is comforting or wish-fulfilling. It is to be accepted because it makes a reasoned claim to be the most intellectually adequate view of reality and of human personhood that human thought has devised.\n\nOf course any philosophical view will remain contested and less than overwhelmingly convincing. This is, after all, philosophy and not chemistry. But we can scarcely escape having some such view, and idealism will always continue to be one of the most intellectually impressive high-points among human attempts to achieve real insight into the nature of the complex and mysterious reality of which we humans are part.\n\nThe point of this discussion has been to emphasize that we all have privileged, though not infallible or complete, access to our own inner lives, our thoughts, memories, feelings, and intentions. This fact gives us very important information about the world \u2013 namely, that conscious experiences and intentional actions are real, not reducible to material and publicly observable facts, and morally crucial for the way we live.\n\nMaterialists, however, have a very different view. They would in general say that conscious experiences, if they exist, are byproducts of material processes, so thinking and feeling does not give any special or privileged access to reality. Reality is accessed through scientific (and materialist) theories. Yet for materialists such theories are a by-product, and an unforeseen one at that, of blind laws of nature. So, on a materialist theory, we would not expect that our theories (including the theory of materialism) are particularly reliable or informative vehicles of information about the world.\n\nMaterialism gives abstract theory priority over concrete experience, while at the same time it undermines the reliability of the reason and understanding that provides us with our abstract theories. That is like saying that we should trust reason even when what it tells us is that reason is untrustworthy. Something seems to be wrong somewhere.\n\nThe idealist resolution of this paradoxical situation is to say that our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions do give us access to reality. They suggest that reality itself may be founded not on blind chance or unconscious necessity, but on some form of purposive consciousness.\n\nMaterialists will probably protest that consciousness is a very late evolutionary development, requiring complex brains for its existence. But we need to distinguish the embodied consciousness of beings that exist in a common space-time manifold from a possible non-embodied consciousness that expresses itself in, or forms the causal basis of, the whole space-time manifold itself. The former types of consciousness do come into being as the result of a long process of evolutionary development, and they have a strong causal and epistemic dependence upon their physical environment. The latter type of consciousness does not come into being at all. The physical world depends for its very existence upon the primordial consciousness and perhaps expresses the inner nature of that consciousness, as it brings into being dependent consciousnesses which can share relationships with it.\n\nWhy should we think that there is such a primordial consciousness? The strongest form of idealism, that of Bishop Berkeley for instance, would say that only minds are fully real, and there cannot be material things that are not contents of some consciousness. Also the only sort of causal power we directly experience is our own intentional action, which brings things about for a reason. The idea of \"material causality\" or, more exactly, regularity of succession, is by contrast a relatively abstract notion. On this strong idealist view, the ultimate reality has to be mind, and ultimate causality has to be intentional agency.\n\nWeaker versions of idealism would insist that value (the positive evaluation of personal experiences) and purpose (the effort to bring about future states) are elements of reality that are not analysable in purely material terms. Therefore, mind must at least be a fundamental component of what there is, and if there is some ultimate explanation for the existence of the universe, it must include a mind-like element. Personal explanation (explaining something by saying that it is chosen for a good reason) must be part of the explanation of why the cosmos exists as it does. And it implies that alleged experience of a non-embodied mind, known in and through material appearances, is a real possibility that may be veridical and could provide confirming evidence of the existence of such a mind.\n\nIf we give great importance and value to the inner personal lives of human beings, and if we find the distinctiveness of human life to lie largely in the ability to choose goodness for its own sake, then we are committing ourselves to a view of reality that affirms the reality and value of conscious experience and moral goodness. This is opposed to any hard-line materialism that denies the existence or importance of consciousness, and it is opposed to any relativist view of ethics that maintains that the good is whatever certain people happen to prefer. There are real values and they lie in conscious states or actions. Since such values are objective, they suggest the existence of an objective non-human consciousness in which they can be found.\n\nWe may also feel that two very different sorts of reality, the material cosmos and the existence of free conscious and intelligent agents, need to be integrated within a coherent and plausible metaphysical framework. The materialist thesis that inner experience and purpose just happen to originate by chance and have no lasting significance does not seem very plausible. Consciousness and purpose simply become inexplicable add-ons to the physical process, and for a tough-minded materialist they may even be quite illusory.\n\nAn idealist framework will explain the physical cosmos as existing in order to permit beings who have personal experiences and purposes to share a common environment in which they can learn, develop, and act. But this \"in order to\" introduces purpose into the basic structure of the physical cosmos, and that introduction suggests that the basic structure of the physical cosmos is mind-like in important respects.\n\nFurther, the apparent intelligibility of the world suggests that there are good reasons for why things are as they are; that events do not happen solely by chance. Even the laws of nature exist for a reason, and the best reason is that they exist for the sake of desirable goals which the universe may realize. We are then thinking of a primordial mind that can envisage and evaluate possible goals and bring them about intentionally. That is the heart of the idealist case.\n\nMany idealists would call this primordial consciousness \"God\". But others find it better to avoid the word \"God\", because of the many different, and often silly, things that it might mean to them. Idealists do not mean to speak of a person, probably male, who lives outside the universe and interferes in it from time to time, in completely unpredictable ways. They believe that the ultimate nature of reality is more like consciousness than either blind necessity or pure chance. It is a consciousness very unlike human embodied consciousness. It is an independent and generative consciousness, not a dependent and largely receptive one. It contains as part of its substance something like a set of ideal possibilities, which perhaps necessarily express themselves in varied forms of finite material being. Its nature is known by human beings, if it is, as all other minds are known, by seeing the temporal processes of the phenomenal world as expressions of a largely hidden mental content.\n\nFor idealists like Hegel, primordial mind is not some being apart from the physical universe. It is the inner nature of the universe itself. It does not conjure up the universe out of nothing by some arbitrary act of will. It realizes its own necessary nature in a progressive process of temporal unfolding. It is not a person who chooses to create suffering and tragedy just because it wants to, when it could easily have chosen otherwise. Suffering and tragedy are parts of its own being, possibilities necessarily inherent in its self-objectification. Nevertheless, it could be said to have a moral goal or purpose \u2013 as a rational consciousness, it \"aims at\" the realization of many sorts of valuable states for their own sake. And it may actualize freedom and mutuality as well as necessity and a monopoly of causal power. That is, the cosmos it objectifies may generate many personal agencies capable of moral choice and social relationship, with a degree of autonomous causal power. Indeed in this cosmos it seems to do precisely that.\n\nPresumably such a mind will have knowledge of whatever becomes actual in the cosmos. Most idealists suppose that while it will retain complete knowledge of all that has ever existed, within its own cosmic experience it will mitigate destructive and painful experiences by subordinating them to and placing them in a wider context of creative and valuable experiences. Within that context they may be seen as inevitable, or at least as non-removable, parts of an emergent cosmos in which societies of creatively and morally free finite agents exist. In this way it will fulfil the goal of its own self-realization.\n\nIdealism is certainly a \"grand metaphysical theory\", and as such it is the main philosophical competitor with materialism. And both idealism and materialism are competitors with a Rylean or Wittgensteinian disinterestedness in such grand metaphysical systems.\n\nPhilosophy and metaphysics\n\nI suspect that Ryle would say, in response to all this, that if we are thinking about the concept of mind, and we get too far away from the ordinary language that we use about human minds and the everyday contexts in which we use that language, our concepts will no longer have any purchase on reality. They will be like cog wheels spinning energetically on their own without connecting to any useful mechanism. We should look at the informal logic of mental-conduct concepts as they are actually used, and not try to invent purely hypothetical and untestable theories about how they might be used in totally different, probably inconceivable, circumstances. Talk of \"ultimate reality\" is like talk of \"ultimate Platonic trousers\": all very well in theory but not very good for covering your legs.\n\nUnfortunately, once philosophers had eliminated the great classical philosophical systems as based on grammatical mistakes, and had demonstrated that the language that ordinary people speak is quite in order as it is, as long as ordinary people do not ask silly questions about it, there was nothing left for philosophers to do. It is rather ironic that Ryle, as a great philosophy teacher, was able to place most of his pupils (including me) in university jobs as professional philosophers, where they were paid to proclaim that there was no such profession as philosophy.\n\nI had to teach a course in moral philosophy in the 1960s (I will not say where), and I recall the widespread philosophical view that there was no point in asking moral philosophers about difficult ethical issues, since their opinion was no better than anyone else's. Moral philosophers could write long monographs about how people use words like \"good\" or \"right\", but they were not qualified to express any moral opinions. Looking around at some of my colleagues, I thought that perhaps this was a very good thing.\n\nIn a similar way, metaphysics was a form of armchair palaeontology \u2013 the study of fossilized philosophical systems that were now all extinct. If asked what the nature of reality was, philosophers would reply, \"It all depends on what you mean by real,\" and then patiently explain that real hair consisted in not wearing a wig or that real antiques were not new things that had been shot full of holes to look like ancient woodworm. If unwise undergraduates persisted in saying that they were seeking for what things were made of, they would be told that some things were made of wood, some of plastic, and some had not been made at all. It is not surprising that philosophy classes became progressively less well attended. Ancient philosophers like David Hume had played backgammon because philosophy was too difficult. Modern philosophers played backgammon because philosophy was too easy and consisted mostly in getting people to stop asking philosophical questions \u2013 which they could do best by not going to philosophy lectures.\n\nThat, however, is no longer the case. Partly because physicists have stepped in where philosophers refused to tread, and partly because medical practice and new technology generated a new range of ethical problems that do need some expertise to address, philosophy has started to get interested in the large traditional metaphysical and ethical issues again. \"What is the real?\" and \"What is the good?\" are no longer naive questions. People really want to know if the natural sciences are the only ways of finding out the truth, and if there is any way of reasonably resolving the ethical dilemmas that modern medicine puts before us.\n\nImagining minds\n\nMaterialism battles with idealism \u2013 and scientists line up on both sides. Utilitarianism battles with moral absolutism \u2013 and both politicians and doctors find themselves on opposing sides here too. Any objective observer would say that we are in a situation where many diverse and competing views can be reasonably defended. I am not persuaded that ordinary linguistic usage should be the final test of whether we are talking sense or making sense of human existence. If anything, I tend to think that ordinary linguistic usages are liable to be quite misleading, to express prejudices and half-digested philosophical theories whose origin has been forgotten.\n\nI certainly think that if we are considering the concept of mind, we should not limit ourselves to the sorts of minds we know best \u2013 human minds. We should explore the possibility of other kinds of minds, by imaginative extrapolation. The idea of a cosmic mind is a particularly interesting one, because it takes the notions of knowledge, feeling, and power to the highest degree we can think of. If we grant the existence of consciousness and objective value, we can try to conceive a consciousness of supreme value, knowledge, feeling, and power, and try to say what in general it would be like. That is indeed what many writers of science fiction do \u2013 and they often describe possible realities that some philosophers cannot imagine. Perhaps, as Tom Stoppard once said, \"There are more things in my philosophy than are dreamed of in reality.\" Or perhaps such dreams give a hint of what reality might really be like.\n\nThe cosmic mind may not have all these properties to the highest possible degree, and, if not, it should perhaps try harder. Anyhow, idealist views are not committed to the \"highest degree of mind\" view, pleasing though that might be. What they are committed to is that the reality underlying sensory appearances is more like a conscious and purposive cause of the phenomenal cosmos than it is like unconscious globs of unintelligent stuff (or maybe one super-glob of super-stupidity) from which the cosmos emerges without purpose or design. Or if purpose and design remind you too much of God, we might say that an idealist cosmos would at least exist for a reason, and it would exhibit an intelligible order.\n\nIf an idealist philosophy is adopted, this will have implications for the way human persons see themselves in relation to the cosmos of which they are parts. Most basically, they will find in their own inner lives of apprehension, feeling, and intention, a resonance or unity with the inner reality of the cosmos. Human consciousness will not be a freak, transient accident in a basically lifeless and indifferent universe. It will have a place in the self-realization of cosmic mind. The world revealed to us in sensory experience will be seen as an expression of cosmic mind \u2013 sometimes terrifying and dangerous, sometimes beautiful and awe-inspiring, but always expressive of a deep consciousness beyond the veil of the senses. The world may be \"read\" as an interaction with cosmic mind, somewhat as other human bodies are read as expressions of conscious feelings and aims. Humans will be fundamentally \"at home\" in the universe; not alien intrusions into a realm of blind laws, but integral parts of a self-expressive process oriented toward the realization of objective personal values.\n\nWithin such a world view, the arts can be seen as participations in the creativity of the cosmos, in a power beyond the finite self that yet works through and can heighten the insights and skills of artistic endeavour. Great works of art, music, and literature will be disclosive of what George Steiner calls \"real presence\", communications of transcendent mind as perceived by the immanent and embodied minds of human beings.\n\nScience will be seen as the discovery of a real intelligible order in the natural world, an order with a beauty and rationality that can be partly captured by mathematical exploration. The ancient Greeks were right \u2013 mathematics is the key to the order of the universe. For some peculiar reason, they did not devote much time to testing their mathematical theories by experimental observation, insisting that their maths was right without looking to see. But they did see what modern science has often failed to see, that a rational universe will be one in which the laws of nature will themselves have a reason. The only plausible candidate for such a reason is not the existence of a further set of hyper-laws. It is that for the sake of which all laws exist, the efficient realization of intrinsic values.\n\nMorality will be a response to an objective moral ideal and goal for the cosmos itself, a goal which humans can play a part in realizing. It will not be the construction of compromise rules which can mediate between opposing social interests. The good life will be a life lived for the sake of good, both in oneself and in society. It will be part of the realization of distinctive values which forms the ultimate reason for the existence of the cosmos. Devotion to the good for its own sake will thus also be devotion to that ultimate mind by which the good is conceived and in which it is progressively realized. This makes possible that \"intellectual love of God\", of the source and completion of the good, which was the centre of Spinoza's philosophy.\n\nHuman history will not only be a story of the interactions of human persons as they formulate cultural ideals and seek to make a distinctive contribution to the human world. It will also be an expression of the self-realization of transcendent mind, as it generates many diverse embodied minds, allows them creative and moral freedom, interacts with them as they impede or realize its purposes, and leads them through objectification and alienation toward a wider goal of a global society of societies. Hegel developed most fully this view of what he saw as the planetary history of Absolute Spirit. We may view his specific analyses and predictions with some scepticism. Karl Marx even found it necessary to stand Hegel on his head and get rid of a higher consciousness altogether, though he did not do any better himself. But that should not put us off the thought that in some way human relationships may also be the vehicles of the expression of the inner nature of the cosmos as it moves toward a moral goal that is inherent in its own inner being.\n\nCosmic optimism\n\nIdealists tend to be optimistic about the universe, thinking that value will be progressively realized in it. Even then, however, they usually accept that the universe will come to an end in a few billion years or so. Their optimism is not unqualified. Indeed some of them go around looking rather gloomy, and saying, \"It may seem good now, but mark my words, in a few billion years this will all be gone.\" The super-optimists, however, refuse to accept this depressing thought. Bolstered by some of the weirder extremes of cosmology and artificial intelligence research, they think that human beings will manage to download themselves into supercomputers and move off into inter-galactic space, as our sun runs out of steam (more precisely, out of heat).\n\nBy the time our universe runs down, they will then have become even cleverer, and will be able to travel through a black hole into a brand new universe. So they can keep going forever, moving from one universe to another, intelligences of immense knowledge and power, living in the huge seeming emptiness between the galaxies, hidden from all the relatively minute intelligences slowly emerging in those universes.\n\nIf this is so, then in our universe today there are probably huge numbers of super-intelligences living in outer space, and having super-committee-meetings about how they might guide the affairs of the little primitive carbon-based life forms emerging in their local universe. Religions may sometimes seem weird, but they have nothing on some modern cosmological speculations. A favourite among such speculations as I write is the many-worlds or multiverse theory. It holds that every possible universe exists, the whole set of universes forming a super-universe or multiverse.\n\nIt is not often realized that on this theory, every possible array of gods, goddesses, devils, and angels will exist somewhere in some universe. So every possible religion and philosophy will be true, but all in different universes. We can correctly believe in God in one universe and correctly be an atheist in another. We can even be parts of God in some universes and parts of Lucifer in others. The possibilities are endless. Even materialist atheism can be true in some universes, where no super-intelligences ever visit, and only the illusion of consciousness exists (I am not sure what that would feel like or who would be having the illusion, but now we've got the story going, let's run with it as far as possible).\n\nSpeculative science has thus far outstripped idealism in its classical forms. But the surprising thing is that these possibilities, though they are indeed fantastic, seem to be not only logically possible, but physically possible. Common-sense philosophy can be seen to be merely a restriction on human imagination. Perhaps common-sense philosophers should stay in more and read more science fiction. If they do that, they will soon find themselves asking, \"Which universe do I actually live in?\" And I do not think the answer is at all clear.\n\nOf course that is the main reason for being a common-sense philosopher. We cannot make our minds up between all the possible universes we might be living in, and so we drop the subject and just respond to particular problems as and when they come up.\n\nOn making ultimate metaphysical decisions\n\nIdealists, like everyone else, can distinguish between speculation and real existential decisions \u2013 decisions which make a real, practical, important difference to the way we live. The question of whether our descendants might one day decant themselves into a supercomputer and disappear down a black hole is purely speculative. It opens the mind to the possibility of the continued existence of intelligent life even after this universe has run down and given up the ghost (or all its ghosts). But it is not something we should count on or look forward to in the next decade or so.\n\nHowever, our answer to the question of whether this cosmos has an objective moral goal which we can play a part in actualizing might make a difference to how we see our lives and to how we live. If we see human lives as lived in a dialectical or ambiguous relationship to the goals of cosmic mind, as alienated by hatred, greed, and ambition and yet haunted by the ideal of a more creative and compassionate global community, that might make us see ourselves and other persons in a new light. We might see persons as \"called\" to a distinctive way of life, which is to be achieved only by overcoming the attractions of pleasure, power, and indifference that would frustrate such a life. Each person would be both a potential vehicle of expressing a higher consciousness and also a partial obstacle to its expression. In that dialectic of expression and obstruction each person would be part of a continuing interplay between transcendent mind and many socially embodied minds, an interplay which weaves history into the complex patterns it displays.\n\nWhether the pattern of history moves inevitably toward a society on this planet in which values are freely created and shared without restriction is perhaps not as clear as Hegel and Marx both thought. It might be that our world will, despite T. S. Eliot, end with a bang and not with a whimper. Humanity could be a cosmic experiment that is about to fail, and, as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy predicts, our planet might be removed to make way for a cosmic motorway or for some more successful form of life. Since we cannot be sure, maybe the best we can do is to hope and work for the best and yet prepare for the worst. That way we might at least find, as tourists do when they contemplate the weather while on holiday in England, that we will be very pleased that things did not turn out to be quite as bad as they could have been. And that could be part of the recipe for a happy life.\n\nIdealism need not be religious, in the sense of leading to membership of some religious institution. Many idealists regard most religions as a mass of superstitions and legends, with unduly submissive attitudes toward various holy books, all of which contradict one another. But idealism may be sympathetic to some kinds of religion or spirituality, as attempted human responses to transcendent mind, intended to achieve liberation from self-centred egoism and to evoke a sense of union with or positive relation to a reality of wisdom, compassion, and bliss.\n\nFor some people, idealism is best seen as an abstract intellectual attempt by weak and partly corrupted human reason to approach a truth that has been independently revealed in a more emotionally accessible way by God \u2013 that is, I think, what most Christians think about Hegel. Even if that is so, idealism will remain an intriguing testimony to a residual sense of the ontological primacy of mind, of the reality of the soul and of God. For others, the reverse will be true, and various religions may be symbolic and pictorial ways of approaching the philosophical truth of idealism \u2013 that is what Hegel thought about most Christians.\n\nWhatever view you take about that, idealism seems to me the most coherent, comprehensive, integrative, and plausible conceptual scheme for understanding the world of which we are parts. As a basic metaphysical scheme, it does not need and cannot have \"evidence\", in the sense of publicly observable experimental demonstration. Like any ambitiously large-scale philosophy, it is based on reasons drawn from a wide range of data. Different philosophies stress different aspects of these data as of primary importance, and idealism stresses the irreducibility and importance of consciousness, reason, and morality.\n\nThere are alternative metaphysical schemes. For some, the conceptual disentangling of mind from the context of its human embodiment in brain, body, and society is a step too far, and may seem like the invention of a fantastic fiction. They will not be able to see the life of the human mind as one of response to transcendent mind through art, science, morality, and quotidian experience. It will still be possible, however, to see the life of the mind as one of creative and empathetic interaction with other embodied minds, and to find the best kind of human life to be the common pursuit of the good and the beautiful, even in a world plagued by violence and injustice and destined to end in universal cosmic death. Some would hold that human life becomes more precious by recognition of its sheer fortuitousness, its brevity, and its inevitable end.\n\nWhile not sharing that view myself, I recognize in it a tragic nobility, and I feel that a life committed to such a pursuit would be a life well worth living. Maybe it is really all one can have. Yet it would not be unreasonable to hope for more. Some of us think we have more, not particularly in visions or peculiar and overwhelming \"religious experiences\", but in a general confirmation throughout many forms of personal experience of a sense of transcendent presence that speaks of a mind other and greater than ours or of what Matthew Arnold called \"an enduring Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness\". I doubt if this is a matter that philosophy alone can resolve, although philosophical reflection may help to make clearer the different presuppositions it is reasonable to adopt and some of the logical consequences of adopting them.\n\n## Chapter Fifteen\n\n## Can we still speak of the soul?\n\nI conclude the book with some references to the views of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and the Bible. I draw attention to particular affinities that exist between their views and those expressed here. Idealism is a philosophy, not a religion, but it has an elective affinity with some religious views insofar as they are genuinely humanistic, and it shares with them an aversion to materialism, especially in its reductive or eliminative forms. Insofar as religions have a philosophical basis, it will usually be a form of idealism. Insofar as idealists seek ritual, moral, and communal expression for their views, they may find it in some form of religion.\n\nHowever that may be, I will conclude with a final homage to and divergence from Gilbert Ryle. I should say that he would agree with the first of the following sentences, and probably remain baffled by the second: there is no ghost, and there is no machine. There is only the reality of mind, and its expression and appearance in the dynamic and developing forms of an open and emergent material universe.\n\nI have mentioned the soul once or twice in previous chapters, though I have generally preferred to talk about the human person or the mind. Yet of course I have been speaking throughout of what has been traditionally thought of as the human soul, and in this last chapter I will connect what I have said with some traditional philosophical and religious views.\n\nWe do not speak much of the soul these days, though the ancient Greek word for soul \u2013 psyche \u2013 can be translated as \"mind\". Perhaps psyche is rather broader in reference, since it can be used to refer to all living things rather than just to mind. But it does not have to refer to something higher than minds and detachable from them. The soul is nevertheless often thought of as a distinct spiritual substance which is added to the body at some early stage of life, and which departs at death to continue its existence in its own immaterial way. Plato did seem to speak of the soul in that way, saying in some dialogues that all souls were destined to return to their true homes in the stars, once they had escaped their bondage to physical bodies. One problem with this view is that it is hard to see what souls will do all day if they have no bodies. Perhaps they just twinkle or spend their time doing arithmetic in their heads \u2013 except of course they have no heads. That is not something that most of us would look forward to with keen anticipation.\n\nBut being Plato, he did not always think that, and he had a much more positive view of physical bodies in the Timaeus, where he even spoke of the physical cosmos as a \"visible god\", and of souls as finding visible and sometimes beautiful expression within the cosmos.\n\nPlato divided the soul into three parts, but he did so largely in order to make a neat and tidy comparison between the individual and society. In The Republic he divides the classes of society into three \u2013 the rulers, the guardians, and the rest. The rulers, after long training, could tell what the best kind of society would be. The guardians were the executive power, an armed guard who could defend the state and enforce the decisions of the rulers. The rest carried on trade and did other sorts of menial and unworthy but necessary things. Plato wished to argue that justice ruled when all these parts of society were content with their proper place in the social order.\n\nWhen he came to speak of justice in the individual soul, he similarly tried to speak of it as a sort of internal order. Reason should rule. There should be a part for enforcing rational decisions. We might call this \"the will\", which puts decisions into effect. But Plato called it thumos, a \"spirited\" element, whose defining virtue is courage and a sense of honour or righteous indignation. The third element is desire. In the well-ordered soul, honour would execute the decisions of reason, and control desire. In a badly ordered soul, desire, and passionate action might overwhelm reason.\n\nThis threefold Platonic division is not quite that of Ryle's pet hate \u2013 the division of mind into thought, will, and feeling, three separate faculties each doing their own job. But it is pretty close. There is a contemplative faculty, an executive faculty, and a faculty closely bound up with bodily needs, wants, and feelings. This, Ryle says, is \"such a welter of confusions and false inferences that it is best to give up any attempt to re-fashion it\".\n\nRyle's point is that there are so many different sorts of mental activity that it is pointless to try to divide them up into a specific number of ways of thinking, as though there was a little committee inside the brain which divides mental jobs up rather neatly between its members. It is only fair to recall, however, that Plato is not seeking to give a systematic analysis of mind. What he basically wants to say is that in the just soul the passions and desires should be ordered to good ends by reason, and that to order often unruly desires some fairly aggressive and resolute discipline is called for. The inner mental disciplinarian is thumos, which we might call resolution or determination, the guardian and overseer of desire. It is not unlike Nietzsche's \"will to power\". If it is not controlled by reason, it will seek vitality and ambition for their own sakes. But when controlled by reason, it will order desires toward the cultivation of personal excellence and the realization of that which is good and beautiful.\n\nWe need not speak of \"three parts of the soul\". We could simply say that we have bodily appetites, but we are capable of reflecting on what is fully good and worthwhile, and we can discipline our appetites to aim habitually and by nature at such things. A good human life requires desires to be controlled effectively by dispassionate understanding and an iron will. Plato's metaphorical talk of the faculties of the soul makes this point very well. It is after all true that human minds think abstractly and understand, feel pleasure and pain and many diverse subjective responses to what impacts on human bodies, and are able (or at least think they are able) to act to control their bodies and environments to some extent. These are the main elements appealed to in forms of personal explanation. So even if Plato's terminology differs somewhat from ours, it alludes to the main basic elements that characterize human mentality, and it clearly places an emphasis on the importance of moral action (action for the sake of good) in human life. It also brings out the importance of having a view of human nature that can make sense of moral action in a universe like this. To have a picture of the nature of morality is already to have a picture of human nature. What philosophy does is try to make that picture explicit.\n\nAristotle on the soul\n\nDespite the immense importance of Plato in the history of Western philosophy, it was Aristotle who formulated the most influential Western definition of the soul, when he said that it was the \"form\" (eidos) of the body. A form is the essential nature of something, that which makes it what it is and not another thing. All things, for Aristotle as for Plato, incarnate forms; they have essential or proper natures. But organic forms, the natures of organisms, have a special role as defining what it is a developing organism is \"aiming at\" or tending by nature to be. Thus the form of a human embryo is to be a specific human adult, with the capacities and dispositions of that fully grown organism. Or the form of an acorn is the fully grown oak tree.\n\nEach organic form has a set of specific capacities that are proper to it. For Aristotle, vegetative forms have the capacity for growth and reproduction. More complex animal forms have the capacity for movement and sentience. Human, intelligent forms have the capacity for abstract thought and responsible action. Thus in speaking of forms we are speaking of sets of capacities proper to organisms of a specific kind. When we say that the soul, more properly the intellectual soul, or the mind, is the form of a human body, we mean these sets of capacities are proper to human beings as such.\n\nAristotle's doctrine of the soul or mind is thus that some intellectual and moral capacities and propensities are distinctive of and proper to organisms that are members of the human species. To say what the human soul is is to say what the distinctive, proper capacities of human beings are. I believe that Gilbert Ryle would accept this view, with one important and decisive proviso. All essentialist and teleological elements must be removed from the idea of a \"form\".\n\nThe rise of modern science involved a rejection of the idea that substances have essential natures, which they are \"meant\" to embody. Rather, the natural world is a continuum of many different properties, capacities, and forces. One shades into another without any clear demarcation line, and there are many blurred edges and overlaps. As Wittgenstein put it, there are many family resemblances between things and processes, but there need be no central defining characteristic that makes a thing what it is.\n\nEvolution is often interpreted in this way, leading to views that humans are not sharply distinguished from higher primates, and that, as a class, they have no necessary and sufficient defining characteristics. Some humans have no intelligence, and some intelligences are not human. Humans are beings that resemble each other (and also other animals) in varying ways and to varying degrees, like different members of a family. Therefore (it is sometimes said) humans have, as such, no peculiar moral value or worth.\n\nIn the same way, the idea of final causality was widely rejected in the seventeenth century. Organisms do not \"aim at\" some ideal state, for the sake of which they exist. They usually pass through a cycle of growth and decay, without aim or purpose, just happening to reproduce on the way. Therefore (it is sometimes said) there is no particular sort of thing that humans ought to be or no sort of life that humans are meant by nature to live.\n\nI think Aquinas was right in suggesting that the Aristotelian view only made sense based on the supposition that there is some kind of cosmic mind which contains the ideal forms that define what things properly are in their fullest development or what the innate goals of their existence are. Idealists will naturally have no problem with such a view, and it fits well with the belief that intellectual understanding, creative freedom, and interpersonal empathy are objective goals of the cosmic process. It is not the human species, as such, that is of special value. Any being capable of understanding, freedom, and empathy has special moral worth \u2013 just the \"faculties\" of thought, will, and feeling so derided by Ryle. For this reason, \"humanism\" is not the most appropriate term for that concentration on personal flourishing that was one of the theoretical marks of the European Enlightenment. It would be better to speak of personalism, the postulation of intelligible thought, creative will, and empathetic feeling as intrinsic moral goods, to be protected and maximized wherever they occur.\n\nI think it makes good sense to say that any beings with such capacities are of distinctive worth and should be respected as such. It also makes sense to say that human beings are such beings or are parts or offspring of such societies of beings, and so incarnate a specific character or form which is morally important. To sustain, enhance, and cherish such capacities, and to oppose all that frustrates them, both in oneself and in others, as far as is possible, is a distinctive moral goal for human lives.\n\nWhat modern science opposes is answering questions about the natures of things with merely verbal definitions. What is required is experimentation, observation, and testable predictions. Natural science is not concerned with the aims natural things might have, but with the regular processes by which things change. But that does not mean that there are no goals in nature or that those goals cannot be defined in terms of distinctive capacities. Values and purposes have not been the concern of the natural sciences for some centuries. But the exclusion of the personal from the realm of natural science does not exclude it from reality. It is for philosophical reflection to define what worthwhile purposes may be, using all the available data provided by the natural sciences, but adding data from the rich historical records of human personal and moral experience, and making the most comprehensive personal evaluation of all this data.\n\nCartesian dualism and beyond\n\nWhen the Aristotelian philosophy was replaced by the more mechanistic approach of classical science, it became difficult for philosophers to integrate personal values and purposes into the increasingly influential world view of natural science. Cartesian dualism was one symptom of this difficulty, separating mental substance from material substance in such a way that it was difficult to see how one could interact with the other. As I have emphasized, Descartes believed in such integration, but did not find a plausible way of formulating it. It was to take the discovery of evolution to do so, with the picture it opened up of a gradually more complex and emergent process leading to the development of mind as an increasingly autonomous inner aspect of matter.\n\nA Cartesian hangover from Aristotle was the notion of substance, an enduring substratum that could contain various changing properties. For many philosophers, this was slowly replaced by the idea of process, of a flowing succession of properties, located in space and time. The idea of substance could be retained as the idea of a core bundle of properties that could change more or less gradually over time. The idea of strict numerical identity was replaced by the idea of a succession of properties, \"identity\" being largely a matter of degree and convenience. A tree generated from the pruned stump of a prior tree could be called the same tree or not, almost at will.\n\nIn modern science, questions of identity are often treated as matters for conventional decision, upon which nothing much turns. With personal and mental lives, however, the idea of identity becomes morally important. It matters to me whether tomorrow I will remember the plans I made yesterday and be able to continue them or whether I will take over the plans of someone else and pass them on to another person in turn. \"This is just what I planned to do\" is very different from \"This is what he (someone otherwise just like me) would have wanted me to do.\"\n\nRyle notwithstanding, it is the chain of privately accessible experiences and actions, thoughts and intentions, that makes the difference. When one and only one person can have such private access, then I could reasonably say that the same personal subject of experience and action continues to exist. The sense of being one and the same continuing subject of many experiences and acts is important to a person. That, I think, is what Descartes meant by a mental substance. For that reason, there is little or no substantial difference between being a mental substance and being a process of privately accessible, temporally flowing events and acts. That is just what being a mental substance is.\n\nDescartes held that the mental substance could exist without the physical substance of the body. But he did not hold that it should, that it did or that it would be a full and proper person if it did. In this, too, he is surely correct. There can, logically, be a succession of thoughts and feelings without any physical body or brain or universe. Perhaps they would be thoughts and feelings about a universe in which we used to have a body and a brain. Perhaps disembodied minds would be condemned to repeat their past embodied experiences over and over again.\n\nOn the other hand, perhaps chains of mental acts could find new forms of embodiment in different environments. When Plato speaks of the soul's journey of a thousand years between earthly births, he is speaking as if there are bodies of some sort, receiving experiences from some form of environment, good or bad. And his story is relatable without obvious contradiction. Perhaps it is in some such world, unfathomably far in our future and from this space-time complex, that minds once embodied here could find a fulfilment rare and strange, where fully shared understanding, cooperative creativity, and mutually reinforcing happiness could ameliorate and transfigure all the conflicts and sufferings of our previous lives. And yet those past lives would have been the way of bringing us to our final goal, a way that we were partly thrown into and partly chose, but which was always destined for final good, and which, if we saw it whole, we would embrace with repentance and with joy.\n\nThat is the dream of idealism. But is it true? It must be plainly said that there is no proof. Yet it is more than an idle wish. It is rooted in the firm belief that mind is the ultimate nature of being, and that intelligent mind aims, as far as it can, at goodness, at what is worthwhile for its own sake. This dream is what mind would realize if it could, if it were at all possible. It does seem possible, since it contains no contradiction. Dare we then hope for it?\n\nWhat we should commit ourselves to is the importance of freedom, of moral commitment, of nobility of character, of intellectual and moral virtue, of personal fulfilment and flourishing for all. With this goes a sense of the importance of mind or personhood, of a moral intelligence embedded in an emergent physical world. One might be agnostic about questions concerning an objective spiritual basis of reality. I fully understand that. But moral action requires passionate commitment, not based on evidence (in the sense of demonstration beyond reasonable doubt or even probabilistic judgment), but consonant with one's most basic world view.\n\nThat world view may remain largely implicit and obscure, even to oneself. Yet if one commits to the importance of morality, this is an implicit commitment to the importance of mind, if morality is not to be fundamentally irrational. It is entirely reasonable to root these commitments in a basic ontological option for the rationality and goodness (moral orderedness) of being. Then we can root our morality in a response to what is most fully real, what is possible of fuller realization, and what will satisfy personal striving for fulfilment in many diverse and unique historically situated vocations. This is faith \u2013 trust that reality is what it seems to us in our highest moments of insight to be. It is validated by practice and by the experience of a life sustained by love.\n\nThe soul and immortality\n\nSome people speak of belief in immortality as based on a desire to find some supernatural sanction for moral conduct. If there is a supernatural power that will reward goodness and punish badness, this adds force to moral motivation. But that is to my mind an unduly negative way of putting things. Belief in immortality is primarily based on belief that the ultimate character of reality is mind. This builds consciousness, value, and purpose into the universe in a fundamental way, and prevents one from seeing existence as pure chance, accident or unforeseen happenstance. It roots moral action in a perception of objective purposes of value which it is a human responsibility to further. It gives rise to a presumption that such goals will be achieved if it is possible to achieve them. The point is not that I will be punished or rewarded for my acts. The point is that moral action will not be in vain. My turning away from justice and compassion will lead to my inhabiting a world of injustice, violence, conflict, and hatred. My growth toward greater justice and love will lead to my living in a world of friendship, cooperation, and universal empathy.\n\nIn the world as we see it, it is in very general terms true that heroic moral acts lead to a happier and more flourishing society, and that violence breeds its own destruction. But this is only true in general. In millions of particular cases, the innocent perish and the evil flourish. Moral action seems ineffective, and personal sacrifice is in vain. It is not a selfish desire to continue to exist that leads to belief in immortality. It is the impact of the thought that goodness will not triumph, and that the noblest moral sacrifices will fade into insignificance in an indifferent universe.\n\nIn a universe in which mind is primary and aims at good, it would contradict the rational structure of the universe if that were the last word. If value and purpose are primary in the universe, then there must be some possibility of rectification of the ills of this life, space for fuller development of our feeble moral efforts, and the possibility of a fuller realization of the value of finite being than seems to be possible in this life. Thus it is deeply rational to hope for a life of the mind beyond the death of this body.\n\nThat does not mean that this life becomes less important, while we simply wait for better times hereafter. This life is part of the human pilgrimage, and what is done in it determines what shall become of human lives. In a world corrupted by evil, conflict, and injustice, we have a unique personal part to play in an unfolding scenario of trials encountered and endured, of values envisaged and realized, of tasks undertaken and achieved. Our life is not sound and fury, signifying nothing. It has been like a journey into a far country, from which, chastened and taught by experience, we must at last return. As Plato puts it in Orphic mythology, after our \"journey of a thousand years\" through the earth, we may shine as stars in the sky. Or, in a Christian version of the same hope, after we have passed through the fires of purification (Mark 9:49 and 1 Corinthians 3:13\u201315), we may at last shine like the sun in the kingdom of the Father (Matthew 13:43).\n\nThis mention of Orphic and Christian symbols may be thought to be introducing religion into a philosophical work. And it may indeed seem that if there is a supreme cosmic mind, it would be rather strange if it disclosed nothing of its nature and purpose in some form of revelation. Nevertheless, this book belongs to philosophy, because it makes no reference to any revealed truths, and its arguments do not depend upon any specific religious teachings. What it does, though, is give many religious interpretations of the human soul a strong rational foundation, suggest the wisdom of at least attending to religious claims for revelation, and support the importance of an understanding of human persons as moral agents whose lives have unique value and a moral purpose that gives them inalienable significance and meaning.\n\nBiblical views of the soul\n\nIn a book about the nature of human persons, it would be absurd to overlook religious views entirely. So I will end by saying something about the biblical view of the soul that has been so influential, especially in Western culture. One major problem here is that Plato and Aristotle, or a mixture of the two, have often been more important than what the Bible says. For this reason, there is frequently much confusion about what the Christian or Jewish view of the soul is. The strange truth is that there is, strictly speaking, no biblical, Hebrew or Greek word for \"soul\", even though the word \"soul\" is constantly used in English translations of the Bible.\n\nIn Hebrew there are three words \u2013 nephesh, neshamah, and ruach \u2013 which can each be translated as breath, soul or spirit. None of them seems to denote a thing, substance or entity. They are more like activities or energies. In Genesis 2:7, God formed man \"from the dust of the ground\", and breathed into his nostrils \"the breath of life\". Later, in Genesis 7:22, it is reported that, during the great flood everything on dry land in whose nostrils was \"the breath of life\" died.\n\nThe breath of life is common to all breathing animals, so in this sense \"the soul\" might be taken as that which keeps animals alive and breathing. It is not particularly mental or conscious, but it is some sort of vitality or energy, perhaps something like what the philosopher Henri Bergson called the \u00e9lan vital, life force.\n\nHumans are made from dust and filled by God with vital energy. The first creation story in Genesis 1:26 adds that humans are made in the \"image and likeness\" of God, having dominion over other life forms. There is much discussion about what exactly this means, but one main interpretation is that humans are entrusted with stewardship of the earth, so that they can act as God does with justice and mercy toward other lives, and stand in the place of God upon this planet.\n\nSome writers have protested that this gives humans too much power, licensing them to do whatever they want with the earth and with other animals. This seems to be against the spirit of the biblical account, however, since all things belong to God, and the role of humans can only be to do God's will, though to do it with a sense of personal responsibility.\n\nFor the Genesis stories, humans are special not because they alone have souls, but because, being material and breathing beings, they have a responsibility to order the living things in the world in a just and compassionate way, thereby helping to realize the divine purpose for creation and sharing in the divine work of bringing finite things to the fulfilment for which they were created.\n\nThe Hebrew Bible does not show any great interest in a separate spiritual realm apart from this material world. Indeed, for most of the Hebrew Bible, there is no positive view of any life beyond death. The Bible is concerned with realizing justice and compassion in this material world, and humans, as fully material beings \u2013 \"dust\" \u2013 have the responsibility to do that.\n\nIt is for that reason that when belief in an afterlife became more important, at the time when the very latest passages of the Hebrew Bible were being written, it was thought of in a rather material way. There might be a \"resurrection of the body\", not just a continuance of disembodied souls. There might be a \"new heaven and earth\", not a non-physical existence of some sort. We can conclude, then, that the Hebrew (Old Testament) view of the soul is that it is not something that could or should float free of the body. A piece of matter has a soul if it has a sense of responsibility and all that implies \u2013 knowledge, freedom, and moral sensibility. Any material entity with those capacities would have a soul. So the possession of a soul is the possession of a set of capacities that entail consciousness, evaluation, and purposive causality (the existence of mind). But those capacities are possessed by a material entity, by dust enlivened by the divine life, not by an immaterial entity that may or may not be embodied in matter.\n\nNevertheless, there was some idea of an afterlife in early biblical thought. Sheol is the place of the dead, like Hades in the Latin tradition. It is not much to be looked forward to, but past persons do seem to reside there \u2013 Samuel was called up from Sheol by the witch of Endor (1 Samuel 28). There were also angels of various sorts, and some Old Testament characters were said to have ascended to heaven \u2013 Enoch, Moses, and Elijah were popular candidates. Apparently there were other realms apart from this earthly one, where past persons could exist in some sense.\n\nSince ordinary physical bodies do not go to Sheol, it must be possible for persons to transfer to other sorts of bodies. The soul may not be an immaterial entity, but persons can be embodied in different ways. In later Jewish thought, ideas of a place of punishment (probably temporary) and of paradise developed, presumably as intermediate states before the general resurrection.\n\nIn later Christian tradition, this became the doctrine of purgatory or, in the Eastern Orthodox traditions, of the intermediate state, where experiences of various kinds occur to persons who neither exist in their earthly flesh-and-blood bodies, nor in their perfected and glorious resurrection bodies, which will exist only when the whole of heaven and earth and all living things have been renewed.\n\nThe whole biblical tradition of course is opposed to materialism. It is idealist, in that it is centred on a knowing, intending, and creating God who is not embodied in any sense. Ruach, the breath or spirit of God, is the energizing power of God that shapes creation out of primal chaos (Genesis 1:1\u20132), and that inspires prophets and heroes. Part of being created \"in the image\" of God is being able consciously to share in this creative power of God, and so participate in a spiritual and non-material power that has causal influence in the material world.\n\nIn the New Testament, nephesh is rendered into Greek as psyche, and ruach as pneuma. Again, psyche is usually translated into English as \"soul\", but again it primarily refers to any embodied living animal, anything that \"has breath\". As Christian thought developed, humans were distinguished as a sub-class of animals that have an \"intellectual soul\", a specific set of intellectual capacities, especially knowledge, freedom, and moral sense. These capacities were seen as capable of being embodied in different non-flesh-and-blood forms (purgatory or paradise), though it was important that they had been generated and cultured in earthly life. And their final destiny was thought of as a transfigured yet fulfilled form, still individual, still social, still personal, of their first earthly embodiment.\n\nIn the key New Testament passage on the resurrection of the dead, Paul distinguishes between the soma psychikon and the soma pneumatikon (1 Corinthians 15:44). We die, he says, in the former, in bodies filled with the breath of physical living things. But we are resurrected in the latter, in bodies filled with the divine breath or Spirit. They are in some sense bodies, yet they are not the same in kind as ordinary material bodies. They have been transfigured by the divine Spirit, to become knowers and mediators of Spirit, freed from ignorance and selfish desire, free to cooperate with the creative purposes of Spirit. The environment in which they live will be different from this world, free from the laws of transience and decay, and yet the later prophets foresee that this world will be transfigured too, that there will be \"a new heaven and earth\", a new cosmos.\n\nThe biblical idea of the soul is complex and many-stranded. Some of these strands, however, are widely shared. They emphasize that some form of embodiment is proper to such conscious, feeling, willing beings as human persons are. But they refuse to limit embodiment to the precise physical bodies that exist now on this planet. They envisage some form of continuance in which human moral choices for good or evil can be seen and felt with all their implications, and can be worked out to their ultimate conclusion. They give free and responsible moral choice a decisive causal role in the formation of the human future. And they look forward to a final transfiguration of material embodiment that will enable it to become a fully conscious cooperation with and a fully conscious expression of the self-realization of Supreme Spirit in a world of many embodied, unique, and freely acting souls.\n\nIdealist philosophy did not develop independently of such a religious tradition. Both the biblical tradition and the analogous Indian tradition of Brahman \u2013 one Supreme Self of the cosmos \u2013 have been closely interwoven with the growth of philosophical ideas about the nature of reality. Alleged personal experiences of God or of the Supreme Self have for many confirmed the thought that the heart of reality is conscious mind.\n\nNevertheless, even apart from that, rigorous philosophical thought about the nature of human persons, and about the place of mind in the cosmos, does, in my view, point toward idealism. The argument for idealism stands on its own, and it offers a view of human life that stands in stark opposition to the materialism that characterizes many popularizations of modern scientific thought. It gives human life a value, significance, and purpose of enduring worth. Not only that. It might actually be true.\n\n## Notes\n\nIntroduction\n\n1. Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994, p. 3\n\nChapter One\n\n1. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson, 1949, p. 11\n\n2. Ibid, p. 12\n\n3. Ibid, p. 15\n\n4. Ibid, p. 15\n\n5. Ibid, p. 21\n\nChapter Two\n\n1. Michio Kaku, Hyperspace, Oxford: OUP, 1994, p. 15\n\n2. Gilbert Ryle, op. cit., p. 16\n\nChapter Seven\n\n1. Michio Kaku, op. cit., p. 177\n\nChapter Nine\n\n1. Malcolm Jeeves and Warren Brown, Neuroscience, Psychology and Religion, West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2009, p. 52\n\n2. Ibid, p. 117\n\n3. John Polkinghorne, One World, Oxford: Templeton Foundation Press, 2007, p. 102\n\n4. Malcolm Jeeves and Warren Brown, op. cit., p. 49\n\n5. Ibid, p. 111\n\nChapter Eleven\n\n1. Gilbert Ryle, op. cit., p. 61\n\n2. Ibid, p. 48\n\n3. Ibid p. 47\n\n4. Ibid, p. 79\n\nChapter Twelve\n\n1. Ibid, p. 84\n\n2. Ibid, p. 110\n\nChapter Thirteen\n\n1. Ibid, p. 167\n\nChapter Fifteen\n\n1. Ibid, p. 62\n\n## Short bibliography\n\nI have not given classical texts a publisher, since there are many translations and editions. For them I have given the date of original publication.\n\nIntroduction\n\nFrancis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.\n\nGilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson, 1949.\n\nChapter One\n\nA. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1936.\n\nAyer's later rejection of logical positivism is expressed in his Gifford lectures, published as The Central Questions of Philosophy, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973, especially chapter 2.\n\nRene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, especially Meditation 6, second edition, 1642.\n\nKeith Ward, The God Conclusion, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2009, chapter 3.\n\nLudwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell, 1953.\n\nChapter Two\n\nGeorge Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, second edition, 1734.\n\nMichio Kaku, Hyperspace, Oxford: OUP, 1994.\n\nJohn Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book 2, 1690.\n\nA readable, popular account of the interpretation of quantum theory is: Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality, New York: Anchor Books, 1985.\n\nFor a much more difficult technical account, Paul Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Oxford: OUP, 1958.\n\nAnd for a selection of \"weird\" views (where \"weird\" may well mean \"true\"), see J. A. Wheeler and W. H. Zureck, Quantum Theory and Measurement, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.\n\nChapter Two\n\nDavid Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, volume 1, 1739.\n\nChapter Three\n\nBernard d'Espagnat, Veiled Reality, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995.\n\nImmanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, 1783. Kant wrote this to explain the \"Critique of Pure Reason\", and it is in some ways a simpler exposition of his thought.\n\nKeith Ward, The Development of Kant's View of Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1972.\n\nChapter Four\n\nOn Hegel, see Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.\n\nKeith Ward, Concepts of God, Oxford: Oneworld, 1998.\n\nA. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. David Griffin and Donald Sherborne, New York: Macmillan, 1979.\n\nA simpler exposition of Whitehead's thought: John Cobb and David Griffin, Process Theology; an Introductory Exposition, Philadelphia: Westminster 1976. Although called theology, there is a lot of philosophy in it.\n\nChapter Five\n\nDerek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.\n\nKeith Ward, Religion and Human Nature, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.\n\nBernard Williams, \"Personal Identity and Individuation\", in Problems of the Self, Cambridge: CUP, 1973.\n\nChapter Seven\n\nSimon Conway-Morris, Life's Solution, Cambridge: CUP, 2003.\n\nChapter Nine\n\nMalcolm Jeeves and Warren Brown, Neuroscience, Psychology and Religion, West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2009.\n\nMalcolm Jeeves, ed., From Cells to Souls \u2013 and Beyond, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004.\n\nFor a good account of non-reductive physicalism, see Warren Brown, Nancey Murphy and Newton Malony, Whatever Happened to the Soul? Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998.\n\nAnd for a modern fully dualist account see Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).\n\nAlso, Karl Popper and John Eccles, The Self and its Brain, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977.\n\nJohn Polkinghorne, One World, Oxford: Templeton Foundation Press, 2007.\n\nZombies, stigmergy, and Michel Cabanac can all be found in David McFarland, Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs, Oxford: OUP, 2008.\n\nAlvin Plantinga, \"Reason and Belief in God\" in Faith and Rationality, ed. Plantinga and Wolterstorff, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1983.\n\nH. H. Price, Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, Oxford: OUP, 1972, especially chapter 6.\n\nA. Quinton, \"Spaces and Times\", Philosophy, volume 37, 1962.\n\nChapter Ten\n\nDavid Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of Mind, London: Routledge, 1969.\n\nDan Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.\n\nBenjamin Libet, \"Do We Have Free Will?\", in The Volitional Brain, ed. Libet, Freeman and Sutherland, Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic, 1999.\n\nPeter Strawson, \"Freedom and Resentment\" in Freedom and Resentment and other essays, London: Methuen, 1974.\n\nChapter Fourteen\n\nSpinoza, Ethics, 1675.\n\nFrank Tipler, The Physics of Immortality, New York: Doubleday, 1994.\n\nChapter Fifteen\n\nThomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Part 1a, question 76.\n\nAristotle, De Anima.\n\nPlato, Timaeus and the Republic.\n\n## Glossary\n\nAbsolute idealism The theory that there is one Absolute Mind of which all finite minds and all matter are parts, or which that Mind generates by inner necessity.\n\nAdvaita One sort of Vedanta (see below), claiming that there is in reality only one non-dual Reality of consciousness and bliss, and that the appearance of many souls and things is an illusion.\n\nAntinomies Kant's word for the contradictions into which, he held, human reason falls when it tries to talk about reality-as-it-is-in-itself.\n\nBasic beliefs Beliefs that are not based directly on evidence \u2013 like the belief that all beliefs must be based on evidence (which is false if there are basic beliefs).\n\nCartesian dualism Descartes' view that mind and matter are different substances, and can exist apart. However, as I argue, this view is often misunderstood, since Descartes did not think that they should exist apart.\n\nCommon-sense philosophy The philosophical theory that the world really is just as most people believe it to be, and common-sense beliefs need no rational justification.\n\nCritical idealism (also called transcendental idealism) Kant's theory that we must assume that reality is ultimately mind-like, but we cannot theoretically demonstrate it, and the material world is not just in our (human) minds.\n\nCritical realism The theory that objects really do exist apart from us, and we have true knowledge of them. But the way we see them depends upon our special sense-organs and mental apparatus.\n\nDeterminism The theory that every event is wholly determined by some initial state and a set of general laws. So no event could be other than it is.\n\nDual-aspect idealism The theory that mind is the ultimate reality, but in the case of human beings, mental events are correlated strongly with physical brain-events, so that a mind can even be called the \"brain seen from inside\".\n\nDualism The belief that humans are made up of two parts, body and mind (or soul). They normally exist together, but can in principle exist apart.\n\n\"Emergent\" universe Universe in which new properties, like consciousness, emerge as matter becomes more complex and organized through time. Such a universe is not just a recycling of properties that have always existed and always will exist.\n\nEpiphenomenalism The theory that minds, consciousness, and mental properties exist, but are wholly caused by brain-events, and have no causal role in the universe.\n\nEvolutionary naturalism The belief that evolution develops by wholly physical laws, without any supernatural or mental influence.\n\nFatalism The theory that, because determinism is true, there is nothing we can do to change the future. Fate rules!\n\nHolistic explanation An explanation of the parts in terms of the whole of which they are part. For example, you may explain why a cell of the body develops as it does by referring to the whole body of which it is part.\n\nHumanism The view that it is more important to care for human welfare than to practise religious rituals. Historically, many Christians have been humanists, but in modern usage humanism often implies the rejection of belief in God.\n\nIdealism The theory that material objects would not exist without mind or consciousness, so that mind is the primary form of reality, and causes material things to exist.\n\nIntensional state A mental state that refers to something beyond itself. That \"something\" could be imaginary or fictional, like a character in a novel.\n\nKarma A Sanskrit term referrering to a law of moral reward and retribution, which determines what happens to souls in their different reincarnations.\n\nLogical positivism A philosophical system that is \"positive\", in that it believes all true assertions must refer to scientifically verifiable facts, and that is \"logical\", because this is a doctrine about meaning \u2013 that factual statements only have meaning if they do refer to such facts.\n\nMaterialism The belief that nothing exists except matter \u2013 publicly observable things with location in space and time.\n\nMetaphysics A systematic attempt to say what sorts of things exist (minds, bodies, numbers, moral truths, God, etc.), and how they relate to each other. Sometimes called a \"world view\".\n\nMultiverse The theory that our space\u2013time universe is only one of many such universe, possibly even an infinite number of them.\n\nNaive realism The theory that objects continue to exist just as they appear to us, even when we are not observing them.\n\nNaturalism Usually, the theory that all true statements must refer to \"natural\" objects \u2013 objects subject to physical laws in space and time.\n\nNon-reductive physicalism The belief that materialism (physicalism) is true, but that matter in very complex states (in brains) produces consciousness, which may even have causal power. So minds cannot exist without brains, but they have new, \"emergent\" properties which simpler forms of matter do not have.\n\n\"Open\" universe A universe which is not deterministic. The future is open to many possible alternative tracks.\n\nPhenomenalism The theory that nothing really exists except sense-data. Physical objects are logical constructs out of sense-data.\n\nPluralistic idealism The theory that mind, not matter, is the ultimate reality. But there are many minds, not just one (not just the mind of God, for example).\n\nPrimary qualities For Galileo, the qualities that any physical object must possess, whether or not it is observed \u2013 properties like position, velocity, and mass, for example.\n\nProcess philosophy The metaphysics of A. N. Whitehead, which denies there are enduring substances, but asserts that there is a continuing process of distinct events (\"actual occasions\") which make up the natural world.\n\nQualia Immediate objects of the senses, just like sense-data. But there might also be feelings, sensations, and mental images.\n\nSecondary qualities Qualities that only belong to objects when they are observed \u2013 like colour and smell. Such qualities are often said to be \"in the mind\".\n\nSense-data The things we are immediately aware of by means of our senses \u2013 patches of colour, smells, touches, and tastes.\n\nSubstance From Aristotelian philosophy, an enduring \"thing\" which is the bearer of properties (like a tree that remains the same while its leaves grow and die). One continuing substance can have many changing properties.\n\nTeleological explanation Explanation in terms of a goal or purpose, not in terms of general laws that bring some state about. For instance, \"I run in order to lose weight\" is a teleological explanation.\n\nVedanta An Indian philosophical system which assumes the truth of the Hindu scriptures (the Vedas and Upanishads), especially that \"all is Brahman\" [Absolute Mind], and builds various metaphysical systems on that.\n\nVerification principle The rule that all meaningful statements must in principle be capable of being shown to be true by some sense-experiences.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\nFirst Vintage Books Edition, August 1984\n\nCopyright \u00a9 1983 by Robert Farris Thompson\n\nAll rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Random House, Inc. in 1983.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data  \nThompson, Robert Farris.  \nFlash of the spirit.  \n1. Blacks\u2014America\u2014History. 2. Afro-Americans\u2014History.  \n3. Arts, Black\u2014America.  \n4. Afro-American arts.  \nI. Title.  \nE29.N3T48 1984 973\u2032.0496 83-40298  \neISBN: 978-0-307-87433-7\n\nv3.1\n**For Dr. and Mrs. R. F. Thompson,  \nthe late Mrs. E. B. Hood, and  \nHenriette Wyeth Hurd**\n\n# **Acknowledgments**\n\nAn artist in Nigeria once taught me a proverb: One tree cannot make a forest _(Igi kan k\u00ec s'igbo)_. In other words, a person who does not work together with his colleagues and his friends will not accomplish very much. The recognition of this truth lies behind all acknowledgments.\n\nThus with profound pleasure and gratitude I record, first of all, the names of the women and men without whose fundamental contributions in the field of African or Afro-American aesthetics I doubt this book would have been conceived at all\u2014W. E. B. DuBois, Melville J. and Frances S. Herskovits, Zora Neal Hurston, Maya Deren, Harold Courlander, Alan Lomax, Alan Merriam, Roy Sieber, Richard Alan Waterman, Marshall W. Stearns, Nat Hentoff, William Bascom, Jean Price Mars, Alejo Carpentier, Argeliers Le\u00f3n, Lydia Cabrera, Arthur Ramos, Ralph Ellison, William Fagg, Kenneth Murray, Frank Willett, Roger Bastide, Pierre Verger, Ulli Beier, Janheinz Jahn, Kwabena Nketia, and Don Fernando Ortiz. Their work encouraged my lifetime interest in African\/Afro-American musical and visual contributions.\n\nSeveral friends and colleagues generously read my manuscript, in part or in its entirety, and made many useful suggestions. Nancy Gaylord Thompson, William Rout, Richard N. Henderson, Richard and Sally Price, George Kubler, Henry Drewall, Sidney Mintz, Paul Newman, Roger Abrahams, John Szwed, Perkins Foss, John Janzen, Jan Vansina, Wyatt MacGaffey, Fu-Kiau Bunseki, Daniel Biebuyck, Nehemiah Levtzion, Charles Bird, Keith Nicklin, Araba Eko, Clarence Robins, Lydia Cabrera, Dennis Warren, Roy Sieber, Claude Savary, Harold Courlander, L. Prussin, and K. Campbelle.\n\nThe following persons helped in various ways: Vincent Scully, Nelson Ikon Wu, Charles Seymour, Sheldon Nodelman, Robert and Fi Herbert, Leonard Doob, Leon Lipson, Sumner Crosby, Arthur Wright, Anne Hanson, John Blassingame, Richard Morse, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Margaret Webster Plass, Bernard Fagg, Jacqueline Delange, Charles Ratton, J\u00fcrgen Zwernemann, Ekpo Eyo, Kenneth Murray, John Picton, Oginnin Ajirotitu, A. Onayemi Williams, Alaperu Iperu, Adisa Fagbemi, Wole Soyinka, Tahonzagbe Hountondji, C. Malcolm Watkins, Clarence Robins, Ted Holiday, John Amira, Sunta, John Mason, Babalosha Adefunmi, Akinleye Awolowo, B. C. de Groot, J. Douglas, Valdelice Gir\u00e3o, Katherine White Reswick, Morton D. May, Huguette van Geluwe, Vinigi Grottanelli, Albert Maesen, Ezio Bassani, Aldo Tagliaferri, Carlo Monzoni, Jos\u00e9 Adario dos Santos, Deoscoredes e Juana dos Santos, Vivaldo da Costa Lima, Clodimir Menezes da Silva, Renato Ferraz, Christopher Healey, Janina Rubinowitz, Gaama Gazon, Leo Fonseca e Silva, John Dwyer, Arlete Soares, Balbino, Arnaldo e Helma Marques, Oresto Mannarino, Alain Chevalier, Ragnar Widman, Bertil S\u00f6derberg, Torben Lundbaek and Paul Mork, Sylvia de Groot, Andr\u00e9 K\u00f6bben, Ambassador Franklin Williams, Ambassador and Mrs. Oakley, Lloyd and Sarah Garrison, Agogohene of Agogo, Thomas Akyea, Mr. and Mrs. Michael Hoyt, Rick Lawler, Peter Eno, Charles Miller, Chiefs of Ngbe and Obasijum at Itu and Defang (Cameroon), Obon Ndidem, Big Qua Town (Calabar), Gerry Amede, Ludovique Elien, Nathaniel Spear III, Mrs. Edward Webb, Albert Sanders, Judith Wragg Chase, Harris Lewis, Andrew Lewis, Muriel and Malcolm Bell, Mary Granger, Andr\u00e9 Phanord, Andr\u00e9 Pierre, Fr\u00e8re Cornet, Nestor Seuss, Gweta Lema, Shaji, Mrs. William R. Eve, Mr. and Mrs. Clemens de Baillou, Barbara Rivette, Elisabeth Coffman, Earle S. Teagarden, Patrick Pleskunas, Junellen Sullivan, J. Carter Brown, George Ellis, Regan Kerney, Robert L. Bernstein, and P. Lawford.\n\nI salute the strong support of my editor at Random House, Erroll McDonald, who helped to shape and protect this book; the inspiring presence of my children, Alicia and Clark; and, above all, the priestesses and priests of traditional Africa, and of Afro-America, who guard the coming of divine aspiration from heaven to this world.\n\nR.F.T.\n\n_New Haven_\n\n_October 1982_\n\n# **Contents**\n\n_Cover_\n\n_Title Page_\n\n_Copyright_\n\n_Dedication_\n\n_Acknowledgments_\n\nIntroduction\n\n[ONE Black Saints Go Marching In:  \nYoruba Art and Culture in the Americas](Thom_9780307874337_epub_c01_r1.htm)\n\n[TWO The Sign of the Four Moments of the Sun:  \nKongo Art and Religion in the Americas](Thom_9780307874337_epub_c02_r1.htm)\n\n[THREE The Rara of the Universe:  \n _Vodun_ Religion and Art in Haiti](Thom_9780307874337_epub_c03_r1.htm)\n\n[FOUR Round Houses and Rhythmized Textiles:  \nMande-Related Art and Architecture in the Americas](Thom_9780307874337_epub_c04_r1.htm)\n\n[FIVE Emblems of Prowess:  \nEjagham Art and Writing in Two Worlds](Thom_9780307874337_epub_c05_r1.htm)\n\nNotes\n\n_About the Author_\n\n# **Introduction**\n\n# **The Rise of the Black  \nAtlantic Visual Tradition**\n\nListening to rock, jazz, blues, reggae, salsa, samba, bossa nova, juju, highlife, and mambo, one might conclude that much of the popular music of the world is informed by the flash of the spirit of a certain people specially armed with improvisatory drive and brilliance.\n\nSince the Atlantic slave trade, ancient African organizing principles of song and dance have crossed the seas from the Old World to the New. There they took on new momentum, intermingling with each other and with New World or European styles of singing and dance. Among those principles are the _dominance of a percussive performance style_ (attack and vital aliveness in sound and motion); _a propensity for multiple meter_ (competing meters sounding all at once); _overlapping call and response_ in singing (solo\/chorus, voice\/instrument\u2014\"interlock systems\" of performance); _inner pulse control_ (a \"metronome sense,\" keeping a beat indelibly in mind as a rhythmic common denominator in a welter of different meters); _suspended accentuation patterning_ (offbeat phrasing of melodic and choreographic accents); and, at a slightly different but equally recurrent level of exposition, _songs and dances of social allusion_ (music which, however danceable and \"swinging,\" remorselessly contrasts social imperfections against implied criteria for perfect living).\n\n_Flash of the Spirit_ is about _visual_ and _philosophic_ streams of creativity and imagination, running parallel to the massive musical and choreographic modalities that connect black persons of the western hemisphere, as well as the millions of European and Asian people attracted to and performing their styles, to Mother Africa. Aspects of the art and philosophy of the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Republic of Benin; the Bakongo of Bas-Zaire and neighboring Cabinda, Congo-Brazzaville, and Angola; the Fon and Ewe of the Republic of Benin and Togo; the Mande of Mali and neighboring territory; and the Ejagham of the Cross River in southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon, have come from sub-Saharan Africa to the western hemisphere.\n\nAll of these traditions are ancient and charged with nobility of blood and purpose. And all of them, with the exception of the villager Ejagham, are urban. Since the Middle Ages or earlier, the ancestors of the Yoruba, the Bakongo, the Fon, and the Mande peoples have lived in commanding towns, centers of visual richness and creativity. Even the Ejagham, with their widely imitated important men and women associations, founded respectively under the sign of the leopard and the crocodile\u2014emblematic of intimidating powers of moral vengeance and strong government\u2014live surrounded by miniature versions of the trappings of the courts of ancient urban queens and kings.\n\nThese civilizations not only were impressive for their urban density, refinement, and complexity, but were empowered with an inner momentum of conviction and poise that sent them spiraling out into the world, overcoming accidents of class, status, and political oppression. The rise, development, and achievement of Yoruba, Kongo, Fon, Mande, and Ejagham art and philosophy fused with new elements overseas, shaping and defining the black Atlantic visual tradition. To portray not only the originating impulses of these different black civilizations but some sense of the special inner drive and confidence that has kept them going\u2014that showered the northeast of Brazil with famous beads and emblems and gowns of the Yoruba and Dahomey; that fundamentally enriched the culture of North America with profound and sophisticated Kongo- and Angola-influenced herbalism, mental healing and funereal traditions among black people of the Old Deep American South and so on\u2014this is the scope and sweep and purpose of this book. For several decades, scholarly concentration upon shared main organizing principles of dance and music have shown generalized African cultural unities linking the women and men of West and Central Africa to black people in the New World. This book begins the project of identifying _specifically Yoruba, Kongo Dahomean, Mande_ , and _Ejagham_ influences on the art and philosophies of black people throughout the Americas.\n\n_Flash of the Spirit_ opens with a discussion of the art and ideals of the Yoruba, black Africa's largest population, creators of one of the premier cultures of the world. The Yoruba believe themselves descended from goddesses and gods, from an ancient spiritual capital, Ile-Ile. They show their special concern for the proprieties of right living through their worship of major goddesses and gods, each essentially a unique manifestation of _\u00e0she_ , the power-to-make-things-happen, a key to futurity and self-realization in Yoruba terms. There are thousands of deities in Yoruba territory, western Nigeria and eastern Benin Republic, but only the most widely worshipped and important survived the vicissitudes of the Atlantic Trade. These deities include Eshu, spirit of individuality and change; If\u00e1, god of divination; Og\u00fan, lord of iron; Yemoja, goddess of the seas; Oshun, goddess of sweet water, love, and giving; Oshoosi, god of hunting; Obaluaiye, dread spirit of disease and earth; Nana Bukuu, his mother; Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3, the fiery thunder god, who has inspired thousands of Afro-Americans (two Afro-American religions\u2014Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3 in Trinidad and Xango in Recife in Brazil\u2014bear his name). There are many other spirits of the Yoruba, alive and brilliantly worshipped by thousands in the New World, such as Obat\u00e1l\u00e1, deity of creativity; Orisha Oko, a celestial judge and restorer of fertility in life and cultivation of the earth; Eg\u00fang\u00fan, ancestral spirits, virtual moral inquisitors, who form the world of the dead. In _Flash of the Spirit_ , I offer portraits of ten _orisha_ , deities of the Yoruba, to represent the impact of the mind and spirit of millions of Yoruba in West Africa on key black urban populations in the Americas, most notably in Havana, Salvador, Brazil, and the heavily Hispanic barrios of certain cities of the United States, especially Miami and New York. In other words, the richness of detail, moral elaboration, and emblematic power that characterize the sacred art of the Yoruba in transition to Brazil, Cuba, and the United States, as sampled in this volume, is but an introduction to a wider universe of interlocking forms that will require future books fully to explore and explain.\n\nAlso widespread across the black Atlantic world are the signs and insights of the great Kongo people of Za\u00efre, Angola, Cabinda, and Congo-Brazzaville. There is a clear connection between the cosmographic signs of spiritual renaissance in the classical religion of the Bakongo and similarly chalked signs of initiation among blacks of Cuba, Haiti, the island of St. Vincent, the United States, and Brazil where numerous Kongo slaves arrived. The Kongo sign of the four moments of the sun\u2014dawn, noon, sunset, and the mirrored noon of the dead that we call midnight\u2014the master icon of their religious and philosophic world, informs the rituals of heavily Kongo-influenced parts of the New World. Kongo, for instance, largely sparked the rise of a beautiful ideographic tradition among the Haitian people, ground-signatures of deities called _v\u00e8v\u00e8_ , and an equally famous and pervasive ground-sign tradition among the blacks and African-influenced people of Rio de Janeiro\u2014signs that are called _pontos riscados_. They can be compared with yet more signs, richly reflecting Christian and other Western influences, on the isle of St. Vincent in the black Caribbean and with others found among Kongo-Cubans and U.S. mainland blacks from Memphis to the Carolina coast. These drawings and their accompanying rituals of healing and\/or initiation reflect the confluence of originating Kongo impulses plus other African and European influences.\n\nIn Haiti occurred a deep synthesis of the main forms and tenets of the classical religions of the Yoruba, the Dahomeans, and the Bakongo that was partly informed by the saints of the Roman Catholic Church and by their attributes. The result was _vodun_ : formally speaking, one of the richest and most misunderstood religions of the planet. In the chapter on Haitian _vodun_ I will not only review those elements of Yoruba and Kongo art and thought informing the main forms of vodun, but also focus in particular on the Dahomean influence. I will describe the greatness of _vodun_ art by way of an examination of perhaps the religion's two most beautiful expressions: the ground-paintings called _v\u00e8v\u00e8_ and sequin-studded flags of mediation, for the goddesses and gods, called _drapeau de vodun_.\n\nTwo mainstreams of visual lore and creativity came from the ancient Mande to the Americas. The cone-on-cylinder building traditions of the Mande and their neighbors\u2014their special spatial patterns and proportions\u2014were models for Afro-Mexican cone-on-cylinder structures along a stretch of the southwestern littoral of Mexico locally called the \"little coast\" (La Costa Chica), a few hours south of the well-known city of Acapulco.\n\nThe specificity of design of the rhythmized textiles of the Mande and their neighbors and of the far-flung replications of this mode, mediated through the Dyula and other Mande traders, has been handsomely reexpressed in the western hemisphere. Four main Afro-American textile traditions\u2014Barbadian aprons, Afro-Suriname Djuka _as\u00e9esenti_ , and Saamaka _as\u00e9esente_ , some U.S. black quilt-tops, and Afro-Bahian _panos da costa_ \u2014show traits deriving in part from Mande and Mande-related textile traditions. Chief among these features is the sewing together of narrow strips to form multistrip textile compositions in which the accents of one strip are staggered in relation to the accents of the strip immediately adjoining it but matched with the accents of other strips in the composition. This striking style of suspended patterning is one of the most dramatic elements of African influence not only in the visual art of the Afro-American world but also in its dance and music.\n\n_Flash of the Spirit_ ends with a discussion of the ideographic writing of the Ejagham of eastern Nigeria and western Cameroon. Through the accident of their proximity to Calabar, one of the notorious slaving ports of Africa, their art and ideology of accomplishment and prowess, specially symbolized among men by the sign of the leopard, indelibly influenced the art history of western Cuba. There men of Calabar-area descent founded Cuban chapters of the male \"leopard\" associations of Calabar and the Ejagham to the north with many aspects of their art and ideographic writing recalling the sumptuousness of the feathered art of the noblewomen of Ejagham. Ejagham artistic influence in the Americas extends a deeply rooted and significant African ideographic writing system, surprising only to those who still believe that Africa alone among the continents was without letters before the arrival of whites, without a means for recording and transmitting moral and folk lore. The transformation of Ejagham _nsibidi_ writing into the creolized offshoot in Cuba known as _anaforuana_ is one of the signal achievements of the black New World.\n\n_Flash of the Spirit_ , then, illumines art and philosophy connecting black Atlantic worlds. I hope, in opening these lines of inquiry, that the identification and explanation of some of these mainlines, intellectually perceived and sensuously appreciated, will provide a measure of the achievement of African civilizations in transition to the West, for theirs is one of the great migration styles in the history of the planet.\n\n# **One**\n\n# **BLACK SAINTS  \nGO MARCHING IN**\n\n# **Yoruba Art and Culture  \nin the Americas**\n\nOne bright morning in the middle of the nineteenth century, a young American missionary, R. H. Stone, ascended a lofty granite boulder and looked down upon the Yoruba city of Abeokuta. He wrote:\n\nWhat I saw disabused my mind of many errors in regard to... Africa. The city extends along the bank of the Ogun for nearly six miles and has a population approximately 200,000... instead of being lazy, naked savages, living on the spontaneous productions of the earth, they were dressed and were industrious... [providing] everything that their physical comfort required. The men are builders, blacksmiths, iron-smelters, carpenters, calabash-carvers, weavers, basket-makers, hat-makers, mat-makers, traders, barbers, tanners, tailors, farmers, and workers in leather and morocco... they make razors, swords, knives, hoes, billhooks, axes, arrow-heads, stirrups.... women... most diligently follow the pursuits which custom has allotted to them. They spin, weave, trade, cook, and dye cotton fabrics. They also make soap, dyes, palm oil, nut-oil, all the native earthenware, and many other things used in the country.\n\nThe city of Abeokuta seethed with creative activity, belying the condescending Western image of \"primitive Africa.\"\n\nThe Yoruba are one of the most urban of the traditional civilizations of black Africa. Yoruba urbanism is ancient, dating to the Middle Ages, when their holy city, Ile-Ife, where the Yoruba believe the world began, was flourishing with an artistic force that later provoked the astonishment of the West. At a time, between the tenth and twelfth centuries, when nothing of comparable quality was being produced in Europe, the master sculptors of Ile-Ife were shaping slendid art, as exemplified by a Berlin Museum terra-cotta head (Plate 1). In the elegant conception of the head, perhaps representing a person of status or a most important spirit, can be seen the signs of spiritual alertness (the searching gaze) and self-discipline and discretion (the sealed lips), which suggest, in Yoruba symbolic terms, the confidence of the people's monarchic traditions, and the complexity and poise of their urban way of life.\n\nPLATE 1\n\nLike ancient Greece, Yorubaland consisted of self-sufficient city-states characterized by artistic and poetic richness. The Yoruba themselves cherish the creators of their aesthetic world, as one of their hunters' ballads states:\n\nnot the brave alone, they also praise those who know how to shape images in wood or compose a song.\n\nWhen the first missionaries penetrated the city of Abeokuta in the 1840's, they found that the talents of the local master carver Kashi \"had procured for him the headship of the artisans in Abeokuta, and he had great influence among the people.\"\n\nThe Yoruba assess everything aesthetically\u2014from the taste and color of a yam to the qualities of a dye, to the dress and deportment of a woman or a man. An entry in one of the earliest dictionaries of their language, published in 1858, was _amewa_ , literally \"knower-of-beauty,\" \"connoisseur,\" one who looks for the manifestation of pure artistry. Beauty is seen in the mean _(iwont\u00fanwonsi)_ \u2014in something not too tall or too short, not too beautiful (overhandsome people turn out to be skeletons in disguise in many folktales) or too ugly. Moreover, the Yoruba appreciate freshness and improvisation per se in the arts. These preoccupations are especially evident in the rich and vast body of art works celebrating Yoruba religion.\n\nThe Yoruba religion, the worship of various spirits under God, presents a limitless horizon of vivid moral beings, generous yet intimidating. They are messengers and embodiments of _\u00e0she_ , spiritual command, the power-to-make-things-happen, God's own enabling light rendered accessible to men and women. The supreme deity, God Almighty, is called in Yoruba Olorun, master of the skies. Olorun is neither male nor female but a vital force. In other words, Olorun is the supreme quintessence of _\u00e0she_.\n\nWhen God came down to give the world _\u00e0she_ , God appeared in the form of certain animals. _\u00c0she_ descended in the form of the royal python _(ere)_ , the gaboon viper _(oka olushere)_ , the earthworm _(ekolo)_ , the white snail _(lakoshe)_ , and the woodpecker _(akoko)_. God, within these animals, had, according to Yoruba belief, bestowed upon us the power-to-make-things-happen, morally neutral power, power to give, and to take away, to kill and to give life, according to the purpose and the nature of its bearer. The messengers of _\u00e0she_ reflect this complex of powers. Some are essentially dangerous, with curved venomous fangs. Others are patient and slow-moving, teaching deliberation in their careful motion. Even the earthworm has its power, \"ventilating and cooling earth without the use of teeth.\"\n\nWe find the avatars of _\u00e0she_ dramatically suggested on the body of a superb ritual ceramic bowl for the thunder god and other deities _(ikoko shango)_. Made in Oyo Yoruba territory, perhaps in the late nineteenth century or the early decades of the present century, it was found in a market in the city of Ibadan in 1964. The object (Plate 2) now forms part of the exhibition collection of the Yale University Art Gallery. Deferring for the moment a discussion of the central motif\u2014the square representing the four corners of the earth along with the three concentric circles within the square that are the triple sign of the Yoruba goddess Earth\u2014we note strong zigzag patterns in relief that suggest the coming down of _\u00e0she_ in the form of lightning. These patterns also signify the embodiment of _\u00e0she_ within the python, gaboon viper, and many other serpent messengers of the deities. Y-shaped representations bespeak the balancing of this fiery enabling power upon thunderstaffs, i.e., double meteorites upon a royal scepter. Above these Y-shaped thunderstaffs appear smooth rectangular emblems representing thunderstones themselves come from heaven. Time and again the story of the descent of God's _\u00e0she_ , in multiple forms, in multiple avatars, is suggested ideographically upon this important vessel. To the right and left of the central square emblem appear chiefly scepters, underscoring the essential nobility of the persons who embody and comprehend the power-to-make-things-happen. The three concentric circles suggest three stones, the kind Yoruba women use to support their cooking vessels, meaning that adherence to the moral sanctions of Earth supports us all, safeguarding the equilibrium of the country and its people.\n\nSome trees are also thought to be avatars of _\u00e0she_ , sentinels guarding the Yoruba universe. The mighty teaklike _iroko (Chlorophora excelsa)_ is often so honored in traditional towns by the tying of a white cloth to its trunk as an offering. Iron, as time-resistant as the towering _iroko_ when specially consecrated, is also believed to contain _\u00e0she_. _\u00c0she_ may also be present in a drop of semen or a drop of blood\u2014for many Yoruba, red, \"supreme presence of color,\" signals _\u00e0she_ and potentiality.\n\n\u00c0she has other formal representations, including iron staffs, iron sculptures of serpents and long-beaked birds, and even the fluid of snails poured over altar emblems.\n\nPLATE 2\n\nA thing or a work of art that has _\u00e0she_ transcends ordinary questions about its makeup and confinements: it is divine force incarnate. This richest of all privileges is merited by the highest women and men of the land: the master priestesses, the diviners, the kings, the most important chiefs. All have _\u00e0she_. And even their words are susceptible to transposition into spirit-invoking and predictive experiences, for _\u00e0she_ literally means \"So be it,\" \"May it happen.\"\n\nYoruba kings provide the highest link between the people, the ancestors, and the gods. Their relation to the Creator is given in the praise poem _Oba alashe ekeji orisha_ , \"The king, as master of _\u00e0she_ , becomes the second of the gods.\" Birds, especially those connoting the _\u00e0she_ of \"the mothers,\" those most powerful elderly women with a force capable of mystically annihilating the arrogant, the selfishly rich, or other targets deserving of punishment, are often depicted in bead embroidery clustered at the top of the special crowns worn by Yoruba kings (Plate 3) signifying that the king rules by mastering and participating in the divine command personified by them. These feathered avatars brilliantly rendered in shining beads protect the head of the supreme leader. The veil that hangs across the wearer's face protects ordinary men and women from the searing gaze of the king in a state of ritual unity with his forebears.\n\nPLATE 3\n\nRitual contact with divinity underscores the religious aspirations of the Yoruba. To become possessed by the spirit of a Yoruba deity, which is a formal goal of the religion, is to \"make the god,\" to capture numinous flowing force within one's body. When this happens, the face of the devotee usually freezes into a mask, a mask often (but not always) held during the entire time of possession by the spirit. _\u00e0she_ is untranslatable. But it is clearly manifest in prophecy and predictive grace; hence persons possessed by the spirit of a Yoruba deity are believed to speak of things yet to come. They attract large crowds wherever they appear. They look about grandly with fixed expressions, with eyes sometimes wide and protuberant. The radiance of the eyes, the magnification of the gaze, reflects _\u00e0she_ , the brightness of the spirit. According to the Yoruba:\n\nThe gods have \"inner\" or \"spiritual\" _eyes (oj\u00fa in\u00fan)_ with which to see the world of heaven and \"outside eyes\" _(oj\u00fa ode)_ with which to view the world of men and women. When a person comes under the influence of a spirit, his ordinary eyes swell to accommodate the inner eyes, the eyes of the god. He will then look very broadly across the whole of all the devotees, he will open his eyes abnormally.\n\nIn addition to _\u00e0she, iwa_ (character) is another crucially important consideration in Yoruba religion and art. The Yoruba impart to many figurations a sense of ideal noble character by details of attitude and gesture as well as the use sometimes of white-colored media. Character is a force infusing physical beauty with everlastingness. \"I want to deliberate on this,\" an elder of Ipokia, capital of the Anago Yoruba, once told me, \"beauty is a part of coolness but beauty does not have the force that character has. Beauty comes to an end. Character is forever.\"\n\nThe importance of good character _(iwa rere)_ , which is virtually synonymous with coolness, with gentle generosity of character _(iwa pele)_ , is poetically rendered by the Yoruba:\n\nA man may be very, very handsome\n\nHandsome as a fish within the water\n\nBut if he has no character\n\nHe is no more than a wooden doll.\n\nPLATE 4\n\nPLATE 5\n\nPLATE 6\n\nAccording to the Yoruba art historian Babatunde Lawal, the Yoruba see the force of inner character operating as a smoky flame _(eefin n'iwa)_ easy to detect, for outward beauty can be burned through by inner ugliness or selfishness.\n\nLike _\u00e0she_ , good character originates in God. God is praised as Lord of Character _(olu iwa)_. Hence, that which attains proximity to the divine generally is progressively imbued with fine character. Artistic signs communicating this noble quality, _iwa_ , are often white. Immaculate white cloths may be honorifically draped over sculpture honoring gods or ancestors famed for spotlessness of reputation, as in the case of the cult of Obatala, the god of creativity. Purity of sculptural presentation; symmetry; balance: these qualities can memorably imply _iwa. Iwa_ also means custom, the traditional ways of life. An image portraying a person fulfilling the canons of the land in terms of fine posture or careful hands-to-the-sides gestures of spiritual alertness (Plate 4), or giving to an elder in the correct and prescribed manner\u2014with _both_ hands\u2014(Plates 5, 6) suggests submission to moral authority or to higher forces.\n\nA main focus of the presentation of ideal character in Yoruba art is the human head, magnified and carefully enhanced by detailed coiffure or headgear. This tendency, in combination with the use of the symbolic color of good character, white, is strikingly present in the Yoruba shrine of the head _(il\u00e9 or\u00ed)_. It is often a pointed, crownlike box, lavishly covered with a sheath of cowrie shells (Plate 7) to represent the riches a good head\u2014good character\u2014will bring, for cowries were the traditional currency of Yorubaland.\n\nAccording to traditional authority, shrines of the head also conceal, in the covering of the shining white shells, an allusion to a certain perching bird, whose white feathers are suggested by the overlapping cowries. This is the \"bird of the head\" _(eiye ororo)_ , enshrined in whiteness, the color of _iwa_ , and in purity. It is the bird which, according to the Yoruba, God places in the head of man or woman at birth as the emblem of the mind. The image of the descent of the bird of mind fuses with the image of the coming down of God's _\u00e0she_ in feathered form.\n\nThe sense of certainty, which character and _\u00e0she_ confer, is enriched by mystic coolness _(itutu)_ , whose emblematic color is often blue or indigo or green. Lawal introduces us to this sovereign concept, which cuts across virtually the whole of Yoruba figuration:\n\nTo tame or pacify is to \"cool the face\" _(tu l'oju)_. Thus, providing the non-figurative symbol of an orisha with sculptured face facilitates the pacification of that orisha, for what has a face is controllable.\n\nMuch Yoruba art is informed by _itutu_. To carve a calm face upon a represented thunderstone, or upon an abstract divination tray, or to incise it upon the swelling curves of a calabash for sacred things is to provide critical focus for acts of sacrifice and devotion.\n\nFurther manifestations of aesthetic coolness in Yoruba art include representations of idealized action. We must take care not to stress character and coolness as separate semantic structures because they shade into each other and also blur into the existential definition of _\u00e0she_. The interrelation of the concepts is explicitly given in vernacular testimony from the capital of the Anago:\n\nPLATE 7\n\nCoolness or gentleness of character is so important in our lives. _Coolness is the correct way you represent yourself to a human being_. When I saw you, I opened my cap. It is _itutu_ , answering past _itutu_ you made to me.\n\nThe phrasing is significant\u2014 _opening_ the cap, instead of doffing or removing it, in Western parlance, is a sign of generosity of response, of coolness in life and art. Thus Yoruba art abounds with images of men or women proffering a vessel. Witness a thunder god scepter-image of a naked kneeling woman supporting her breasts, with both hands (Plate 8). This is a sign of giving\u2014\"This milk shall be the sustenance of my children.\" It relates to another frequent image, the man or woman who presents an open, empty kola bowl (Plate 9), held with both hands, again as a sign of honor and respect. In the case of women, the location of the bowl at the level of the womb deliberately hints at the giving of children to the world.\n\nGenerosity, the highest form of morality in Yoruba traditional terms, is suggested yet another way: by the symbolized offering of something by a person to a higher force through the act of kneeling. Thus a senior priest: \"If you wish to talk to an elder, you do not stand, you kneel. When presenting a plate of food to someone important, _kneel_ as you make the presentation. _Kneel_ and give with _both_ hands, the left with the right, the 'mother hand' and the 'father hand,' the hand-which-keeps and the hand-which-acts\" (Plate 5). Giving with both hands, in a gesture of submission, emphasizes in traditional terms the act of giving as an embodiment of character and perfect composure, a point given further focus, in both art and life, by the firmness of the facial expression that accompanies the noble act.\n\n\"Constant smiling is not a Yoruba characteristic,\" a village elder once told me. Sealed lips, frequent in Yoruba statuary, are a \"sign of seriousness.\" They, too, imply the coolness of the image, as in an idiom that refers to discretion in ordinary discourse: \"His mouth is cool\" _(\u1eb9nu \u00e8 t\u00fat\u00f9), which is one of the ways the Yoruba would say, \"He fell silent.\"_ 22 _Like character, coolness ought to be internalized as a governing principle for a person to merit the high praise \"His heart is cool\" _(okan \u00e8 tutu). In becoming sophisticated, a Yoruba adept learns to differentiate between forms of spiritual coolness: (1) direct sacrifice _(ebo)_ , the cooling of the gods by the giving of cherished object\u2014such as the proffering of a ram to the thunder god; and (2) propitiation _(irele)_ , the utterance of conciliatory words or acts to hardened or angered deities, entreating them to become generous and concerned at times of crisis, such as birth, death, or initiation._ _A three-figure image for the deity Earth (ere_ Ogboni_), carved in Abeokuta in the twentieth century (Plate 10), splendidly illustrates cooling by propitiation. Here, where a male helper holds a fan, a literal sign of coolness and rank, a woman cools _(tu)_ her spiritual superior, the towering Ogboni cult leader with his staff of office, by prostrating herself on her right side. Through this gesture, called _yinrinka_ , a female member of a compound traditionally paid her respects every morning to the head man and head woman of the compound. (The corresponding male gesture of submission, _idobale_ , involved a complete prostration of the body on the ground. It was used also in saluting superiors.) The notion of coolness in Yoruba art extends beyond representations of the act of sacrifice and acts or gestures of propitiation. So heavily charged is this concept with ideas of beauty and correctness that a fine carnelian bead or a passage of exciting drumming may be praised as \"cool.\"\n\nPLATE 8\n\nPLATE 9\n\nPLATE 10\n\nCoolness, then, is a part of character, and character objectifies proper custom. To the degree that we live generously and discreetly, exhibiting grace under pressure, our appearance and our acts gradually assume virtual royal power. As we become noble, fully realizing the spark of creative goodness God endowed us with\u2014the shining _ororo_ bird of thought and aspiration\u2014we find the confidence to cope with all kinds of situations. This is _\u00e0she_. This is character. This is mystic coolness. All one. Paradise is regained, for Yoruba art returns the idea of heaven to mankind wherever the ancient ideal attitudes are genuinely manifested.\n\nThe Yoruba remain the Yoruba precisely because their culture provides them with ample philosophic means for comprehending, and ultimately transcending, the powers that periodically threaten to dissolve them. That their religion and their art withstood the horrors of the Middle Passage and firmly established themselves in the Americas (New York City, Miami, Havana, Matanzas, Recife, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro) as the slave trade effected a Yoruba diaspora\u2014reflects the triumph of an inexorable communal will.\n\nYoruba traditional culture and religious art had seemed destined for total obliteration in the wake of the slave trade, civil wars, and modernization. By the early decades of the nineteenth century the stability of western Yorubaland had been destroyed. The protective military arm of the old empire of the Oyo Yoruba, centered in their capital city of Oyo-Ile near the Niger River, collapsed during severe political dislocations following the end of the reign of King Awole in 1796. The western and northwestern groups of Yorubaland were consequently harassed by Dahomean slave-hunting warriors and Fulani horsemen, and later even by other Yoruba. Refugees fled to the south, where they banded together in new settlements, such as Ibadan and Abeokuta, for protection. These camps rapidly became cities, only to come in conflict with ancient established kingdoms, such as the Ijebu.\n\nWith the restraining hand of Oyo weakened, inevitably civil wars flared, starting with conflict at the ancient city of Owu in 1821. Ijebu began selling Egba and Ibadan captives; Egba and Ibadan retaliated. By 1845 Ibadan, successor to Oyo's power, had evolved into a military state and marched east to capture and sell Ijesha Yoruba, for the latter's capital, Ilesha, was the strongest northeastern kingdom and hence an obvious candidate for conquest in Ibadan's search for expansion into the area. While all this was happening, the Yoruba were beset by the Atlantic slave trade.\n\nNew World Yoruba emerged from all this strife. Ketu Yoruba men and women captured by the Dahomeans turned up in Haiti and Brazil, where to this day they are called by the Dahomean word _nago_. Oyo and other captives of the Fulani were brought to Cuba, Brazil, and the Caribbean, notably Trinidad. The Yoruba of Cuba were called Lucum\u00ed, probably after an ancient Yoruba phrase meaning \"my friend\" _(oluku mi)_. Thus the deities\u2014the orisha\u2014of the city-states of Oyo and Ketu were introduced to Cuba and Brazil, where the names of particular goddesses and gods of abiding fame\u2014Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3, Yemoja (often called Yemay\u00e1 in the New World), Oshoosi, Orisha Oko, Eyinle\u2014derived from the Oyo region. The cults of Oyo and Ketu deities (the latter including especially Obaluaiye, Omoolu, and Nana Bukuu) were reinforced by their encounter with most of the principal Yoruba deities: Eshu, Ifa, Osanyin, Ogun, and Obatala. Yoruba-influenced Ewe, Popo, and Fon slaves from territory directly to the west of Yorubaland brought their own cults and also influenced the syncretism of deities. A remarkable fusion of _orisha_ , long separated by civil war and intra-Yoruba migrations, took place in the New World.\n\nWhat is more, especially in Cuba and Brazil, New World Yoruba were introduced to the cult of Roman Catholic saints, learned their attributes, and worked out a series of parallelisms linking Christian figures and powers to the forces of their ancient deities. Thus the smallpox deity was equated, in some places, with Saint Lazarus because of the latter's wounds illustrated in chromolithographs. Thus the Virgin Mary was sometimes equated with the sweet and gentle aspect of the multifaceted goddess of the river, Oshun. Thus Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3, the Yoruba thunder god, in Cuba was frequently equated with Saint Barbara, whose killers were struck dead by God with lightning.\n\nYoruba-Americans, outwardly abiding by the religious proprieties of the Catholics who surrounded them, covertly practiced a system of thought that was a creative reorganization of their own traditional religion. Luminously intact in the memories of black elders from Africa, the goddesses and the gods of the Yoruba entered the modern world of the Americas. They came with their praises _(or\u00edk\u00ec)_ , extraordinary poems of prowess that defined the moral and aesthetic reverberation of their presence.\n\n## **Portraits of Major _Orisha_**\n\n### Eshu-Elegba\n\nAccording to legend, at a crossroads in the history of the Yoruba gods, when each wished to find out who, under God, was supreme, all the deities made their way to heaven, each bearing a rich sacrificial offering on his or her head. All save one. Eshu-Elegbara, wisely honoring beforehand the deity of divination with a sacrifice, had been told by him what to bring to heaven\u2014a single crimson parrot feather _(ekodide)_ , positioned upright upon his forehead, to signify that he was not to carry burdens on his head. Responding to the fiery flashing of the parrot feather, the very seal of supernatural force and _\u00e0she_ , God granted Eshu the force to make all things happen and multipy _(\u00e0she)_. _Outward_ signs of submission and material bounty were no match for wisdom and humility. Once granted his powers of dominion, Eshu, instead of arrogantly subordinating everyone to himself, did the \"cool\" (generously appropriate) thing: he gave a vast commemorative feast to share his newfound prestige, and to honor God for the priceless treasures of _\u00e0she_. And he warned those who did not recognize his status that he would bend them, \"like a string upon a bow,\" or pound them \"like a shell.\"\n\nThe sign of the crimson feather worn upon the brow, the seat of mind and judgment, was clearly interpreted as a symbol of _\u00e0she_ and the techniques of ritual assuagement _(etutu)_ that lead to the attainment of _\u00e0she_. Representing both the means and the end, the red parrot feather is seen today in initiatory contexts in the Yoruba religion ranging from the Benin Republic to Bahia in Brazil. _\u00c0she_ is a privilege of righteous living, not a right, and it can be seriously diminished when someone has slighted a deity or an important person. This means that one must cultivate the art of recognizing significant communications, knowing what is truth and what is falsehood, or else the lessons of the crossroads\u2014the point where doors open or close, where persons have to make decisions that may forever after affect their lives\u2014will be lost.\n\nEshu consequently came to be regarded as the very embodiment of the crossroads. Eshu-Elegbara is also the messenger of the gods, not only carrying sacrifices, deposited at crucial points of intersection, to the goddesses and to the gods, but sometimes bearing the crossroads to us in verbal form, in messages that test our wisdom and compassion (\"Is this true; shall I help him; what larger purpose opens up beyond this message?\"). He sometimes even \"wears\" the crossroads as a cap, colored black on one side, red on the other, provoking in his wake foolish arguments about whether his cap is black or red, wittily insisting by implication that we view a person or a thing from all sides before we form a general judgment.\n\nBecause of his provocative nature, Eshu has been characterized by missionaries and Western-minded Yoruba alike as \"the Devil.\" Outwardly mischievous but inwardly full of overflowing creative grace, Eshu-Elegbara eludes the coarse nets of characterization. Even his names compound his mystery. Some call him Eshu, \"the childless wanderer, alone, moving only as a spirit.\" Others call him Elegbara (or Elegba), \"owner-of-the-power\" (the ever-multiplying power communicated by the crimson feather that he bore to heaven), a royal child, a prince, a monarch. He is, of course, all these beings and more\u2014the ultimate master of potentiality. Eshu becomes the imperative companion-messenger of each deity, the imperative messenger-companion of the devotee. The cult of Eshu-Elegbara thus transcends the limits of ordinary affiliation and turns up wherever traditionally minded Yoruba may be.\n\nSo it was that Eshu-Elegbara became one of the most important images in the black Atlantic world. Blacks honor him in Cuba, for example, where \"men or women of African descent pour cool water at crossroads\u2014unobtrusively if white strangers be about\u2014in honor of Eshu.\" Cuban blacks associate Eshu with change: \"favorable, he modifies the worst of fates; hostile, he darkens the most brilliant of happenings.\" And thousands honor him today in Rio de Janeiro, where candles begging Eshu's favor may be lit in the gutters at intersections, in the very shadows of the skyscrapers that line the beaches of Ipanema or Copacabana. Aware of the complexity of his nature, whose different sides are symbolized by different names, Afro-Cubans share with Nigerians the belief that Eshu is a homeless wanderer, \"whose mood is perpetual evil,\" while Elegba is demonstrably less difficult.\n\nWitness against this shared exegetic backdrop the richness of art concerning Eshu-Elegbara on both shores of the Atlantic. The most important icons of this spirit in Africa are figures in lateritic earth and clay. These forms took root deeply in Cuba, Brazil, Miami, and Spanish Harlem. Wood sculpture, which is regarded within the cult as less ancient and consequently less essential, is divided in Nigeria and the Benin Republic into several categories: tiny supplicant figurines; paired male and female images united by a richly cowrie-studded strand; large ceremonial, figurated dance-hooks, which rest in ceremonial context upon the performer's shoulders; large votive images for decorating shrines and gates to the compounds of the illustrious and the great. Of these, only paired male and female icons sometimes reappeared on New World altars, and even they had attributes\u2014such as an upright knife upon the head, as an emblem of Eshu's wonder-working powers, the limitlessness of his _\u00e0she_ \u2014that were more generally shared and communicated by images in clay in the black Americas.\n\nThe descendants of the Yoruba in Cuba tell a myth relating to Eshu's clay imagery:\n\nOnce upon a time there was a child named Eshu who was always telling lies. One day young Eshu met a pair of terrifying eyes, shining in the shadows of a shell of a cocoanut, lying by a crossroads.\n\nHe told his parents about this marvel (his parents were king and queen) but no one would believe him, such was his reputation for mendacity. And so Eshu was left alone, soon to die a mysterious death, caused by unknown influences emanating from the eyes beside the crossroads. He had not honored these disembodied eyes [which may have been his own!] and that is why he died.\n\nNor did the members of the court see fit to offer sacrifice beside these eyes, still burning with a sinister light. Suddenly death and disaster struck the world with annihilating force. Divination priests were summoned. Ultimately they found the crossroads where the eyes once gleamed. But by this time the shell had weathered into nothing; the eyes were gone. Whereupon the priests then selected a certain stone, soothed it with assuaging fluid. By this rite they caused the spirit of the god Eshu to come from the forest to live within this stone, there to receive their profferings of honor. And so Eshu was properly honored, by sacrificial signs of honor and respect, and order returned to the world.\n\nIn Yorubaland itself, the \"stone\" of atonement was actually a piece of lateritic earth and believed to be the oldest icon of Eshu. Consider a letter, written in 1919 by a Christian convert at Ibadan, relating to Eshu sculpture in wood that once belonged to the writer's father and was probably carved toward the end of the nineteenth century:\n\nMy late father was once the chief worshipper of the gods of mischief, Eshu or Elegbara. Formerly these gods were not represented in human form [i.e., figurated wood] but were adored in the shape of a stone\u2014a kind of laterite or sandstone\u2014but the number of their worshippers increasing, wood statues of these gods began to be made.\n\nLaterite is said to be the oldest and most important medium for representing Eshu, Eshu-Yangi, father of all Eshu. I assume that the custom of marking the presence of Eshu with lateritic cones of hard red clay extends at least as far back as 1659; surviving exemplars of relief sculpture representing Eshu at that time indicate that other iconographic particulars of his image were complete.\n\nThe cone of laterite _(yangi)_ appears in Yoruba markets over which cult officials pour daily offerings of palm oil to maintain Eshu's problematic coolness. Laterite-cone altars to Eshu recall a myth whereby Eshu devoured enormous quantities of fish and fowl offered to him by his mother, and finally devoured his mother, too. Whereupon his father, the god of divination, alarmed, himself consulted a divination expert and was told to sacrifice a sword, a male goat, and fourteen thousand cowries. The god of divination did as he was told. Consequently, when Eshu threatened to devour him, too, the god took a sword and hacked him to pieces, and the pieces became individual _yangi_ , lateritic shards. Orunmila pursued Eshu through nine heavens until finally, in the last heaven, Eshu was pacified by Orunmila and said that all the particles of his spirit, the _yangi_ stones and shards, would become his representatives. All Orunmila had to do was to consult them (make sacrifice upon them and ask a blessing) whenever he wanted to send them on a mystic mission. Eshu then returned his mother, alive, to the world. His terrifying gluttony had therefore concealed an abundant generosity, the many pieces of laterite, the myriad Eshu. This represents the fact that he can take anything away\u2014or give it back\u2014according to whether his surrogates in clay are worshipped with sacrifice and devotion.\n\nJuana Elbein dos Santos strikes to the core of this legend:\n\neach individual is constituted and accompanied by his personal Eshu, the element which permits his birth, ultimate development, and progeny.... in order that [Eshu] can fulfill harmoniously a person's cycle of existence, the person must without fail restore, through sacrifices, the _\u00e0she_ devoured, in a real or metaphoric way, by his principle of individualized existence.\n\nEshu the prince devoured the truth by lying, never sacrificing, heedless of the damage done, and paid for his arrogance, when he finally told the truth, by dying. Thus in the Afro-Cuban myth Eshu devours himself but once again returns when proper sacrifice, centered upon a piece of stone, is made. The story of Eshu is an intricate retelling of the Yoruba belief that the highest form of morality is sharing and generosity\u2014the strongest talisman to hold against jealousy.\n\nAt some time the lateritic cones and pillars, which stand to remind the world of Eshu's power to disintegrate or multiply all happening, became figurated. Adding a note of literal sacrifice, cowrie shells, the ancient Yoruba coinage, mark the eyes and mouth of these figures of Eshu. Such images, like _yangi_ before them, could be fashioned within a shrine or at a crossroads or upon a threshold. They appear very widely in Yoruba and Yoruba-influenced lands.\n\nFrom western Togo comes an arresting exemplar (Plate 11). It was collected at Misah\u00f6he, Togo, in 1912 and is now in the Linden Museum, in Stuttgart. Here Legba (Elegbara) is a tiny rounded head of whitened clay, set on a rounded neck and shoulders also made of clay, the whole set, with feathers, within an earthenware dish similarly coated with whitish clay. This silent, staring little sprite, like the head and shoulders of a human embryo suddenly exposed, projects an image that is at once spectral and unfinished-looking. The gazing eyes recall the Afro-Cuban myth's burning orbs within the shell beside the crossroads. Diminutive dimensions and the use of clay as the main material recall the original animate fragments of laterite into which Eshu was divided.\n\nPLATE 11\n\nThe custom of making small votive images for Eshu was strongly reinstated in western Cuba. Many images were made of clay in Cuba, while some, in stone, were given eyes and mouths either by incisions or with paint, including a sui generis image, shown in a work published by Lydia Cabrera in 1954, carved in the form of a profile of the little spirit's head. Clay heads positioned in an earthenware pan ( _cazuela de barro_ ), analogous to the Ewe mode, emerged also in western Cuba. This is a hint that the rising style acquired its force through fusion of both Ewe\/Dahomean (Arar\u00e1) and Yoruba (Lucum\u00ed) manners of formal exposition. Moreover, clay and small stone sculpture were portable artifacts easy to hide from strangers, even under conditions of far-reaching oppression.\n\nThe vitality of reemergence is evinced by the numerous modes of Afro-Cuban clay statuary for Elegba. An elegantly innovative example of a style that apparently flourished in Havana in the nineteenth century was given as a gift to Lydia Cabrera by Asikpa, El Moro, a follower of the Yoruba gods. The artist took the round earthenware bowl and centered in it the image, as an inspiration for creative repetition of its circular shape, in a ring of gleaming cowries marking the shoulders of the figure, and, in a secondary ring, the neck.\n\nPLATE 12\n\nThe ways of rendering Elegba in stone and clay were countered in the twentieth century by yet another Afro-Cuban mode, Elegba rendered in concrete. By 1954 the mode was well established in Havana, where Sidney W. Mintz collected an example at a market in the summer of 1956 (Plate 12). Such images, essentially conical in shape, were creole transformations, as it were, of the ancient market cone of laterite. Here the tip of the cone is perforated, to receive a single nail, which is meant to suggest the wonder-working knife of Eshu Odara, who worked miracles with a knife erect upon his head.\n\nThe original lateritic shards became two hundred Eshu, and then two hundred more, in the telling of the origin of Eshu-Yangi (Eshu-the-Mound-of-Laterite). And, similarly, Afro-Cuban Eshu images multiplied wondrously. As the guardian of the threshold and keeper of the gate, not unlike the earthen Legba outside the compound entrances of Dahomey, they were placed in containers and concealed behind the main entrance to a person's house. \"Fed, there is no danger, but forgotten, something begins to happen,\" a Cuban woman told me in 1979.\n\nThe tradition of guarding homes with images of Eshu came with black Hispanic people from the Caribbean to New York City and Miami in the decades after World War II. Today clay or concrete images for Elegba in the United States number in the hundreds.\n\nEshu statuary is strongly rooted in Spanish-speaking New York City. Some fine examples\u2014from the collection of Christopher Oliana, himself one of the founding fathers of the Yoruba religion among mainland blacks in New York City\u2014grace the permanent exhibition of Afro-Americana at the Museum of Natural History.\n\nIn the northeast of Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century Eshu-Bara was represented by anthills. Given the incontestable impact of Kongo and Angola cultures upon black Brazil, as well as the importance of the termite mound as a sign of the dead in those portions of Central Africa, arriving Fon, Ewe, and Yoruba slaves may have merged an already well-established mystic usage of earthen mounds with the concept of the lateritic cones of Eshu.\n\nThe Yoruba of Bahia and their cultural allies, the Brazilian descendants of the Ewe (Gege) and the Fon, reintroduced the ancient household altar of Eshu\u2014small head and shoulders set within a dish or bowl. From a turn-of-the-century account: \"a ball of clay congealed with the blood of a bird, palm oil, and an infusion of sacred herbs, reproduces a human face, the eyes and mouth of which are represented by three small shells or cowries, inserted in the mass before it dries.\"\n\nAt some point a nineteenth-century continuity was complicated by a quest for a novel form, a building up of the image within a bowl in such a manner that it would rise up out of its container and begin to gesture. The latter trend was apparent by 1945 in Recife (though it may well have occurred before that time), where an Eshu-Bara was photographed.\n\nRio conceals its share of clay Eshu mounted in bowls. But this former Brazilian capital, like Havana, is heir to a modern mode in which concrete is used in the making of such images. Consider a smoothly finished \"Eshu Boi\" now in the Museu de Pol\u00edcia (Plate 13) that was probably made before 1941. In Dahomean Yorubaland, around Ouidah, I have seen large freestanding images for Elegba with mystic signs of the divination deity marked in inserted cowries on the chest of the image that are precisely one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Rio icon. The solid oval head of this image is hinged to an equally solid mass of truncal concrete, with the latter's starkness relieved by rounded suggestions of shoulders, arms, and trunk. Affection for Eshu softens the hardness of the medium, not unlike a stone transmuted into a child's stuffed animal, and this is appropriate to Eshu's fusion of valences that are both childlike (insatiable eating) and mature (restitution of what is right to those who sacrifice).\n\nPLATE 13\n\nClay and concrete Eshu have symbolic resonance\u2014sacrificial shells, where embedded, bring to life the spirit who, though reduced to shards, has nonetheless retained the energies upon which the development of our individuality depends.\n\nThe powers of Elegba are similarly retold in Nigerian Yoruba wood sculpture, e.g., indigo-painted images of a man and a woman joined by a cowrie-studded leather strap of the kind worn by women devotees, which is deliberately displayed upsidedown. An early European document of the genre appeared in an engraving (Plate 14) in a book about missionary life in the village of Oshielle, eight miles east of the city of Abeokuta. The book was published in 1857. In fact the engraving was based upon a drawing made in Oshielle of an actual specimen of paired male and female Eshu sculptures, which Reverend Townsend, a missionary, took back to Exeter, England, in 1868 (Plate 15). The engraving and the original both show a cylindrical base from which hang strands of cowries and a calabash-of-power ( _ado iran_ ), communicating Eshu's ability to endlessly multiply his force.\n\nPLATE 14\n\nSome Egbado Yoruba villagers say such images represent Elegba and his wife. This complements a deeper interpretation of Eshu as the principle of life and individuality who combines male and female valences. Here both the male and female figures have bulging eyes, which for Yoruba embody the power-to-make-things-happen, the gift Eshu received from God in heaven. This hint of awesome potentiality is softened by the generosity of the woman's gesture, a giving of her breasts, but sharpened by the male's presentation of arms both real (a club or sword) and mystic (a calabash containing power). Their protruding eyes and the male's calabash foretell a miracle that unfolds upon their heads, from which springs up a bladelike element structurally equivalent to the knife-atop-the-head that identifies Eshu in some of his clay and concrete avatars. Here the knives have been transformed into serpent heads, recalling a praise poem for Eshu, who \"makes a whistle from the head of a serpent\" (Plate 16). As if to emphasize the limitlessness of Eshu's wonder-working, calabash containers of self-multiplying power surmount the serpents' heads.\n\nWhen a knifelike element rises out of Elegba's head, it is a sign that the display of his powers has begun, the illustration of the wonder _(ara)_ from which his special name, Eshu Odara, \"the Wonder-Worker,\" derives. Songs for Odara in Ilodo and Ouidah in West Africa mention this wondrous knife as a reference to the fact that the pointed head of Eshu cannot shoulder ordinary burdens. Slightly modified, these songs reemerged among the blacks of Bahia and Havana and, later, in Hispanic New York City and Miami. Their lyrics conceal a visual pun on the single crimson feather that Eshu wore erect upon his head in the presence of the Almighty. Both feather and knife are described as preventing Eshu's head from being used to support an ordinary burden.\n\nIn the wake of this continuing and systematic lore, it was inevitable that nails and other objects would be used to simulate the knife atop the head of Eshu in the clay and concrete sculptures of Havana and Harlem. The sharply pointed knife _(shonsho abe)_ that crowns the head of Eshu is the striking element of a wooden image of him that was collected (probably in 1927) by Arthur Ramos in Bahia (Plate 17). The Ramos piece compares nicely with the Townsend images in Exeter (Plate 15). The expressive play of mass that enlivens the Nigerian images is, however, muted in Brazil. There the simple renderings of line and silhouette are indicative of the maker's apparent wish for leanness of expression. The Brazilian Elegba image holds the calabash-of-power, flaunting the power to make things multiply. This charming Afro-Brazilian figure is in the strongest tradition of visually rendering the Eshu knife.\n\nPLATE 15\n\nPLATE 16\n\nPLATE 17\n\nPLATE 18\n\nFurther transatlantic reinstatements extend the attributes of Elegba. His dance-hook or club becomes a simple hook in Cuba, sometimes painted red and black. The Ulm If\u00e1 divination tray, one of the oldest known pieces of Yoruba wood sculpture and carved before 1659 (Plate 19), includes, at \"seven o'clock\" in the interior circle, an image of Eshu with tailed headdress, sucking his thumb. In the upper right-hand quadrant of the outer square there is another image, perhaps Elegba, smoking a pipe. These are ancient representations of the flagrant orality of Elegba, hints of a propensity to absorb and to devour. His pipe remains an important emblem and so he appears in Cuba, shaped in clay and set in a vessel in the Ewe manner, with a pipe beside him. The icons of Elegba seemingly are infinite. They are figures representing the supreme importance of attaining spiritual coolness through direct sacrifice _(ebo)_ and ritual reconciliation _(irele)_ , acts that protect the mirroring imperative of the actualization of individuality\u2014points intuited in a final example of Eshu sculpture, an image in wood that once graced the compound entrance of Ogabunna, chief of Ikija quarter, Abeokuta, during the first half of the nineteenth century (Plate 18). Here kneeling suggests submission, sacrifice, and propitiation, while the carefully positioned clublike element and the towering headdress are intimations of _\u00e0she_ , and multiplication of the self.\n\n### If\u00e1\n\nWhenever traditional Yoruba encounter change or challenge in the world of Eshu, the limitations of individual calm and wisdom become acute. In such a case a person relies on the accumulated insights of the poetic chants of the Yoruba divination system called If\u00e1 to place his or her individual problem in perspective. Thus Abimbola: \"If\u00e1 divination is performed by the Yoruba during all their important rites of passage such as naming and marriage ceremonies, funeral rites and the installation of kings. In traditional Yoruba society, the authority of If\u00e1 permeated every aspect of life because the Yoruba regard If\u00e1 as the voice of the divinities and the wisdom of the ancestors.\"\n\nPLATE 19\n\nThere are many forms of countering uncertainty with divination in Yoruba culture, including the throwing of kola nuts _(obi)_ on the ground, the casting of cowrie shells _(owo)_ , water-gazing, mirror-gazing, and receiving ecstatic prophecy from a deity speaking through an initiated priest or priestess. Over these systems If\u00e1 rules supreme. The lifetime study demanded to maintain If\u00e1 and the respect traditional Yoruba have for the analytic reach of its verses can be indicated by a single proverb: \"Stargazing is no substitute for If\u00e1's knowledge.\"\n\nThe literature of If\u00e1 divination divides into sixteen main parts called _odu_. Each _odu_ bears the name of an ancient prince. To hear the verses is to come into the presence of a royal voice imparting insight and infinite experience. The priest of divination himself is called the father of the secrets _(babalawo)_ , and he is allowed to possess, like the Yoruba divine kings, beaded treasure and regalia.\n\n_Ikin_ , \"The Sixteen Sacred Palm-Nuts,\" are held the most ancient and important of the instruments of divination. They come from the sacred palm tree of If\u00e1 _(ope ifa)_. Myth tells us how and why these natural elements became an august sign.\n\nOnce If\u00e1 reigned upon the earth and there dispensed his precious wisdom. But one day a son of If\u00e1 arrogantly refused to bow down before his father, whereupon Ifa withdrew to heaven.\n\nWhen the light in the eyes of Eshu dimmed by the road and disappeared, the world began to die. Similarly, the translation of If\u00e1 to heaven occasioned such a terrifying blast of sterility and drought that starving animals attempted to devour sharp razors scattered on the ground, and river basins were covered with dead leaves. The world again was dying. The children of If\u00e1 climbed the sacred palm tree to beg their father to return, and he gave each of them sixteen palm nuts as a concentrated essence of his healing wisdom, replacing himself on earth with the sixteen sacred palm nuts, the _ikin_. Order and life were again restored.\n\nThus, like the division of Eshu into myriad fragments of raw laterite, the division of If\u00e1 into sixteen kernels taken direct from nature restores life. These powerful beliefs give sanction and authority to the most important form of If\u00e1 divination, which involves the use of the _ikin_ and is usually reserved for crucial moments, such as the investiture of a king.\n\nIn such cases, the diviner strews fine divination powder _(iyerosun)_ obtained from the irosun tree (or powdered dry bamboo) on an If\u00e1 divination tray, here illustrated by perhaps the oldest known example, carved before 1659 (Plate 19), and smooths it over. Then, with his middle finger, he traces either a single line or two lines in the powder, depending on the number of _ikin-if\u00e1_ that remain in his hand when he attempts to pick up sixteen _ikin_ in his right hand. If two palm nuts remain, he marks parallel lines on the tray, or, if one _ikin_ remains, one vertical stroke, and so on, until by divining four times with the _ikin_ in this way, one out of a possible set of sixteen patterns completes itself upon the divination tray.\n\nThe sign of a particular section _(odu)_ of the verbal literature of If\u00e1 has now appeared. The diviner recites the verses associated with this sign in three parts: (1) an exemplary myth from the lore of the goddesses and the gods; (2) what happens to the deities within each myth, i.e., cautionary tales on the consequences of failure to make sacrifices indicated by If\u00e1; and (3) application of these themes to the client's problem. The last part usually opens with the phrase \"If\u00e1 says,\" for the client has now placed himself within range of the very voice of the god of divination, speaking through the ritual moves and counters:\n\nIf\u00e1 says that a man should not be covetous and that he should not strive to win a position from the person who holds the position by right. [If\u00e1 also says] that he should make appeasement lest the people of the world take his role from him and give it to another.\n\nThe client himself interprets such verses, for the _babalawo_ is not allowed to know the precise nature of the client's problem. In the verse just mentioned, he might find evidence that an excess of ambitious maneuvering on his part may have angered certain elders who had secretly caused a swift and inexplicable decline in his fortune. Proper sacrifices would be indicated, and he would offer them gladly, knowing that he was making amends suggested by the gods themselves.\n\nThere is another If\u00e1 divining method, involving the use of a divining chain _(opele)_ made of string or metal with four half-nuts of the _opele_ fruit attached to each half of the chain. Each _opele_ nut has a smooth outside surface and a rough inside surface. When the divining chain is thrown, away from the diviner, it falls upon the ground in a rough U shape, with four _opele_ seeds on one side, four on the other, each possibly falling a different way. There are thus sixteen possible forms of presentation, the mystic number of If\u00e1, and each of these presentation forms of the divining chain stands for an _odu_. If the _odu_ that emerges is the one called _Eji Ogbe_ , the diviner writes its sign upon the divining tray:\n\nIf the _odu_ , on the other hand, turns up as _Oyeku Meji_ , the appropriate signature to mark in the _iyerosun_ dust takes another form. And so on. In an example of divining-chain divination in Dahomean Yorubaland at Takon in Benin (Plate 20), all eight seeds have fallen \"open,\" the sign of the richly favorable _odu Eji Ogbe_. This sign has also been permanently rendered in cowrie-shell mosaic (from which one shell is missing) in the floor at the threshold of the owner of the divining chain, to charge the gateway to the house of a chief with good luck and well-being. Thus chain-divining cuts through to _odu_ in a manner similar to the use of _ikin_. The \"readings\" occur faster in the case of the chain, which is more commonly used.\n\nPLATE 20\n\nBoth systems expose Yoruba to the principal sixteen verses of If\u00e1 divination and thus lead to treasures of African verbal poetry and wisdom. It is believed that If\u00e1 encompasses the whole of the wisdom of the ancestors, the whole of the wisdom of the deities, and thus safeguards \"everything that is considered memorable in Yoruba culture throughout the ages.\" Hence the splendor of the image of If\u00e1:\n\nThe life of If\u00e1 surpasses water's coolness\n\nThe life of If\u00e1 surpasses water's coolness,\n\nThe speaker-of-all-languages married a woman\n\nwho herself bathed only in water that is cold\n\nThe life of If\u00e1 surpasses water in its coolness.\n\nWande Abimbola points out that the survival of Yoruba tradition through its turbulent history depended in large measure on a cadre of wise and disciplined diviners steeped in the secrets of the ancestors and of the gods. Thus one can well imagine how cultural treasures were brought across the Atlantic by men who remembered the lore of the _odu_ , the divination verses.\n\nIn Cuba the amazing continuity of Nigerian _odu_ was established in a landmark publication by William Bascom, in 1952, in which he proved that the _babalao_ (creole equivalent to the original Nigerian diviners) had reinstated the _odu_ , with names and explanatory tales virtually intact. In the process, Yoruba divining trays, divining chains (Plate 21), and sacred sixteen _ikin_ were introduced to Cuba.\n\nOf the Cuban divination trays, most are round, like an example from northern Yorubaland (Plate 22), or rectangular, with staring Eshu heads facing each other, and some are called _atefa_ , a Ketu word and thus a hint of the Ketu Yoruba origins of the mode. The divination trays of Bahia are also called _atefa_ , with the same implications. The Museu de Arte Popular, in Bahia, included in its 1968 Afro-Brazilian exhibition a magnificent _atefa_ , attributed to an unknown nineteenth-century carver (Plate 23). The purity of his handling of the ancient themes is manifest in his use of the circle and the head of Eshu (Plate 24), which interrupts the flow of the elaborately carved border, as in the case of the ancient Ulm tray (Plate 19). In the Brazilian example, two heads of Eshu stare at each other across the cosmic circle. There are similarly paired segments of ornamental carving filled with depictions of honorific cowrie shells and V-form elements which may relate cryptically to thunderstones or the Y-like prongs of the thunder ax.\n\nPLATE 21\n\nPLATE 22\n\nPLATE 23\n\nPLATE 24\n\nPLATE 25\n\nYoruba sculptors also make caryatid cups _(agere ifa)_ as vessels for the sacred _ikin-if\u00e1_ or the divining chain.\n\nA Nigerian caryatid figure by Labintan of Otta (Plate 25) supports the If\u00e1 bowl with his head and the soles of his feet. He rests on his elbows and bends up his legs. This marvelously realized gesture conceals, in apparent playfulness, serious submission to predictive grace.\n\nIt is important to grasp the style of Labintan because one of his If\u00e1 divination carvings, an _agere_ emboldened with strongly postured human figures supporting the bowl on their heads, washed up on the shores of Brazil (Plate 26). It was found on the beach at Cal\u00e7ado do Bomfim, Bahia, wrapped in linen, an indication that it had been used by an Afro-Bahian priest or priestess. Apparently upon the death of the owner, the cup had been tossed into the sea to return with the soul of its departed owner to Yorubaland.\n\nThis piece establishes that some Afro-Bahian works of art of the turn of the century were actually carved in Yorubaland, in this case Otta. Attribution to Labintan can be demonstrated by shared traits, including deeply drilled human pupils, hooked noses, hairpin ears, sharply pointed chins, identical hinges, and identically shaped shallow bowls.\n\nPLATE 26\n\nThe ties that bind the \"Rome of the Africans,\" Bahia, to the Yoruba of Nigeria were never more directly instanced. But most of the New World forms of If\u00e1 divination art were indigenously continued and elaborated, giving rise to the _atefa_ of Bahia and Havana, the _opele_ of western Cuba, and the use and knowledge of the green and yellow beads of If\u00e1 throughout the Atlantic world.\n\n### Osanyin\n\nThe art and lore of the cult of Osanyin, god of herbalistic medicine, embody a richness of positive assertion comparable to that of If\u00e1. In Osanyin's name the Yoruba undertook a vast study of the leaves and herbs and roots of the forests, classifying them with regard to their therapeutic properties, and combining them to make the master medicines of initiation and _\u00e0she_.\n\nOsanyin initiates master this taxonomic knowledge, learning what species of forest herbs to collect, mix, and pound to make medicine to soothe a feverish body or to calm an agitated mind. Leaves and roots as elements of healing are to Osanyin what the sixteen _ikin_ and the art divination are to If\u00e1. As we shall see, rich traditions of verbal art and literature also traveled with his worship to the New World.\n\nIn Cuba, for example, traditional segments of the black population honor Osanyin and link him-to a deeper belief in the spirituality of the forest. There the faithful honor the forest, _el monte_ (literally, \"the mountain\") as a source of healing power. They realize that this standing cathedral of shade and moistness belongs to Osanyin and to God, and so they leave small sacrifices in payment for herbs and roots subtracted from his realm, \"for every tree, every shrub and herb has its master, and its protocol.\" Each _orisha_ is served by its own sacralizing herbs, taken with permission from Osanyin, just as each deity is accompanied by his or her Eshu, source of individualizing power and vitality.\n\nAnd yet for all his glory, Osanyin is physically bizarre, having only one eye, one arm, one leg, which are the stigmata of a quondam selfish life, when Osanyin tried to keep all the medicines and leaves to himself. According to legend:\n\nDiviner said he was suffering because he could find no food nor sustenance because all of the work which he might be doing with the leaves was being done by Osanyin. Eshu said that he would help. Eshu caused the stones of the house of Osanyin to fall and maim the deity. Lacking a leg and an arm and an eye, he now needed diviner, urgently, to collect his leaves and continue with the curing of people. And since that time diviners and Osanyin have been working hand in hand.\n\nIt is said that Osanyin also failed to make a proper sacrifice commanded by If\u00e1 and, consequently, lost his voice. Thereafter whenever he opened his mouth to speak, only a comically squeaky voice was heard. Diminished, even vocally, Osanyin is a warning as to what happens to persons who are callously unsharing.\n\nHis is an image now indelibly Atlantic. Both in western Nigeria and eastern Benin, as well as in western Cuba and northeastern Brazil, most of his followers speak of his one-legged, one-armed, one-eyed appearance and his tiny, high-pitched voice. This basic image has been complicated by imaginative additions in Cuba and Hispanic New York. Some Afro-Cuban followers of Osanyin say that one of his ears is of monstrous size but hears absolutely nothing, while the other ear is diminutive but picks up the noise of butterflies in flight, a balance of elements coarse and fine that is reminiscent of Eshu's idiom of extremity. As a matter of fact, both Eshu and Osanyin share the attribute of one-leggedness, and like Eshu, Osanyin was once a prince.\n\nOsanyin, so it is believed in Ijebu Yoruba country, was born with beads shining about his body. Moreover, beads are important to Osanyin because he associates their colors with the hues and qualities of the forest herbs. Thus some of the sylvan fronds are said to be bright green, while other herbs are yellow, black, red, or even white, and each hue denotes a special kind of curing power. In some parts of Yorubaland the beads of Osanyin, in their colors and cool glitter, equal the work of multiple, differently colored, healing herbs. I recall an incident at Edunabon in the south of Oyo country in the winter of 1963\u201364, when a man regarded an ancient, polished blood-red carnelian bead and pronounced it \"cool\" _(tutu)_. But the beads of Osanyin are cool not only in the general sense of giving aesthetic pleasure but in a literal sense of referral to leaf like qualities of refreshing taste or smell, and\u2014most important\u2014powers of restoration.\n\nHeralded by gongs, Osanyin is the crippled king who, crushed to half his size, gained insight into the human condition. He comes not in the body of a possession devotee but in that of a tiny doll, given voice and motion by trained ventriloquists who are also Osanyin priests and healers. Ventriloquism, in fact, is one of the marvels of the cult of the lord of leaves not only in Nigeria but also in Cuba. His tiny voice was once heard also in Brazil, where priests of ancestral spirits attached to their bodies small store-bought rubber dolls of the kind that squeaked when pinched, to suggest the tiny voice of Osanyin\u2014an ingenious \"bending\" of a modern object in the direction of tradition.\n\nOsanyin ventriloquists appeared in the 1950's in and around certain villages of the province of Havana\u2014Perico, Alacranes, Mantilla:\n\nThe Osanyin image of old Federico was a doll. The old man used to sit behind his door, half ajar, to smoke his pipe. One day I happened to be there, and heard a doll say, \"Federico, here comes a woman all dressed in white, looking for a remedy for her husband.\"\n\nHealing, art, and ventriloquism were thus combined in Osanyin worship to provide a striking, theatrical form of consultation to the blacks of Ijebu, Abeokuta, the Orozco sugar mill in Cuba, and other places where the full tradition has been reported or witnessed. I saw the Osanyin puppet in action in southern Ijebu on various occasions in the early 1960's; wearing a miniature beaded veil and beaded gown, it was made to speak in the tiniest of squeaks by the priest-ventriloquist. The reinstatement of this custom in Cuba may not be the work only of the Yoruba and their descendants: Henry and Margaret Drewall found in a study of the Age (hunting deity) cult in Togo in the summer of 1975 that Age is also \"a forest sprite who heals with leaves, has one eye and one leg and whose priest practices ventriloquism.\"\n\nCertain groups in Nigerian Yorubaland allege that the sound of Osanyin's voice relates \"to a little bird that represents him.\" According to this tradition, this bird not only speaks when the deity is consulted, but also lives in the sacred calabash of Osanyin kept upon his altar.\n\nVoice-throwing and bird imagery are integral to the cult of Osanyin, and they explain an important province of Osanyin art: myriad forms of a wrought-iron staff surmounted by one or more birds in iron. If\u00e1 says there are sixteen styles of the Osanyin wrought-iron staff. One kind carries a single \"head\" (a single bird poised at the summit of the staff), while another carries two heads and still another displays three heads and so on until the highest number is achieved, sixteen birds in iron. The last is especially prestigious, \"for the highest people calculate their power by sixteen.\" The divination literature tells us that proliferating bird motifs allude to an ancient time, when Osanyin was magician of the gods, working miracles with one, then two, then three, then four, and, finally, sixteen heads, or birds. The persistent equation of bird with head, as the seat of power and personal destiny, is of the essence in comprehending elaborations of this fundamental metaphor, including staffs (1) showing a single iron bird set upon a single disk of iron surmounting several bells of iron, the _osun_ staff or _orere_ , (2) a bird set over a radiating display of miniature iron implements for the iron god, Og\u00fan, sometimes interspersed with miniature emblems of other \"hard\" deities, (3) a superbly fashioned bird in a commanding position over a circle of smaller, less elaborately decorated birds. The three staff types appear in various New World cities, notably Rio, Bahia, Gona\u00efves (Haiti), Havana, and New York, but rarely simultaneously.\n\nThe myth of the maiming of Osanyin tells us why he needs If\u00e1 and warns us that the knowledge of the leaves must be shared. But the obverse is equally true: If\u00e1 needs Osanyin. Without the lord of leaves and his many medicines, If\u00e1's effectiveness would be seriously diminished. And so the diviner-herbalist and the herbalist come to share the _osun_ staff, an extraordinary \"text\" wrought in iron on the power to comprehend and check disease.\n\nOdeleogun, a master blacksmith of Efon-Alaiye who flourished toward the end of the last century, is believed to have made our Nigerian example of the genre (Plate 27). It is a work that gracefully illustrates the _osun_ structure: a single iron bird over a single iron disk that covers and conceals parts of the four inverted iron bells radiating out from a single point along the staff below the disk and formally \"answered\" by four more bells, hanging right side up, below this point.\n\n_Osun_ , transmuted into _ase_ by the Popo and the Fon of what is now Benin, have been enriched there by generations of expressive elaboration since 1659 and earlier. There the single bird often rests upon the canonical disk, but the latter element can be fashioned to seal completely the mouth of a single inverted conical container, under which appears a small sphere or sometimes (as in this instance) a hard-shelled seed, which is pierced by the axis of the staff (Plate 28).\n\nFrom Ekiti (northeastern Yorubaland) to Dahomey the association of the presiding bird figure with war on witchcraft is more or less consistent. An informant at Igogo-Ekiti in the summer of 1965 alleged that a bird atop a healer's staff shows \"the mothers\" how powerful the healer is with his herbs. Dahomean chiefs in the city of Abomey told me in 1968 that the bird atop the _ase_ staff (Plate 28) represented the power of King Glele in overcoming not only the armies of Mahi but the \"bird\" (i.e., sorcerous potentiality) of the leader of the enemy forces as well. In addition, a healer at Ipokia, capital of the Anago Yoruba, revealed in December 1962 that the bells on such staffs are sometimes interpreted as metaphoric leaves; the disk is meant to cover the leaflike bells so that uninitiated eyes cannot see what is inside them.\n\nPLATE 27\n\nPLATE 28\n\nA seed as an occasional element on the _osun_ or other Osanyin-related staffs, and the use of bells, express the lore of the guards of If\u00e1. It is told that If\u00e1 brandished a certain seed before the witches of feathered form, saying, \"Witch is not fierce, she cannot eat the hard seed.\" It is also told that If\u00e1, informed by Eshu of the secret vulnerabilities of \"the mothers,\" brandished, among many effective objects, the leaf called _agogo igun_ (bell of the vulture's beak) \"so that everything he asks for, by means of agogo bells will be obtained.\"\n\nThus the metaphor of a text in iron is not to be taken lightly; the bird is both the mind of the healer and a warning to the mothers that he knows their forms and the powers that they inform; the disk covers his secret antidotes to their deadly propensities; and the bells and the seed are guards or extensions of the neutralizing impact of herbalistic medicine.\n\nThe association of a bird with the head or mind of a person is revealed during the initiation of a person into the service of the Yoruba gods in Cuba and Cuban-influenced portions of Miami and New York City. The full ceremony includes one of the most impressive reinstatements of the literature of Osanyin on New World soil\u2014a chanting of some sixteen to twenty-one songs, many based on the same melody. These songs are among the most ancient and precious testaments of Yoruba oral literature that we have in the Americas; they go back at least to the late eighteenth century, and one includes a reference to the immortality of God, unmovable stone under water _(oyigiyigi ota l'omi o oyigiyigi ota l'omi)_. These songs accompany the preparation of the leaves of Osanyin, to complete \"the water of the calm,\" the \"water of the cool\" _(omi ero)_ needed for sacralizing the postulant and the paraphernalia he or she will receive.\n\nAnd then comes the moment when the _\u00e0she_ received by the initiate is sealed in a small incision cut at the uppermost portion of his shaved head and within the container of his personal _osun_ bird-staff with disk and bells:\n\nto make osun is an extremely secret, sacred matter.... Once the person serving as a barber has shaved the initiate's head entirely, he proceeds to paint it white, indigo blue, red and yellow [each color forming a concentric band around the center of his crown].... when the initiator or initiatrix has finished the application of the colors, he or she cuts small incisions at the uppermost portion of the crown and there inserts four important materials, _obi kola, eru, tushe_ , and _osun_ [\"the indispensable seeds of the consagration, seeds imported from Africa\"].\n\nThe four basic seeds\u2014 _osun, eru, tushe_ , and _obi kola_ \u2014placed within the private bird-staff _(osun)_ of the initiate seal the same protective forces that went into his head inside the inverted cone or container beneath the bird of the _osun_ staff. This establishes the bird in iron or metal as the eternal companion and guardian of the initiate. Elements of the ancient \"text\" are reintegrated here\u2014bird, head, seeds, and bells.\n\nMany Cuban _osun_ are strongly African in style, as attested by the older examples of _osun_ staffs in the National Museum in Havana. The latter are remarkable not only for the retention of inverted cones or a single cone in metal under the disk that supports the bird, but also for a shaping of the bird more or less as a flattened, iconic element. Lydia Cabrera published in 1954 a photograph documenting this older style\u2014well-nigh concealed behind a welter of cult detail\u2014at the top of a many-tiered altar to Eshu. Careful study of this area reveals the unmistakable silhouette of an Africanizing _osun_ staff, with its flat, gracefully curving bird at the summit over the disk and inverted cones.\n\nBy 1954 creole transformations had already occurred. The new forms had absorbed Western industrial or cultural fragments\u2014the hubcap of an automobile, a metal rooster from a weather vane or discarded garden furniture, store-bought jingle bells\u2014and invested them with new meaning. The rooster replaced the flattened bird of the elders, the hubcap sometimes became the base, and the jingle bells recalled the _agogo_ gongs. Most important, the single inverted cone underneath the disk became a metal cup (into which the spirit-protecting seeds were placed). It is this modernist form that is most frequently seen today in the Cuban-influenced _bot\u00e1nicas_ of Miami, New Jersey, and New York (Plate 29). In these stores, where herbal charms and medicines frequently are sold, the sign of Osanyin appropriately reappears.\n\nPLATE 29\n\nThere is a further reinstatement of Osanyin iron across the Atlantic that involves staffs with a senior bird of mind or healing positioned at the summit of the staff, above a round of minor birds (Plate 30). Odeleogun of Efon-Alaiye made our Nigerian example, probably in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This strong and elegant bird-staff carries within its forms a universal thought: the triumph of the mind over the annihilating circle of destruction and disease. The double, spiraled plume of the bird at the summit suggests double power held at once, and displays the ever-multiplying presence of Osanyin, or other healing spirits like Erinle.\n\nPLATE 30\n\nAn echo of this form in Bahia in Brazil is lean and simplified, and was made by an Afro-Brazilian blacksmith, Jos\u00e9 Adario dos Santos, at his atelier on the Ladeira da Concei\u00e7\u00e3o above the port of Salvador in the spring of 1968 (Plate 31). A single stylized bird surmounts six raking bars of pointed iron, suggesting, in one version, Osanyin above the crossroads of Eshu and iron, or, in another, the bird of Osanyin above the sharpened points of Ogun's iron, or, in still another, the bird of Osanyin in the branches of a tree. These ideas receive a full embodiment in Rio de Janeiro, where a bird-staff in iron for Osanyin was collected, perhaps around 1941 (Plate 32). Here the bars below the senior bird suggest again the branches of a tree, each displaying a single minor bird beneath the commanding spirit at the summit. There seems to be a lesson in the cherishing of this ancient image: the senior bird of mind and healing, \"the bird that shows the 'mothers' how powerful the healer is about his herbs,\" teaches that the woods and their medicines are grander than any document, and that one who assumes this privileged forest is hers or his alone will be answerable to God.\n\nPLATE 31\n\nPLATE 32\n\n### Og\u00fan\n\nThe art of Og\u00fan reflects his nature as a \"hard god,\" a deity of war and iron. He lives in the flames of the blacksmith's forge, on the battlefield, and more particularly on the cutting edge of iron. He addresses the forest with a sharpened machete; his spirit moves in the clearing of the bush, in the hoes and knives of cultivators. His worship is a means of thanksgiving for the ambivalent civilizing force of iron and iron-made implements. Og\u00fan served the very creator of the world, so it is believed, by clearing the primordial forests with his iron, making the first sixteen roads that radiate from the ancient holy capital, the roads upon which the original sixteen sons of the first king traveled forth to found the sixteen originating kingships.\n\nPraise-chants for Og\u00fan, those collected in ancient towns like Ire and Ketu and Ilesha, illustrate his ambivalent nature: his power to destroy as well as to construct:\n\n[from the towns of Aramoko and Ilesha]\n\nOg\u00fan, master of the world, support of the newborn child\n\nOg\u00fan is virile\n\nOg\u00fan, master of the yam I cut...\n\nOg\u00fan, with coronet of blood\n\nBurns the forest, burns the bush\n\nLeaves the forest screaming in the sound of flames\n\n[from Ire town]\n\nOg\u00fan cuts, in large or small fragments\n\nHe kills the husband on the face of fire\n\nHe kills the wife on the hearth\n\nHe kills the little people who flee outside\n\nEven with water present in the house,\n\nhe washes himself with blood.\n\nSudden as lightning, he terrifies the lazy.\n\n[from the town of Ilesha]\n\nOg\u00fan promenades, serpent poised about his neck\n\nOg\u00fan, King of Ire, lord, great sovereign of iron.\n\nWith stripes about his body,\n\nSuch as one sees only on the skin of the wild doe\n\nUnless it be Akisale, born of the Gaboon viper\n\nUnless it be Akisale, born of the python.\n\n[from the town of Ketu]\n\nOg\u00fan, allied to the man with a quick hand\n\nOg\u00fan, owner of high fringes of palm fronds\n\nOg\u00fan ties on his cutlass with a belt of cotton\n\nOg\u00fan of the sharp black cutlass\n\nHoe is the child of Og\u00fan\n\nAxe is the child of Og\u00fan\n\nGun is the child of Og\u00fan\n\nOg\u00fan, salute of iron on stone\n\nThe blacksmith of all heaven.\n\nOg\u00fan therefore lives in the piercing or slashing action of all iron. Lord of the cutting edge, he is present even in the speeding bullet or railway locomotive.\n\nHe is honored by liturgical jewelry, iron or brass. For example, in the region of Ilesha, whence came many captives to western Cuba and northeastern Brazil, important priests, Aworo and Owari, wear each year during the Obanifun festival a splendid brass pendant of miniature metal emblems, symbolizing iron's self-multiplying powers and potentiality (Plate 33). This fine display of metal emblems is the pendant of Og\u00fan _(amula ogun)_. Our example comes from the old Ilesha forge of Oginnin Ajirotitu.\n\nAccording to the recollection of the late blacksmith's surviving son, Oginnin completed this pendant for Og\u00fan at some point between 1900 and 1925. Richly patinated, the signs of the _\u00e0she_ of Og\u00fan are here specially made in brass, the customary medium used by Oginnin.\n\nPLATE 33\n\nThe _amula_ bristles with twenty miniaturized Og\u00fan emblems: three curved swords of the kind special to the Og\u00fan cult; an iron hairpin called _ikoti;_ an implement given as _oyiya_ (obscured in the photograph); a flaring instrument used for tapping palm wine; a smaller version of the same implement; a strip of chain symbolizing Og\u00fan's uniting force; the curved clapper of an iron bell; a miniature _agogo_ bell for Osanyin; pincers for Osanyin and for Og\u00fan; a snake \"fighting for Og\u00fan\"; the penis of Og\u00fan, partially obscuring a further curved clapper or, alternatively, a curved stick for drumming; a needle; two iron arrows; a large ceremonial iron bell; a knife for the patron deity, Owari; a sword for Owari. The emblems, counting the heavy chain from which they hang, make up twenty-one separate pieces, a multiple of the characteristic number of Og\u00fan, seven.\n\nMajor and minor versions of the same basic implements sometimes appear together here, and a constellation of further objects united by a kind of visual pun\u2014i.e., penis-stick-needle\u2014further deepens our appreciation of the infinity of Og\u00fan's power, for implements in iron are to his cult as pieces of lateritic stone are to Elegba, or palm nuts to If\u00e1.\n\nThe imaginative force of this visual tradition swept across the Yoruba New World. For example, evidence of Yoruba emblematic iron appeared in Cuba no later than 1868: \"in Guanabacoa an iron bar was found, one third sunk into the ground, with a crescent-form ornament at the top, from the sides of which hung four hooks with blood-sprinkled trinkets in the form of shovels, hoes, knives, and hammers\".\n\nPLATE 34\n\nPLATE 35\n\nOg\u00fan art in Cuba today includes the bucket-shaped iron cauldron (caldero de og\u00fan). Such objects (Plate 34) are full of various expressions of ironwork, such as nails, iron bows and arrows, horseshoes, and fetters, thus fusing token pieces of his medium within the programmatic arrangements of the _amula_ with an iron cooking vessel, as if to prepare a mighty broth of iron. Note that the illustrated cauldron for Og\u00fan is tightly wrapped with chains of iron, echoing a major element of the _amula_. The Cuban migration to North America has resulted in the establishment of the _caldero de og\u00fan_ tradition in Miami and New York, with fanciful additions, such as a shrine in the New York area in 1979 that has a _caldero de og\u00fan_ with an actual pistol (Plate 35).\n\nOg\u00fan is one of the most popular of the _orisha_ among Brazilian blacks. Again, as in Nigeria and the Benin Republic, Brazilians honor Og\u00fan by placing upon his altar separate pieces of iron as well as special miniaturized examples of his implements, called in Bahia _ferramentas de og\u00fan_ (Og\u00fan irons), which, like giant beads or pendants, are often pierced and threaded through a length of wire or piece of chain or thread. Recife is a rich source of such objects, but Salvador is perhaps the Brazilian city most famous for Yoruba symbolic iron. There, in the summer of 1968, I found Jos\u00e9 Adario dos Santos making _ferramentas de Og\u00fan_ at his forge on the Ladeira da Concei\u00e7\u00e3o above the harbor.\n\nPLATE 36\n\nEarlier, in the spring of 1965, Richard and Emerante Morse collected one of his works in the Mercado Modelo (Plate 36), illustrating how Dos Santos follows firm Yoruba canons of expression while at the same time designating modern tools of iron as extensions of Og\u00fan's realm. Here Dos Santos suspends seven iron implements\u2014knife, sword, hoe, spear, knifelike object, shovel, pick\u2014from the iron bow of the hunter-god, Oshoosi, Og\u00fan's mythic brother and companion. The number of the pendants is significant, for in the _candombl\u00e9s_ of Bahia the deity is praised as \"Seven Og\u00fan\" (Og\u00fan Meje), which alludes to the multiplication of his \u00e1she in tools of iron, and this reflects the influence of Nigerian Yoruba praise poetry and lore, as in an Oyo ballad of the hunters where the deity of war and smithing is saluted with the phrase \"seven iron signs of the god of iron.\" But there are also emblems with twenty-one miniature pieces of iron in Bahia, as at Ilesha and in Dahomey.\n\nOg\u00fan's absorption of industrially made iron implements in his arsenal of ritual attributes is paralleled by the advance of the same elements into the realm of Afro-Brazilian myths:\n\n[Og\u00fan]... wished to find his brother [Oshoosi]. He entered his father's forge and there made seven instruments\u2014pick, pick-axe, axe, scythe, spear, cutlass, and shovel. He carried them over his shoulder and entered the forest.... [By means of these implements] he forced his way into the forest until he found his brother... put him on his shoulders, and returned home.\n\nThus, across the Atlantic, iron instruments are all, in the end, the children of Og\u00fan, carried on his broad and mighty shoulders. He directs their energies to benefit those who earn his love through ties of kinship and those who make sacrifices and festivals in his name. The icons of Og\u00fan are not, however, for the lazy or the irreverent. Og\u00fan marches only with the spiritually vital and the quick of hand.\n\n### Oshoosi\n\nThe brother of Og\u00fan, Oshoosi, himself quick and strong, ultimately emerged as the deity of the hunters, the fabled archer of the gods.\n\nThe power of this deity is manifest in the speed and accuracy of his arrow, in prideful assertion of mind and muscle that have been wonderfully honed by the disciplines of forest hunting:\n\nHe is all alone and very handsome\n\nHandsome even in quality of voice.\n\nVital, he arises in the morning,\n\nBow and arrow already about his neck.\n\nSmall or hugely-built, the hunter is stronger than most men\n\nOshoosi quickly unleashes his arrow.\n\nWe see him only to embrace a shadow.\n\nWhen this man of determined muscle becomes a shadow, all that remains is his hunter's fly whisk ( _irukere_ ), his arrow ( _ofa_ ), and his bow ( _orun_ ). His arrow and his bow have been specially rendered in honorific iron or brass since time immemorial. These metal representations of a single arrow heraldically crossing a single bow at its center (Plate 37) form, in Nigerian Yorubaland, part of the traditional Oshoosi sacrificial altar ( _ojubo oshoosi_ ). In the winter of 1964 I visited such a shrine, under the famous Olumo Rock of the Egba and Egbado metropolis of Abeokuta. An early European notice of a shrine for Oshoosi is dated 1857: \"a huge iron bow, heavy with the weight of hundreds of strings of cowries hanging from it, and from small iron cylinders in which are miniature arrows.\"\n\nThe relationship between the cult of Oshoosi and the actual practice of archery in traditional Yorubaland can only be surmised, given present evidence, but it is worth mentioning that in the nineteenth century the English explorer Lander claimed that the Oyo Yoruba \"have the reputation of being the best bowmen in Africa,\" and that Yoruba arrows carried iron heads. This provides another, practical reason for the close association between Oshoosi and the lord of iron.\n\nIn Bahia, Oshoosi represents the pantheon of the hunters of the Yoruba. He is one of the _orisha_ most worshipped by persons of Ketu Yoruba descent. Therefore, the search for antecedents to aspects of Bahian worship of Oshoosi logically begins in Ketu in the People's Republic of Benin. There Deoscoredes dos Santos found that the fly whisk for Oshoosi and its associated lore were similar to Bahian expressions. More important, he found in Ketu a strange, bramblelike shrine, the _ojubo oshoosi_ , for sacrifice to Oshoosi that is similar to certain altars in Bahia for the same deity. If the hunter's fly whisk illustrates the medicine that Oshoosi carries with him into the forest, the bramblelike sacrificial shrine\u2014dry, leafless branches placed in a careful pile on the earth\u2014mysteriously brings the forest to the village.\n\nPLATE 37\n\nMetal bows and arrows for Oshoosi, fashioned in the Nigerian ideographic pattern, took root in Bahia. Among the blacks of Bahia the emblem was sometimes called _damata oshoosi_ , based on a praise-verse that describes the archer as a man who combines the strength of three hunters ( _ode meta_ ) within a single person. It is a praise-verse that came to western Cuba as well as to northeastern Brazil. The interconnections between Oshoosi and Og\u00fan fit the fact that the sign of the lord of the hunters is frequently shown together with the pendant iron implements of Og\u00fan both in Brazil and Cuba. Afro-Bahian versions are straightforwardly additive; they have a metal bow and arrow, the bow of which serves as a bar on which to suspend the seven or twenty-one pendant miniature implements of Og\u00fan (Plate 36). The arrow is the vertical accent and is soldered to a stand or is sharpened at both ends so that it can be driven into the earthen floor of a traditional shrine or altar.\n\nPLATE 38\n\nIn Cuba combined signs of Og\u00fan and Oshoosi have flourished since the nineteenth century, and most of these are simplified statements. But occasionally craftsmen have made elaborate fusions of art for Oshoosi and Og\u00fan, as in an apparently twentieth-century example now in the Institute of Ethnography in Havana (Plate 38). Here the sign of Oshoosi, like a flag of Nimrod, presides over the emblems of Og\u00fan Alagbede (Og\u00fan the Blacksmith). The metal sign of Oshoosi is set atop a kind of carousel of rotating avatars of iron\u2014lengths of chain, a horseshoe, a pick, an ax, a hammer, an arrow, a sledgehammer, a hook, a scythe, and many other objects. Particularly affective is the garlanding of the whole with ornamental pieces of chain, the ancient Yoruba ideogram for the unifying power of the deities. Since World War II similar objects, usually reduced in scale and degree of elaboration, have appeared in the Hispanic barrios of some cities in New England, New Jersey, and New York.\n\nWherever Oshoosi is honored, the canon of his icon has remained intact. He seems to have lifted, invisibly, his bow and arrow, and taken aim, as if to protect the panoply of Og\u00fa's iron, as if to return the debt established when Og\u00fan marched with these implements to find his brother in the forest.\n\n### Obaluaiye\n\nObaluaiye's power to heal or conjure smallpox (or other dread disease) makes his cult feared and respected in Yorubaland. He is an earth deity who strikes down the arrogant and the immoral alike with \"spears\" of pestilence and fever. Informants have spoken of the danger of walking alone when the sun is hot at noon, when Obaluaiye and his followers, all dressed in scarlet, are believed to haunt the earth, and of the danger of wearing red or loud patterns for fear the deity, enraged at the appropriation of his prerogatives, might harm them.\n\nBritish colonial authorities banned the cult in Nigeria in 1917, when Obaluaiye priests were accused of deliberately spreading smallpox. But members of the cult, confident of their insights and their moral worth, refused to be intimidated. They took their worship underground. They worshipped Obaluaiye under different names, e.g., the Lord (Oluwa). The strength of his lore in modern Nigeria is illustrated by the continuity of the old belief that it was dangerous to call him by his name, for one would thereby spread his dread disease, _shoponnon_ (smallpox). Today even some English-speaking Yoruba use the circumlocution \"S.P.\" when alluding to smallpox.\n\nThe terror can be harnessed, however, to shock the thoughtless into social awareness and concern:\n\nIf you are rich, you do not laugh at the poor\u2014\n\nLittle people can become grand\n\nWhen you come into the world\n\nYou own neither a wife, nor a car, nor a bike\n\nNothing you have brought and\n\nNo one knows the future.\n\nThese verses suggest that epidemics\u2014the fiery, annihilating hand of Obaluaiye\u2014can bring about social conscience because they could topple the rich and the powerful. Once aroused by arrogant behavior, the spirit of Obaluaiye is dangerously difficult to appease: \"The glowing embers are difficult to stamp out.\" Obaluaiye is thus a complex god, who inspires a complex set of verses in which the themes of terror and moral retribution are interwoven in a thousand different ways. The following conveys some sense of the peculiar beauty of the poetry chanted in his name:\n\nWild animal, with whom we have been entrusted\n\nYour bird cannot strike my bird.\n\nKing of precious beads, death who flees at dawn.\n\nLeaf poised upon the surface of the water.\n\nBlack hunter, physique covered by a gown of raffia\n\nFalls mightily, blocks the road, as a thorn.\n\nThorn penetrates, man enters town with limp.\n\nNo one should walk alone at noon.\n\nThe images caught within these verses are almost filmic, so swiftly realized are the shifting nightmare changes. Obaluaiye emerges, dressed in broomlike strands of raffia straw, then is suddenly transformed into a mighty force\u2014falling like a tree that blocks the road, and then becomes a thorn.\n\nThe thorn is a metaphor for the pestilential needle of his morally aroused vengeance. Hence a hapless person\u2014foolish enough to ignore warnings not to walk alone at noon when the sun is at its strongest and the sands, domain of the deity, literally heat up between his toes\u2014is pricked by the thorn. We recoil in horror, knowing that with his limp he brings doom to the village.\n\nThorn imagery suggests the specially planted species of cactus dedicated to Obaluaiye and found on public shrines in the Ketu Yoruba area of eastern Benin. It also leads to two of the mystic weapons of his arsenal of disease: an arrowlike object ( _esin_ ) wrapped in scarlet cloth and kept on his shrine; and a lance ( _oko_ ), sometimes plain, sometimes decorated with cowrie shells and special tassels. Both are extensions of the idea of something that pricks the flesh and inflames with lethal pain. Obaluaiye's full complement of attributes also includes the club, one of the most ancient and rudimentary of the weapons of the Yoruba\u2014in this case, the rather generously sized specimen known as the _kumo_ , covered with rust-colored camwood paste.\n\nThere is a line of poetry praising the deity as a man covered with raffia fiber, as if he were a walking broom\u2014a Yoruba traditional whisk broom with a short handle and long fiber. As a matter of fact, extensive broom imagery characterizes the cult of Obaluaiye.\n\nThe Yoruba whisk broom, sacralized by the addition of medicines and camwood paste sprinkled on the straw, is one of the more formidable and famous of Obaluaiye's emblems. If\u00e1 tells us that when he is enraged, Obaluaiye takes this special broom and spreads sesame seeds ( _yamoti_ ) on the earth before him, then sweeps the seeds before him, in ever-widening circles. As the broom begins to touch the dust and the dust begins to rise, the seeds, like miniature pockmarks, ride the wind with their annihilating powers: the force of a smallpox epidemic is thereby unleashed. According to Dos Santos, the cult name for this horrific broom, _shashara_ , is said to represent a fusion of two roots in Yoruba, \"pitting with smallpox\" ( _shasha_ ) and \"human body\" ( _ara_ ).\n\nThe worship of the deity is widely known in the Benin Republic under the Fon term _Sakpata_. Some of the more beautiful of the verses in his honor have been elaborated at his festival in Abomey, Benin. The Dahomean elaboration of his cult traveled, with the Yoruba version, to Cuba and to Brazil, and there they reinforced themselves. For example, the deity is known by a creole Yoruba term in Cuba, \"Babal\u00fa Ay\u00e9,\" the title of a famous Afro-Cuban caf\u00e9 song of the 1940's, but his broom is called by the Dahomean term _ha_ (spelled j\u00e1 in Spanish), and is richly beaded and decked with cowries (Plate 39), as in Dahomey, here illustrated with royal beaded Yoruba-Cuban fly whisks for the gods.\n\nDahomean style is also reflected in the shaping of the smallpox broom in Brazil. The original _ha_ of the region of Abomey has a special medicated handle covered with crimson cloth decked with rich, ornamental bands of cowrie-shell embroidery. Emerging from the handle are the long, bound center fibers of the leaf of the _palma vinifera_. There is a hint of the \"bush\" in the manner in which the fibers of the _ha_ explode this way and that in a twisting of strands at the working end of the instrument, whereas the fibers at the base are tightly bound together. The smallpox priest who carries this mystic broom is dressed in special garments, including a bonnet and armbands, all embellished with cowrie-shell embroidery.\n\nPLATE 39\n\nThe latter elements of Dahomean ritual dress, brilliantly miniaturized and recombined in the making of the creole smallpox brooms of Bahia, give rise to one of the most beautiful objects of the black Atlantic world (Plate 40). The _ja_ of Dahomey in the process of transformation into the _shashara_ of Bahia acquires the noble stillness of a column, so neatly cut and tightly bound are the fibers, which are enclosed by bands of ornamental leather often sited near the bottom and at the middle of the broom fibers as well as at the handle. These bands are richly appliqu\u00e9d, in the Dahomean manner, with cowrie shells. They dress the object with the logic of a Dahomean priest's attire. In the end a whisk broom, glittering with crimson, white, black, and other colors, becomes a kind of abstract jewelry, made of shells and straw and leather.\n\nThese changes parallel an apparent shift in function. When Obaluaiye appears, dressed in his appropriate raiment, in the dances of the temples of Bahian blacks, he rarely carries, so it is reported, his club or arrow. Instead, he bears a lance or broom with motions underscoring a gentler mood. The broom is \"danced\" with gestures that are smooth and orchestrated, as if to suggest a sweeping away of terror, light-years removed from the scattering of sesame seeds amid dark clouds of dust. In short, the Afro-Bahian _shashara_ is more a royal scepter than an object of use\u2014hence the almost speculative manner in which its ancient functions are recalled.\n\nPLATE 40\n\nPLATE 41\n\nBut there is nothing muted about the intimation of African forest energies and fierceness projected in the impressive all-raffia crown ( _ade iko_ ) (Plate 41) and all-raffia gown ( _ewu iko_ ) that are prepared by specialists in Bahia for possession-devotees to wear when the spirit of Obaluaiye fills them. This is a form of dress that directly recalls not only the Nigerian verse about \"black hunter, physique covered by a gown of raffia\" but also the conical shape and veil of both Dahomean smallpox deity costuming and one of the main forms of Yoruba royal headgear (Plates 42 and 43).\n\nPLATE 42\n\nThe roots of the Afro-Bahian raffia gown are therefore various. North of the Fon in the Benin Republic there is a famous shrine to the mother of Obaluaiye, Nana Buk\u00fau, on a platform by a baobab tree, overlooking the Yoruba settlement of Dassa-Zoum\u00e9 (Plate 44). Here there is a standing cylinder of clay over which has been fitted a raffia garment, communicating the presence of a spirit and bringing to mind the image of a whisk broom given animate solidity and form. Obaluaiye is an earth deity and here the body of his mother, as it were, like Elegba, acquires a flesh of laterite, a flesh covered over with raw fiber, the dress of spirits across West Africa. The summit of this strange image is surmounted by a raffia crown with a stemmed finial, also in raffia\u2014details matched by the style of the Afro-Bahian crown for Obaluaiye (cf. Plate 44 with Plate 41).\n\nPLATE 43\n\nAccording to the Lagosian cult of Ejiwa, the earth deity gave Eshu, when the latter was scarred with smallpox marks, a garment made of raffia, of a thickness sufficient to keep flies from swarming about his wounds. Hence, If\u00e1 tells us, the Ejiwa (Eshu) masquerader to this day appears completely shrouded in raffia. Lagos, of course, was intimately linked to Bahia in the Atlantic trade, as were territories to the north of the Fon. The primary image of the Ejiwa cult is a most suggestive clue in the search for the origins of the idea of concealment by raffia of the signs of smallpox. In fact, Afro-Bahian informants explicitly claim that the raffia veil of Obaluaiye hides a face ravaged by the disease.\n\n### Nana Buk\u00fau\n\nNana Buk\u00fau is the mother of Obaluaiye, and such is her importance in Dahomey that there she has come to be considered the grand ancestress of all the Yoruba-derived (Anagonu) deities of the pantheon of the Fon. The name of Nana is famous from Ife in Nigeria to Siade and Tchari in Ghana. It is believed that none other than the kings of Asante and Dagomba sent gifts to her shrines in time of war. These kings sought her blessing because of her fabled powers to bring a city victory, to render in ruins the cities of one's enemies. She herself was a superlative warrior, utterly fearless, who razed the mythic city of Teju-ade.\n\nNana Buk\u00fau is the courage and accomplishment of women, sublimed to the form of an _orisha_. She knows terrifying secrets. She shares with her son, Obaluaiye, the smallpox god, master symbols: raffia-made regalia. Nana and her son are both represented by special staffs made of palm-frond fibers tied together, which collectively symbolize the ancestors and cryptically communicate awesome levels of initiation.\n\nPLATE 44\n\nHer primary icon is the _ileeshin_ (a Ketu term). It is essentially from Ketu, this ancient settlement, its cultural provinces, and neighboring territory that the cult of Nana was brought to Bahia, where she is spectacularly honored with the _ileeshin_. Made from the same materials as the broom of Obaluaiye, the _ileeshin_ is, however, an entirely original instrument with its own logic of form and function. It is not loosely structured at its summit like the _ha_ of the Fon. Instead, its strawlike elements almost disappear beneath rich coatings of camwood paste and leather-covered sections often dyed the darkest blue (Plate 45). The summit of the staff is striking\u2014it curls back upon itself, like the tail of a leopard, leaving a strange oval space outlined at the top. This noose-shaped tip is believed to embody Nana's _\u00e0she_ , Nana's intimidating powers:\n\nPLATE 45\n\nThe _ileeshin_ cannot touch a man or boy. Its tip is dangerous. And if a woman holds it, all during the time that it rests in her hand she must not speak any evil of an animal or a man. But, if a cruel and horrible person stands before her, she can take the _ileeshin gogo_ , thrust it out horizontally before her and strike its looped tip against the belly of the man.\n\nInstantly the man would fall back, arms outspread in a gesture of pain and shock, stomach instantly bloated. Then he would die. Attacking an evil person in the region of the belly, causing it to swell even as the person dies, suggests that Nana presides over the giving\u2014pregnancy\u2014and the taking away of life itself. She is equally capable of bringing children into the world or causing doom, depending on a person's goodness or lack of character.\n\nThe nooselike tip of Nana's staff is glossed by a legend recorded by Dos Santos:\n\nNana has possessed a certain staff from the beginning of her life on earth. The name of the staff was _\u00ccb\u00edr\u00ecr\u00ed_. She was born with this staff; it was not given to her by anyone.... when she was born the staff was embedded in the placenta. Ornamental cowries decked this curled staff, and fine ornaments. After it was born it curled into a noose ( _\u00f3 s\u00ec k\u00e1 k\u00f3r\u00f3b\u00f3j\u00f3_ ). Then they cut it from the placenta and they put it inside the earth. But surprisingly, as the infant grew, the staff grew, too. It was the very staff that Nana used when she went to war against the Teju-ade and it was her son who dug it out of the earth. That is why they call it _\u00ccb\u00edr\u00ecr\u00ed_ , my son-found-it-and brought-back-to-me. She used this staff as a medicine of victory. Many modes of mystic potentiality open up for the person who holds this staff. If the people of a town know to use this staff they will be able to prevent war....\n\nPLATE 46\n\nThe Yoruba staff was creatively transformed in northeastern Brazil, where the _ileeshin_ is called _ibiri_. Appropriately, this emblem of the mother of the smallpox deity is fashioned in Bahia by the Asogba, the supreme head of the devotees of Obaluaiye. The Asogba consecrates, makes, and entrusts to the priestesses mounted by Nana the _ibiri_ of Bahia, and conceals powerful medicines in the base of the object. Our example (Plate 46), photographed in the Museu de Arte Popular in Bahia in 1968, captures the degree of artistic independence of the Brazilian form: there is at once a diminishing of the Ketu tradition of heavily coating the fibers of the object with red camwood and a heightening of the Ketu manner of encircling the straw with strips of leather. A war medicine becomes a work of art.\n\n### Yemoja (Yemay\u00e1)\n\nYoruba riverain goddesses are represented by round fans ( _abebe_ ), crowns ( _ade_ )\u2014some with beaded fringes\u2014and earthenware vessels ( _awota_ ) filled with water collected from the river or from the sea, rounded stones, and sand. Those who worship these powerful underwater women long ago devised an artistic strategy, the use of the round fan as an emblem embodying the coolness and command of these spirits of the water.\n\nMyths explain the meaning of the roundness of the fans. According to the verses of If\u00e1, the round fan was a fashion of the goddesses of ancient Ife. And it came to pass that If\u00e1, god of divination, after a quarrel with the river goddesses, departed from the holy city, whereupon a terrifying famine struck the world. If\u00e1 hid in the forest, in a round house made of leaves and saplings (oddly recalling Pygmy structures of Central Africa). As the crisis worsened people consulted diviners. Speaking through the sacred divination instruments, If\u00e1 said that only the river goddesses themselves, including Yemoja, noted for her use of a round fan, could persuade him to return. Each female spirit took a fan, like the round one of Yemoja, and together they all went into the forest seeking the spirit of If\u00e1, throwing stones at anything solid that they saw. When they threw stones at the round house of If\u00e1, he shouted, \"Who is throwing stones at my house!\" _(Tani s\u00f3 k\u00f2 l\u00f2 run!)_. They replied, \"We are, and we wish to see you.\" When they saw him standing before his round house, they immediately started to fan him, then begged him as they fanned him, gave him a special feast and fanned him again. And If\u00e1 was persuaded to return and the famine ended.\n\nThis is a retelling of a myth with a thousand voices, the myth of conflict that threatens to destroy the world and of the discovery of antidotes in mystic coolness. In another version two round droplets of water remaining in the mouth of a single fish reconstitute the peace that brought back order into the world. Here, in the legend of Yemoja and If\u00e1, a special rounded fan\u2014like a giant soothing drop of water\u2014restores peace and calm, associating itself with the image of If\u00e1's cool round house made of herbs and leaves. An indelible current of association links the roundness of habitations to the roundness of things pertaining to riverain goddesses.\n\nBut the coolness of the riverain goddesses is problematic. Vengeance, doom, and danger also lurk within the holy depths ( _ibu_ ) of the rivers where the goddesses are believed to dwell. In the nineteenth-century Yoruba civil wars, warriors from Ibadan and Ijaiye, after killing the king of Owu, were terrified by what the aroused spirit of the murdered king might do. So they temporarily dammed the river Oshun, buried the king's body in the river basin, and then released the waters. The logic: to bury the king deep beneath the rippling surfaces of the river would muffle the roar of his spirit and neutralize and appease his awesome powers of _\u00e0she_. Similarly, the cool, dark depths of the river may shield mankind from the full blast of the fiery powers of witchcraft harnessed by the river goddesses.\n\nWhat is more, a fan can be dangerous if brandished by a person steeped in moral and medicinal lore. For Yemoja and all the other riverain goddesses, especially Oshun and Oya, who presides over the river Niger, are famed for their \"witchcraft.\" They are supreme in the arts of mystic retribution and protection against all evil.\n\nMany riverain goddesses are visualized as women with swords. The sword, together with the negative uses of the fan, may be said to form in part an image of what Judith Hoch-Smith calls \"radical Yoruba female sexuality\":\n\nWithout the concept of witchcraft, power would have flowed naturally through society, lodging only in socially structured positions, most of which were held by men in the traditional Yoruba patrilineage. However, the concept of witchcraft permitted great quantities of power to become lodged in women, who in turn were thought to use that power against the institutions of society. In this sense, witchcraft symbolizes the eternal struggle of the sexes in Yoruba society over control of the life-force.\n\nWitchcraft, in fact, militates against not only total male dominance but the threat of class formation and drastically unequal distribution of wealth. At the core of the all-powerful council of male elders, the Ogboni Society, lies the awesome image of their deity, Earth, all-devouring, all-seeing. It is believed that man as such and woman as such asked themselves, \"Who is supreme?\" And out of the earth came the white-hot message: I AM SUPREME  And Earth was, in a manner beyond sex or class or any consideration contaminated by singleness of expectation. Just as we arrive among the western Yoruba in the presence of God to discover that \"he\" is not he, nor she, but a pure force\u2014 _\u00e0she_ of _\u00e0she_ \u2014so the impartial laserlike precision of the punishing vision of Earth, who was here before the goddesses and before the gods, implies a power beyond \"her\" sex.\n\nImperially presiding in the palaces beneath the sands at the bottom of the river, the riverain goddesses are peculiarly close to Earth. In the positive breeze of their fans, the ripple of their water, there is coolness. In the darkness of their depths and in the flashing of their swords, there is witchcraft. And within the shell-strewn floor of their underwater province there is bounteous wealth. Yoruba riverain goddesses are therefore not only the arbiters of the happiness of their people but militant witches. Their negative power is alluded to in oral literature:\n\nPLATE 47\n\nYemoja, the wind that whirls with force into the land.\n\nYemoja, angered water that smashes down the metal bridge.\n\nBut this is power used against the human arrogance of Western technocratic structures. The natural goodness within the evil of these water spirits is invoked by righteous devotion. Thus, in Cuba, when a divination priest warned women that a certain river goddess had become dangerously angry, senior priestesses, like Yemoja and her circle before If\u00e1, would face the altar of the offended spirit and fan her image with strong concerted motions.\n\nLike an Ipokia shrine of the river goddess Yewa and the forest dwelling of Orunmila, and like the ancient fans of Ile-Ife, the Afro-Cuban ritual fans are round. They are decorated with a richness of material\u2014beads, cowrie shells, jingle bells, even peacock feathers\u2014surpassing that of the originals. For example, a Ketu Yoruba round fan for the goddess Are, wife of the founding deity Ondo, tutelary spirit for many groups of the western Yoruba, is luxuriously embroidered with cowrie shells (Plate 47). The structure and allusiveness of the round, shell-embroidered fan were complicated in Cuba by metallic or feathered embellishments. Thus a fan for the goddess of the sea, Yemay\u00e1, made in Cuba before 1952 but probably in this century, displays a brilliant surface entirely covered with beads in geometric sections (Plate 48). The design includes a lunette on the right, a lunette on the left, both separated by an ascending column of beaded surface that continues the axis of the handle to the very tip of this pointed fan. Seven cowrie shells in a smooth curve decorate the bottom portion of the fan. Nine peacock feathers, with seven jingle bells, add both pleasing sound and swaying movement. (Nine is one of the numbers of Yemay\u00e1 in Africa, as in the Abeokuta praise verse, \"open river, divided into nine parts.\") The feathers are seductively beautiful, but they all carry a charge associated with some birds, namely, witchcraft. The shells suggest the goddesses' money\u2014all underwater creatures, who are close to the sources of the traditional cowrie currency and to the corals from which, in the ancient imagination, much wealth derived, are believed to be quite rich. The bells provide a gentle watery tinkle recalling a poem praising the goddess of the river Oshun that mentions copper bracelets chiming against each other underwater.\n\nPLATE 48\n\nThe religious history of the blacks of Rio is a palimpsest marked by Kongo, Yoruba, and Roman Catholic infusions, as will be elaborated on in the following chapter. Suffice it to say here that in the fusion of these elements\u2014in the rise of the macumba religious groups of Rio\u2014the arrow or the dagger and the heart of the Most Holy Virgin have combined with the imagery of Yemay\u00e1 in the belief that both the Virgin and the goddess of the sea share qualities of sacred love, faith, and purity. In the creole fusion-image of Yemay\u00e1 and the Virgin Mary, \"sung points\" strike through in the macumba shrines of Rio to an oceanic presence behind a Roman Catholic mask:\n\nO Virgin Mary\n\nLike a flower superb\n\nCelestially harmonious...\n\nReigning monarch of the seas.\n\nIn a superb white metal fan for Yemay\u00e1, probably made in the present century (but no later than August 1939, at which point it was accessioned by the National Historical Museum in Rio), the heart of Mary is returned to the sea in a petaled flower image (Plate 49) of Yemay\u00e1, with reflections of the latter's underwater wealth and celestial love suggested by pendants of miniature hearts and nineteenth-century Brazilian coinage. There is the crucial detail of the touching of the bottom of the heart by a sharpened, arrowheadlike point at the top of the handle of the fan, as in the \"drawn point\" that accompanies Rio sacred songs for Yemay\u00e1\/the Virgin Mary. This is, of course, the seal of Nossa Senhora das D\u00f4res, blending with the Yoruba tradition of honoring powerful underwater denizens with honorific fans. Finally, the scalloped edge circumscribes the entire composition with a sign of water.\n\nThe petals surrounding the inner heart suggest a floral image within water, which is implied by the wavy edge of the fan. Each New Year's Eve thousands upon thousands of black and white worshippers descend from the hills above and around the city of Rio and crowd the famous beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema in one of the most celebrated of the festivals for Yemay\u00e1 in the western hemisphere. And one of the acts rendered, then, in her honor, involves the tossing of sacrificial flowers into the breakers of the sea. Pierre Verger has photographed flowers in a container to be sunk beneath the waves in honor of Yemay\u00e1 in Bahia. The image of flowers within the depths is another recollection of tradition in Yoruba New World worship. It recalls the ending of the festival of the riverain goddess, Oshun, with the throwing of flowers into her stream at Oshogbo, in Nigeria.\n\nPLATE 49\n\n### Oshun\n\nDivination literature tells us that Oshun was once married to If\u00e1 but fell into a more passionate involvement with the fiery thunder god, who carried her into his vast brass palace, where she ruled with him; she bore him twins and accumulated, as mothers of twins in Yorubaland are wont to do, money and splendid things galore. She owned a wealth of bracelets, staffs, needles, earrings\u2014all in brass, the metal the Yoruba regard as most precious. When she died, she took these things to the bottom of the river. There she reigns in glory, within the sacred depths, fully aware that so much treasure means that she must counter inevitable waves of jealous witchcraft by constant giving, constant acts of intricate generosity. Even so, she is sometimes seen, crowned, in images of warlock capacity and power, brandishing a lethal sword, ready to burn and destroy immoral persons who incur her wrath, qualities vividly contrasting with her sweetness, love, and calm:\n\nShe greets the most important word within the water\n\nShe is the orisha you see healing by means of water that is cool\n\nIworo bird with brilliant plume upon her head\n\nTitled woman who heals the children...\n\nWitness of a person's ecstasy renewed\n\nShe says: bad head\u2014become good!\n\nMistress of \u00e0she, of full predictive power,\n\nShe greets the most important matter in the water.\n\nStrong woman who burns a person.\n\nShe cures without fee; gives honey to children\n\nHas lots of money, speaks sweetly to the multitude.\n\nNowhere is the kingly power of Oshun not renowned\n\nOshun has a mortar made of brass\n\nSweet is the touch of an infant's hand\n\nKare, King of the holy depths\n\nShe dances, she takes the crown...\n\nThe chiming bracelets of her dance.\n\nShe smites the belly of the liar with her bell.\n\nMother, O Mother of cool water,\n\nYou, who sired the soothing osun herb.\n\nEcstatic praise literature. It is easy in the context of these verses and Oshun's reputation for great beauty to appreciate why she was romantically transmuted into the \"love goddess\" of many Yoruba-influenced blacks in the western hemisphere. But there are dark aspects to her love and the singers of her praises in Nigeria do not hesitate to mention them: her masculine prowess in war; her skill in the art of mixing deadly potions, of using knives as she flies through the night:\n\nWoman wearing manly crown, oh so rare\n\nOwner of a piercing knife, I take my haven by your side\n\nYou own the inner court, where witch-owl lays her eggs.\n\nYou kill this owl, and make of her a strange cuisine...\n\nArriving, trouble vanishes in coolness.\n\nYeye Kare...\n\nYou hollow out sands beneath the sea,\n\nYou're putting money in there\n\nThe water sounds, _wanran-wanran-wanran_ , like the bracelets of Oshun.\n\nBut Oshun's darker side is ultimately protective of her people. This accounts for the famous material expression of her positive witchcraft among Cuban and New York Hispanic blacks, the _oshun kole_ ornament that is hung from the ceiling of the house of its owner: \"Oshun Kole lives in a calabash adorned with five turkey buzzard feathers, a calabash which is suspended from the ceiling.\" The spray of \"witch feathers\" renders this suspended vessel into a kind of elevated devouring force. Like certain charms suspended from the rafters of reception porches used by some northern Yoruba chiefs and kings, the _oshun kole_ is believed to protect the habitation from all evil. Our example, dated 1968 (Plate 50), was made in Hispanic New York and indicates a change in continuity from Nigeria via Cuba: the buzzard feathers have been replaced by store-bought plumes; the calabash is missing; and a single strand of brilliant copper-colored _oshun_ beads with cowrie shell has been added.\n\nElderly informants of Lydia Cabrera remembered the use, at the turn of the century, of crowns with beaded fringes for Oshun in Havana. The praise-verse \"Crowned Woman, O so rare\" is brought to life by a proliferation of crowns for priests and priestesses of Oshun and riverain spirits in Brazil, many with veils that fall across the wearer's face in the ancient Yoruba manner.\n\nPLATE 50\n\nOshun's positive witchcraft gave rise to feathered charms in Cuba and New York. Her sovereign powers are celebrated by the crowns for Oshun in Brazil. But perhaps the most significant of her New World emblems are her round metallic fans. The idea of Oshun among the Ijesha Yoruba of Nigeria is brilliantly realized in circular fans of polished brass with chased and hammered figuration. One of the finest examples of the genre comes from Ilesha, the capital of the Ijesha; it was made in sheet brass around the turn of the century by the master brassmith Oginnin Ajirotitu Arode Onishona (Plate 51).\n\nThe symbols on the Oginnin fan are remarkable for their richness of allusion. First there is a link between the riverain goddess and the ultimate powers of Earth made explicit in praise literature. Here the closeness of the goddess of the water to the Supreme Being is manifested by the handle. From the bottom of the handle hang three chains, the mystic number of Earth. There are also two pairs of three small hearts chased within the surface of the handle. Altogether there are three statements of the power of Earth, who witnesses two-party vows and covenants.\n\nThe son of Oginnin explained the many meanings embedded in this fan as his father had explained them. The summit of the program of decorative detail is dominated by the figure of Oshun herself, shown with hands held high above her head, \"to greet a person with the sign of gladness, not by song.\" She unifies the world by holding a length of chain about her head, an action called I-tie-all-my-people-together ( _mo so awon enia mi po_ ). Fish, in which her spirit moves within the river, appear as motifs, left and lower right. Alluding to the feathered avatars in which she and her circle fly, there is a \"bird of the river\" ( _karo_ ) standing beneath the fish on the right. Serpents also appear; they are messengers of Og\u00f9n's iron\u2014\"fighting evil men.\"\n\nPLATE 51\n\nFor all the signs of witchcraft and the clash of iron, lessons of the cool and antidotes to evil and to envy are richly given, too: a giant rat ( _okete_ ), \"not for the gods but for the cooling of the witches\"; a tortoise ( _ajapa_ ), \"sacrifice to Osanyin, master of the medicines by which we live\"; a cock; a hen; a Muslim writing-tablet (\"carved with Og\u00f9n's iron\"); and the image of a young woman with a bridal hairdo who brings a calabash filled with kola \"for the greeting of the gods.\" These all connote giving and assuagement, acts that still the wind and calm the surface of the water. And all these images float timelessly about the central icon of the paired heads of Owari and Obanifun, spirits of war and creativity. The tip of the cartouche in which these male valences are contained touches the vagina of Oshun. The implication of the fan's program of symbols is precisely this: without constant rhythms of giving and responsibility, the fruitful union of Owari\/Obanifun and Oshun would be no more and the withering famine described in many myths would return.\n\nThe buzz of mythic voices was silenced, as it were, when the brass fans were brought to Bahia. The chasing of symbols upon the surface in the Ijesha manner was apparently lost. All that remains of the originating tradition is the characteristic shaping of the fan in the round manner of the ancients and the use of polished metal as the medium. But metal fans for the river goddesses in Bahia have a Creole richness of their own, as attested by a fan for Oshun made by Clodimir Menezes da Silva in August 1968 (Plate 52). They fuse basic Yoruba style (round outline, metal medium) with an element of Dahomeanizing design (the use of what might be termed \"metal appliqu\u00e9,\" i.e., the bolting together of various levels of sheet metal to form a composition, as in the great metal standing figures of Abomey). In addition, some artists actually sometimes seal sacred liquid within the hollow, syringelike handle of the fan. In other words, the handle loses its flattened textural quality in the manner of Ilesha and becomes a polished cylinder, a vial. Thus the artists of Bahia have extended the image of the fan of Oshun and the riverain goddesses with an object that mimes, as it were, the balancing of a single, multipetaled sacrificial flower on the rolling, scalloped, chiming waters of Oshun.\n\nPLATE 52\n\n### Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3\n\nThe tempestuous mythic third king of the Yoruba, Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3 is an Oyo deity. He is the thunder god, and his consort is the whirlwind, the goddess Oya, who is also the goddess of the Niger River. As an alleged medieval monarch, he has come to symbolize the powers of the Oyo kings. His royal cult plays an integral role in the installation of each king of the Oyo. In the palace of the Oyo kings there is a special priestess, Iya Naso, who is charged with palace worship of the thunder god, and her disciple Iya Aaafin Iku is responsible for Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3's sacred ram (the motion of whose horns are poetically compared to the thrust and parry of the lightning bolt). These palace customs reach a climax at the annual Beere festival when a masked priest, said to represent Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3's own ancestral spirit, Alakoro, perambulates the palace walls while gesticulating and, in his robe of blazing red and shining mask of polished brass, looking like a crimson ghost. Before each of the main gates to the palace he gestures to heaven and then to earth, to heaven and earth again, and moves on to the next point of blessing.\n\nOnce upon a time, as myth would have it, Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3 was recklessly experimenting with a leaf that had the power to bring down lightning from the skies and inadvertently caused the roof of the palace of Oyo to be set afire by lightning. In the blaze his wife and children were killed. Half crazed with grief and guilt, Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3 went to a spot outside his royal capital and hanged himself from the branches of an ayan tree. He thus suffered the consequences of playing arrogantly with God's fire, and became lightning itself. Like Eshu at the Cuban crossroads, in the lightning bolt Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3 met himself. He became an eternal moral presence, rumbling in the clouds, outraged by impure human acts, targeting the homes of adulterers, liars, and thieves for destruction. \"He dances in the courtyard of the impertinent,\" as composers of his praise-poetry envision his transformation of lightning into moral action. Praise singers among the western Yoruba realize a vision of his spirit in poetry charged with flashing images:\n\nWater by the side of fire at the center of the sky\n\nA strange thing, on the road to Teji Oku\n\nHe strikes a stone in the forest, stone bleeds blood\n\nHe carries a heavy stone upon his head without a cushion.\n\nSh\u00e0ng\u00f3 splits the wall with his falling thunderbolt.\n\nHe makes a detour in telegraphic wire\n\nLeopard of the flaming eyes\n\nLord who wears the sawtooth-bordered cloth of returning ancestors ( _egun_ )\n\nStorm on the edge of a knife.\n\nEarthworm, despite no eyes, plunges deep into the earth\n\nHe dances savagely in the courtyard of the impertinent\n\nHe sets the liar's roof on fire\n\nHe carries fire as burden on his head\n\nThe gaze of this leopard sets the roof on fire\n\nFather, grant us the intelligence to avoid saying stupid things.\n\nAgainst the unforeseen, let us do things together.\n\nSwift king, appearing like the evening moon.\n\nHis very gaze exalts a person.\n\nI have an assassin as a lover.\n\nBeads of wealth blaze upon his frame.\n\nWho opens wide his eyes\n\nLeopard of the flaming eyes\n\nFire, friend of hearth.\n\nLeopard, of the copper-flashing eyes\n\nFire, friend of hearth.\n\nLord with flashing, metallic, eyes,\n\nWith which he terrifies all thieves.\n\nThe power of Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3 streaks down in meteorites and thunderstones, stones both symbolic and real. The _\u00e0she_ of Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3 is found within a stone, the flaming stone that only he and his brave followers know how to balance unsupported on their heads. Flaming stones have become a metaphoric burden: the possession priest or priestess often balances a vessel containing burning oil upon his or her head. The earthworm, one of the first of God's messengers of _\u00e0she_ , plunges like lightning into the soil and, ventilating the earth, creates sustenance for plants. Likewise, Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3, as pestle, crushes the fritter that it may properly be prepared, just as Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3's favorite yams and maize must first be pounded. Only by being broken down do substances yield nourishment. Only through chastisement does the liar ideally change and grow.\n\nSh\u00e0ng\u00f3 sits upon a sacred inverted mortar ( _odo_ ) when he fills the body of his possession-devotee. _\u00c0she_ within his meteoric stones also flashes within his eyes, the eyes of the possessed, whose gaze is believed capable of igniting houses. Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3's _\u00e0she_ flashes dangerously in the amazingly wide-open eyes of thunder priests and in the gaze of the royal leopard, who will kill all felons and enemies of the state.\n\nThe metaphoric and moral range of this poetry is matched by that of the images of the altars of Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3. The thunder ax ( _oshe_ ) is one of his most pervasive attributes. The character of Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3's moral retribution and the control of this power by his followers are represented in one of the earliest _oshe_ brought to Europe, a fine specimen taken to England before 1853 by Lt. W. R. Bent of the Royal Navy (Plate 8). It is now in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. Twinned thunderstones appear above the head of a female follower of Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3. There they are balanced, like the meteorites that Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3 carries upon his head. Character and propitiating coolness ( _irele_ ) are exemplified in her poise; she kneels to show honor, holding her breasts as an offertory. She wears the characteristic red and white beads of the thunder god that refer to, among other images, a line of the praisepoem, \"water by the side of fire at the center of the sky.\" The two colors also suggest the friendship of fiery \"red\" Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3 and Obatala, deity of creativity, whose honorific color is white.\n\nMetaphoric fire balanced on the head of the thunder-god follower is an image that traveled to Bahia, in Brazil, where actual dancing with loads of fire has been reported:\n\nIn the cycle of festivals for Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3 in the shrine of S\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alothere is an impressive ceremony, only realized there, wherein thedaughters of Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3, possessed by their orisha, dance with avessel that contains material in flames, upon their heads. The firedoes not harm them, nor does it burn the hands with which they secure the burning vessel. Later, while still moving in the dance, they eat flaming balls of cotton dipped in oil.\n\nThese miracles indicate to believers that Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3's possession of his followers is actual, not a sham. The balancing of twin bolts of meteoric fire on the head of the devotee is also meant to convey a promise of moral vengeance. This powerful dual metaphor spread to the far corners of the Atlantic Yoruba world. It appears with particular strength in Bahia (Plate 53), where in the late nineteenth century the butterflylike shape of the thunderstones balanced on the represented worshipper's head revealed influence from Ketu, where thunder axes frequently are shaped this way.\n\nSome Western Yoruba believe that when Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3 blinks, a lightning bolt will crash down at that instant. And when a devotee is infused, in spirit-possession, with Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3's _\u00e0she_ , the devotee's eyes will bulge. Notice the cause and effect. This fine piece of nineteenth-century Yoruba sculpture in Brazil also shows the servitor with hands on her stomach, making of her midriff an offertory vessel of life and continuity.\n\nPLATE 53\n\nPLATE 54\n\nAfro-Cuban association of the thunder god with Saint Barbara sometimes gave rise on the island to superbly complex renderings. Our example (Plate 54) dates perhaps from the end of the nineteenth century, and apparently was collected in the region of Havana. The artist affirmed the Catholic aspect but transcended it. He dressed a Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3 follower in a red and white chasuble, deliberately creating raking angles in the phrasing of the garment, so as to harmonize it with and mirror the higher angulation of the thunderstones. The calm, pert face of the devotee has slight indications of the markings of Yoruba patrilineal descent groups. This compact little sculpture is a fusion of images from two cultures and two visions under God.\n\nMany Brazilian and Cuban _oshe_ reflect trade ties and strong ethnicity. But there is another kind of thunder ax made in the Americas, among United States blacks who dropped their Anglo-Saxon names in favor of If\u00e1-indicated Yoruba titles or self-assigned names. Adefunmi, the founder of the Yoruba Temple in Harlem in 1960, a Detroit-born black, learned Yoruba initiatory art and lore in Matanzas, Cuba, and brought an originally Afro-Cubanizing form of Yoruba _orisha_ worship to Harlem. But Adefunmi's imagination was restless, and he ceaselessly studied the Yoruba language, handbooks with illustrations of the classical art of the Yoruba, lectures by New York-area Africanists, and many other sources. In the process, the art of New York Yoruba became a willed phenomenon, a self-conscious renaissance that was distinguishable from modern Afro-Cuban work. In this body of art works are precise, detailed representations of the ideas of the _orisha_. For example, Adefunmi's _oshe_ , carved in Harlem in 1965-68, follows the canon in its essentials\u2014the twin thunderstones carried on the head as a mystic burden, the bulging eyes of _\u00e0she_ , the frozen mouth\u2014but the figure gestures asymetrically, with a miniature _oshe_ in the left hand and a thunder rattle in the right (Plate 55). The figure is not frozen in a pose of giving but in a stance of combativeness.\n\nThis figural wariness is appropriate to the condition of blacks in the crisis decade of the 1960's. Awolowo, another prominent member of the Harlem Yoruba Temple, shaped in c. 1968 a remarkable plaster image of Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3, the thunder king (Plate 56) wearing a kind of _oshe_ -coronet and holding before his body a royal Yoruba fly whisk and a miniature _oshe_. His face is traditionally impassive even as he stares. The sweep and velocity of the lines tracing the folds of the royal garment are unprecedented in the classical statuary, and represent the application of a rich inventive mind to the problems of artistic identity.\n\nSh\u00e0ng\u00f3's complex artistic embodiments\u2014warrior and lover, \"water by the side of fire at the center of the sky,\" \"I have an assassin as a lover\"\u2014extend back to antiquity. As early as 1659 Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3's upsurge into the world had been stylized by particularities of sculpture\u2014the fertilizing thrust of the thunderstone into the earth indicated by an image carved in wood, pointing to his penis with one hand while indicating the source of that energy by pointing to the sky with the other hand (Plate 57). Eva Meyerowitz examined an old brass armlet decorated with Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3 emblems in Dahomey (now Benin), where the traditional owners told her that the object had originally come from Oyo-Ile. On this probably ancient piece, possibly from the city of Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3, the sky-and-penis gesture of the thunder god reappears:\n\nPLATE 55\n\nPLATE 56\n\nPLATE 57\n\nPLATE 58\n\nOne figure presses both his hands against his cheeks, showing his tongue which is of enormous size, while the other carries an object in his one hand which suggests a meteorite or thunderbolt, while his other hand points to his sexual organs.\n\nThis strong phrasing came to Cuba:\n\nThere is no more vehement nor energetic spirit [than Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3]. When a devotee is mounted by the spirit of Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3, he charges three times, head leading, spinning like a ram, towards the drums. Then he opens his eyes to abnormal width and sticks out his tongue, to symbolize a fiery belch of flames, and raises his thunder-axe on high and clamps his other hand upon his scrotum.\n\nThe ancient dual gesture is so persistent that not only does Alakoro perform a modified version, pointing to the sky and to the earth twice, before the gates of the Oyo palace, but it is emblazoned in relief upon a thunder pedestal ( _odo sh\u00e0ng\u00f3_ ) found in Bahia, dating, probably, from the second half of the last century (Plate 58). Here the figure of a priestess makes the dual gesture, rattle to sky, hand to waist.\n\nThe coming of the icons of the Yoruba to the black New World accompanied an affirmation of philosophical continuities. Selected fragments of the liturgies remained alive in songs about the wonder-working blade atop, the head of Eshu-Odara, the irons of Ogun flashing moral vengeance in hearth and home, and the murmur of the chiming bracelets of Oshun beneath the undulating surface of the river. These verses lived in chants, and in icons of the goddesses and gods on New World domestic altars.\n\nThere is, in all of this, the vision of the Yoruba Atlantic world, a metaphoric capture of the moral potentiality inherent in certain powers of the natural world\u2014thunder, oceans, herbs, and stones\u2014and a demonstration that creative persons have shaped certain images, pillars of lateritic clay, implements of iron, metal fans, brooms decorated with leather and cowrie-shell embroidery, so that they illumine the world with intuitions of the power to make right things come to pass.\n\nTime and again, in Yoruba Atlantic art and dance, in the image of the servitor shaped in wood or directly embodied in ritual participation, the ancient praise-poems and divinatory insights were materialized, and made visible. One final example:\n\nA magnificent beaded (probably nineteenth century) Nigerian Yoruba tunic for a thunder-god possession-priest ( _ewu sh\u00e0ng\u00f3_ ) displays the lord of thunder with characteristic axe and rattle, surrounded by four birds of nocturnal power [Plate 59]. Here is Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3, beads of wealth blazing on his frame. Here is Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3, with triangularly represented elements of lightning, each with eyes to seek and find the rooves of the ungodly.\n\nPLATE 59\n\nThere is a telling opposition to be noted here\u2014the clash between the hard-edged, sharply pointed thunderstones and the smooth curves of richly elaborated interlace which almost certainly stands for serpents intertwined, ancient Yoruba image of coolness, peace, and power. These interwoven forces come down like lightning, like the zig-zags glittering on the moving body of the Gaboon viper, harbinger of God's _\u00e0she_ , like the earthworm, another founding form of God's _\u00e0she_ , ventilating earth, opening up the soil as with myriad lightning strikes.\n\nFire (thunderstones, flashing with pinpoint metallic eyes) and water (domain of becalmed serpents, superbly coiled about themselves) meet at the center of the sky. There Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3, axe and rattle handsomely attendant, faces the present and the future on behalf of his numerous followers. On the back of the tunic [Plate 60], facing the past, he whirls as an ancestor-inquisitor ( _eg\u00f9ngng\u00f9n_ ), lappets flaring in the wind, a virtual dervish in striped strips of narrow-loom 'country cloth.' There he spins, a righteous whirlwind, a storm on the edge of the knife dividing this world from the next.\n\nPLATE 60\n\nThis spectacularly allusive tradition, the Yoruba beaded royal tunic, was renewed in Cuba in new form. It reached a peak of decorative quintessence in the making, perhaps in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, of a sumptuously beaded garment ( _bandel_ ), for the mother-drum of a set of three Cuban-Yoruba _bat\u00e1_ drums [Plate 61]. Striking changes are apparent. Instead of Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3 in a field of fiery and acquatic forces, there is a vivid creole fusion of distinct goddesses and gods. Olokun, god of the sea [Plate 62], appears at the summit of the composition, eyes fashioned out of flashing mirror shards. The ax of the thunder-god reappears at left, here centered with a shell-studded jewel of copper color, symbolizing Oshun and her world of wealth. The ancient eyes of Eshu-Elegbara, cowrie shells, stare forward from an implicit cross-roads at the bottom of the tunic. Left, there appears a bird of Yemay\u00e1, intuiting her powers; right, another thunder ax; and handsome segments of leopard pelt allude to _orisha_ of the forest. And there is a segment of green and yellow beads for the deity of divination. The attributes of the deities of the Yoruba, one against the other, protect in unison the body of a drum. The drum itself brings back the rhythmized voices of the ancestors of the Yoruba in Cuba. Like a Trajanic frieze, unfolding history, this beaded drum tunic brings back sacred forces from the Old World to the New.\n\nPLATE 61\n\nPLATE 62\n\nIn conclusion, the grand message of Yoruba Atlantic art, wherever it is found, but especially in Nigeria, Togo, and Benin, the United States, Cuba, and Brazil, handsomely counterpointed, in music, by the rising worldwide popularity of Sunny Ad\u00e9 and other players of Yoruba juju music, and especially evident in the Yoruba Renaissance art and architecture (Plates 63, 64, 65) of Oyotunji, South Carolina, in the 1970's is this: sheer artlessness may bring a culture down but a civilization like that of the Yoruba, and the Yoruba-Americans, pulsing with ceaseless creativity richly stabilized by precision and control, will safeguard the passage of its people through the storms of time.\n\nPLATE 63\n\nPLATE 64\n\nPLATE 65\n\n# **Two**\n\n# **THE SIGN OF  \nTHE FOUR MOMENTS  \nOF THE SUN**\n\n# **Kongo Art and Religion  \nin the Americas**\n\nSpelling Kongo with a _K_ instead of a _C_ , Africanists distinguish Kongo civilization and the Bakongo people from the colonial entity called the Belgian Congo (now Za\u00efre) and the present-day People's Republic of Congo-Brazzaville, both of which include numerous non-Kongo peoples. Traditional Kongo civilization encompasses modern Bas-Za\u00efre and neighboring territories in modern Cabinda, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, and northern Angola. The Punu people of Gabon, the Teke of Congo-Brazzaville, the Suku and the Yaka of the Kwango River area east of Kongo in Za\u00efre, and some of the ethnic groups of northern Angola share key cultural and religious concepts with the Bakongo and also suffered, with them, the ordeals of the transatlantic slave trade.\n\nThe slavers of the early 1500's first applied the name \"Kongo\" solely to the Bakongo people. Then gradually they used the name to designate any person brought from the west coast of Central Africa to America. Similarly, the meaning of \"Angola\" broadened over the centuries. \"Ngola\" once referred only to the ruler of the Ndongo part of the Kimbundu culture in what is now the northern part of Angola. According to historian Philip Curtin, \"[Angola's] first European meaning referred quite precisely to the immediate hinterland of Luanda.\" Then the term became the name of not only modern Angola but sometimes the whole west coast of Central Africa, from Cape Lopez in northwestern Gabon to Benguela on the coast of Angola proper.\n\nThe broadening of the meanings of \"Kongo\" and \"Angola\" over the span of the Atlantic trade reflects the expansion of European slave trafficking into the heart of Kongo and Kongo-related societies during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Thousands of persons were abducted from this culturally rich area. And as opposed to a prevalent view of Africans\u2014as belonging to different \"tribes,\" speaking different \"dialects,\" thrown together in the holds of slave ships, and hopelessly alienated, one from the other\u2014Africans from Kongo and Angola shared fundamental beliefs and languages. When they met on the plantations and in the cities of the western hemisphere, they fostered their heritage. Kongo civilization and art were not obliterated in the New World: they resurfaced in the coming together, here and there, of numerous slaves from Kongo and Angola.\n\nKongo presence unexpectedly emerges in the Americas in many places and in many ways. Take, for example, vernacular English and singing. In the South of the United States, important Ki-Kongo words and concepts influenced black English, especially the lexicons of jazz and the blues, as well as of lovemaking and herbalism. Many a Ki-Kongo-derived word has been described by etymologists as \"origin unknown.\" The word \"jazz\" is probably creolized Ki-Kongo: it is similar in sound and original meaning to \"jizz,\" the American vernacular for semen. And \"jizz,\" suggestive of vitality, appears to derive from the Ki-Kongo verb _dinza_ , \"to discharge one's semen, to come.\" _Dinza_ was creolized in New Orleans and elsewhere in black United States into \"jizz\" and \"jism.\"\n\nThe slang term \"funky\" in black communities originally referred to strong body odor, and not to \"funk,\" meaning fear or panic. The black nuance seems to derive from the Ki-Kongo _lu-fuki_ , \"bad body odor,\" and is perhaps reinforced by contact with _fumet_ , \"aroma of food and wine,\" in French Louisiana. But the Ki-Kongo word is closer to the jazz word \"funky\" in form and meaning, as both jazzmen and Bakongo use \"funky\" and _lu-fuki_ to praise persons for the integrity of their art, for having \"worked out\" to achieve their aims. In Kongo today it is possible to hear an elder lauded in this way: \"like, there is a really funky person!\u2014my soul advances toward him to receive his blessing\" ( _yati, nkwa lu-fuki! Ve miela miami ikwenda baki_ ). Fu-Kiau Bunseki, a leading native authority on Kongo culture, explains: \"Someone who is very old, I go to sit with him, in order to feel his _lu-fuki_ , meaning, I would like to be blessed by him.\" For in Kongo the smell of a hardworking elder carries luck. This Kongo sign of exertion is identified with the positive energy of a person. Hence \"funk\" in black American jazz parlance can mean earthiness, a return to fundamentals.\n\nIn the black American metaphysical traditions of conjuring and healing with herbs and roots, there are words and phrases that cannot readily be traced to European origins. One of the most important words in black United States conjure-work, \"goofer,\" refers to grave dirt, often inserted in a charm. In Kongo territory, earth from a grave is considered at one with the spirit of the buried person. \"Goofer dust\" harks back to the Ki-Kongo verb _kufwa_ (\"to die\"). Another important word in the lexicon of the charm makers is toby. A toby is a good-luck charm. In form and function it almost certainly derives from the _tobe_ charms of Kongo. The original charm was \"made up of a mixture of earth from a grave plus palm wine, and is believed to bring good luck.\"\n\nMore important than the impact of Ki-Kongo on the languages of blacks throughout the Americas, though, is the influence of Kongo civilization on their philosophic and visual traditions. Aspects of Kongo culture retained by blacks enslaved in the Americas inspired these men and women to come together as brothers and sisters in Kongo-American societies virtually devoted to the very idea of being Kongo. At the turn of the century in Montevideo, Uruguay, the outwardly festive look of a Kongo dance society could conceal, as Vicente Rossi observed in a study of the origins of the tango, _Cosas de Negros_ (1926), a serious reaffirmation of autonomy:\n\nThere is something there, in the middle of the circle of black men, something that they alone see, feel, and comprehend... the voice of native soil, a flag unfurled in harmonic syllables. There is something there, in the middle of the dancing ring of black men and it is the motherland! Fleeting seconds of liberty have evoked it, and, once brought into being, it fortifies their broken spirits.... they have, forgetting themselves, relived the [Kongo] nation in one of its typical expressions... in sudden homage, with an expanded power of observation... they dance around the vision.\n\nSo powerful an act of cultural recollection would have inevitably reminded some black Montevidean elders born in Kongo of the grandeur of Mbanza Kongo, the ancient ideal capital, heart of the ancient kingdom, where \"all were born, each clan still has its street and each one has relatives to receive him.\" For the Bakongo envisioned their capital as an ideal, noble place where \"a strong chief, supernaturally inspired, assures every citizen his due.\" Mbanza Kongo was sited at the top of a hill, and its location reflects a vision of the cosmos deeply ingrained in the Kongo mind:\n\nThe N'Kongo [i.e., an inhabitant of the capital of Kongo] thought of the earth as a mountain over a body of water which is the land of the dead, called Mpemba. In Mpemba the sun rises and sets just as it does in the land of the living... the water is both a passage and a great barrier. The world, in Kongo thought, is like two mountains opposed at their bases and separated by the ocean.\n\nAt the rising and setting of the sun the living and the dead exchange day and night. The setting of the sun signifies man's death and its rising, his rebirth, or the continuity of his life. Bakongo believe and hold it true that man's life has no end, that it constitutes a cycle, and death is merely a transition in the process of change.\n\nThe Bakongo symbolized the daily journey of the sun around the mirrored worlds of the living and the dead by means of the spiral shape of the _kodya_ shell. They also expressed the same idea, architecturally, with the concentric spaces of the royal enclosure _(luumbu)_. A newly elected king would make a circular tour of his domain, symbolically passing through the worlds of the living and the dead, thereby acquiring mystic insights proper only to a Kongo king.\n\nIn 1960, while most Western journalists were writing copy about the \"Congo crisis,\" Bakongo women were styling their hair in splendid concentric, spiral patterns to celebrate the restoration of black rule and the circularity of the royal enclosure of the ancient ideal capital. Thus the women of Kongo had both invoked the greatness of Mbanza Kongo and communicated their hope that Kasa-Vubu's tour of the country had given him mystic power.\n\nThe Bakongo viewed their capital as an ideal realm in which images of centering prevailed. It was a world profoundly informed by a cosmogram\u2014an ideal balancing of the vitality of the world of the living with the visionariness of the world of the dead. Charms and medicines were constantly produced in the search for the realization of a perfect vision in the less than perfect world of the living. It is true that, unlike the Yoruba, the Bakongo lack a complex pantheon of deities, but they have, instead, a complex system of _minkisi_ (\"sacred medicines\"), which they believe were given to mankind by God. The religion of Kongo presupposes God Almighty _(Nzambi Mpungu)_ , whose illuminating spirit and healing powers are carefully controlled by the king _(mfumu)_ , the ritual expert or authority _(nganga)_ , and the sorcerer _(ndoki)_.\n\nThe king had the power to execute convicted felons and enemies of the state. As supreme authority, he was expected to live decorously, to embody impartiality. The ritual experts, or _banganga_ (plural of _nganga_ ), were various. Some healed with charms\u2014these were _banganga nkisi_. Others healed with roots and herbs and were called _banganga mbuki_. Still others, _banganga ngombo_ , ministered to the needs of clients by means of divination. Some, the _banganga simbi_ , worshipped powerful and mysterious spirits _(bisimbi)_ , \"the highest class of the dead,\" immortal beings who, because of their good works, are believed to be blessed with the power to resist the organic process. Others who were \"chosen\" were transformed, during initiation, from recovered patients to practicing herbalists, and became members of the healing society of Lemba, a band of healers in existence since the 1660's.\n\nNow the king and the ritual experts controlled mystic powers for the common good. By contrast, the _ndoki_ , or sorcerer, was a caricature of the individualist who, lacking social conscience, bases his security upon the insecurity of others. The belief in the existence of evil, in witchcraft\u2014in utterly selfish action devoid of mercy\u2014remains alive in Kongo. Dialectically, it strengthens the need for the wisdom of the ancestors and the elders who know the necessary antidotes. Not all bad luck or deliberate evil, however, was effected by witches. Offended ancestors could also intervene powerfully in the affairs of the living. Again, in such instances Bakongo turned to ritual authorities for guidance.\n\nVersions of some of the ritual authorities responsible for Kongo herbalistic healing and divination appeared in the Americas and served as avatars of Kongo and Angola lore in the New World. Kongo ritual experts in Cuba took the appropriate ancient name _banganga_ ; those in the United States were known largely as \"conjurors\" and \"root-persons\"; and others in Brazil were called _pae de santo_ and _mae de santo_ , names apparently originating in Yoruba worship\u2014 _babalorisha_ and _iyalorisha_ , \"father of the saint\" and \"mother of the saint.\" These ritual authorities were largely responsible for the dissemination of Kongo religious and artistic culture throughout the New World.\n\nThe influences of and improvisations upon Kongo art and religion in the western hemisphere are most readily discernible in four major forms of expression: cosmograms marked on the ground for purposes of initiation and mediation of spiritual power between worlds; the sacred Kongo medicines, or _minkisi_ ; the use of graves of the recently deceased as charms of ancestral vigilance and spiritual return; and the related supernatural uses of trees, staffs, branches, and roots.\n\n## **Tendwa Nz\u00e0 Kongo: The Kongo Cosmogram**\n\nWyatt MacGaffey, a scholar of Kongo civilization and religion, has summarized the form and meaning of the essential Kongo cosmogram as follows:\n\nThe simplest ritual space is a Greek cross [ ] marked on the ground, as for oath-taking. One line represents the boundary; the other is ambivalently both the path leading across the boundary, as to the cemetery; _and_ the vertical path of power linking \"the above\" with \"the below.\" This relationship, in turn, is polyvalent, since it refers to God and man, God and the dead, and the living and the dead. The person taking the oath stands upon the cross, situating himself between life and death, and invokes the judgement of God and the dead upon himself.\n\nThis is the simplest manifestation of the Kongo cruciform, a sacred \"point\" on which a person stands to make an oath, on the ground of the dead and under all-seeing God. This Kongo \"sign of the cross\" has nothing to do with the crucifixion of the Son of God, yet its meaning overlaps the Christian vision. Traditional Bakongo believed in a Supreme Deity, Nzambi Mpungu, and they had their own notions of the indestructibility of the soul: \"Bakongo believe and hold it true that man's life has no end, that it constitutes a cycle. The sun, in its rising and setting, is a sign of this cycle, and death is merely a transition in the process of change.\" The Kongo _yowa_ cross does not signify the crucifixion of Jesus for the salvation of mankind; it signifies the equally compelling vision of the circular motion of human souls about the circumference of its intersecting lines. The Kongo cross refers therefore to the everlasting continuity of _all_ righteous men and women:\n\n_Nzungi! n'zungi-nzila_ | Man turns in the path  \n---|---  \n_N'zungi! n'zungi-nzila_ | He merely turns in the path;  \n_Banganga ban'e E ee!_ | The priests, the same.\n\nA fork in the road (or even a forked branch) can allude to this crucially important symbol of passage and communication between worlds. The \"turn in the path,\" i.e., the crossroads, remains an indelible concept in the Kongo-Atlantic world, as the point of intersection between the ancestors and the living.\n\nHere is one precise version of the _yowa_ cross:\n\n_Yowa_ : the Kongo sign of cosmos and the continuity of human life\n\nThe horizontal line divides the mountain of the living world from its mirrored counterpart in the kingdom of the dead. The mountain of the living is described as \"earth\" ( _ntoto_ ). The mountain of the dead is called \"white clay\" ( _mpemba_ ). The bottom half of the Kongo cosmogram was also called _kalunga_ , referring, literally, to the world of the dead as complete ( _lunga_ ) within itself and to the wholeness that comes to a person who understands the ways and powers of both worlds.\n\nInitiates read the cosmogram correctly, respecting its allusiveness. God is imagined at the top, the dead at the bottom, and water in between. The four disks at the points of the cross stand for the four moments of the sun, and the circumference of the cross the certainty of reincarnation: the especially righteous Kongo person will never be destroyed but will come back in the name or body of progeny, or in the form of an everlasting pool, waterfall, stone, or mountain.\n\nThe summit of the pattern symbolizes not only noon but also maleness, north, and the peak of a person's strength on earth. Correspondingly, the bottom equals midnight, femaleness, south, the highest point of a person's otherworldly strength.\n\nMembers of the Lemba society of healers had initiates stand on a cross chalked on the ground, a variant of the cosmogram. \"To stand upon this sign,\" Fu-Kiau Bunseki tells us, \"meant that a person was fully capable of governing people, that he knew the nature of the world, that he had mastered the meaning of life and death.\" He thenceforth could move about with the confidence of a seer, empowered with insights from both worlds, both halves of the cosmogram.\n\nDrawing a \"point,\" invoking God and the ancestors, formed only a part of this most important Kongo ritual of mediation. The ritual also included \" _singing_ the point.\" In fact, the Bakongo summarize the full context of mediation with the phrase \"singing and drawing [a point],\" _yimbila ye sona_. They believe that the combined force of singing Ki-Kongo words and tracing in appropriate media the ritually designated \"point\" or \"mark\" of contact between the worlds will result in the descent of God's power upon that very point:\n\n_sikulu dya nene_ | A mighty noise  \n---|---  \n_dyakulumukina_ | causing to descend  \n_Na Nzambi a Mpungu_ | Lord God Almighty\n\nThe cosmogram of Kongo emerged in the Americas precisely as _singing and drawing points of contact between worlds_. On the island of Cuba, when Kongo ritual leaders wished to make the important _Zarabanda_ charm (Ki-Kongo: _nsala-banda_ , a charm-making kind of cloth), they began by tracing, in white chalk, a cruciform pattern at the bottom of an iron kettle. This was the \"signature\" ( _firma_ ) of the spirit invoked by the charm. It clearly derived from the Kongo sign except that the sun disks were replaced by arrows, standing for the four winds of the universe.\n\nSignature of _Nkisi Sarabanda_ , western Cuba, twentieth century.\n\nOne of the major functions of the cosmogram of Kongo, to validate a space on which to stand a person or a charm, remains in force in certain Afro-Cuban religious circles. Kongo-Cuban priests have said, \"All spirits seat themselves on the center of the sign as the source of firmness.\" Songs ( _mambos_ ) are chanted, as in Kongo, to persuade this concentration of power upon the designated point. Kongo-Cuban priests activated old, important charms by singing-and-drawing a sacred point. They chanted sacred texts in Spanish and creolized Ki-Kongo while lowering a charm from the ceiling of a shrine to a chalked sign drawn upon the floor:\n\nTo bring down the bundle was a tedious and delicate operation. \"[the bag] was attached to the ceiling, was enormous, and weighed a hell of a lot.\" Juan O'Farril clearly remembers all the songs that accompanied the descent of the sacred bundle. The latter, with his steward and godmother, swept the earth, singing,... until the ground was immaculate and ready to receive the sacred bundle. The priest asked for chalk ( _mpemba_ ), and traced the cross-within-the-circle \"signature\" at the precise point where the bag was to touch the ground.\n\nAnd all the while that this bag of medicine was coming down the priest was singing the _mambo_ , the song to bring it down:\n\n_Mpati! mpati! mpati!_ | Power, power, power  \n---|---  \n_Mpemba, simbi ko?_ | Kaolin is a simbi spirit, is it not?  \n_Mpemba, simbi ko?_ | Kaolin is a simbi spirit, is it not?\n\nThe song was a warning. It suggested that the charm was like lightning, descending in slow motion, a spirit, a _simbi_ , a force that could not be touched or seen until the nganga had completely lowered it to its appropriate point of relevation.\n\nThere are numerous charm-connected cosmograms chalked on earth in Cuba, including one with pieces of silver placed at the ends of the axes of the cross to complete the ancient Kongo pattern:\n\nThe development of mystic ground-drawings in Cuba parallels the development of Afro-Christian crosses, chalked on the floor as critical \"points,\" among the Trinidad Shouters. Related ground-drawings for a Shaker \"mourning\" ritual on the island of St. Vincent, north of Trinidad in the Windward Islands, receive their basic structure from the cruciform, with disks at the end of each line and each design circumscribed. Within each St. Vincentian ground-drawing largely alphabetically derived ideographic signs float like sidereal dust\u2014signs such as   for travel, or   for baptism, or   for Jericho. A crisscross of spiritual signs of power and mediation is remarkable in this Afro-Caribbean calligraphic art, as instanced by a chalked design made for a St. Vincentian mourning ritual, published by Jeannette Henney in 1968:\n\nSt. Vincentian \"mourning\" ritual ground-drawing\n\nBlack ritual leaders among the Shouters of Trinidad have also elaborated an art of spiritual mediation using ground-signs: geometric patterns filled with myriad mystic ciphers and notations. Consider a drawing documented in 1960 by George Simpson. It breaks the circular seal of Kongo-influenced ways of reaching spirit with graphic signs. Here the sequence of the shapes is virtually architectural, building to the climactic pattern of a star. Every element is filled with spiritual notations, miniature cosmograms, the numbers of certain Psalms, and ciphers received in trance:\n\nTrinidad ground-drawing.\n\nThe result is visual glossolalia, a galaxy of points, indicating spiritual encounter and enlightenment. As Jeannette Henney reveals, \"each pointer [sign-maker] has a different alphabet.\" A woman working with the spirit on St. Vincent can \"point souls,\" by means of chalking mystic signs upon the floor in a state of spiritual enlightenment. Her meanings will not be grasped by all. In these rituals involving ground-writing for the \"pointing\" of souls, on St. Vincent and among Trinidad Shouters, there is overlap with the Kongo ritual of \"singing and marking a mystic point\" ( _iyimbila ye sona_ ), which is suggestive of a trace of Kongo influence, however mixed with Christian signs and concepts.\n\nIn Rio de Janeiro, where there was a heavy importation of Kongo and Angola slaves, we meet simple cruciforms, chalked on the floor of shrines and altars, that have become complex signs fusing diverse Kongo, Yoruba, Roman Catholic, and other references. These signs comprise the blazons of the spirits honored in Rio de Janeiro macumba, a mixture of Kongo, Yoruba, Dahomean, Roman Catholic, Native American, and Spiritualist allusions.\n\nIn Rio at the beginning of this century there were two main African \"nations\" with their characteristic worship: followers of the deities of the Yoruba in rites called _candombl\u00e9_ and followers of largely Kongo and Angola medicines and spirits, called originally _cabula_ but latterly macumba after absorption of further influences: \"All that was needed to produce _macumba_ as it exists today was the adoption, along with... Yoruba elements, of the _caboclo_ [inland Native American] spirits, the Catholic saints, and the spiritists' dead.\" The French spiritualism of Allen Kardec\u2014whose _Book of Mediums_ was widely read in Brazil\u2014especially influenced macumba.\n\nMacumba priests, in the beginning, invoked spirits through simple chalked designs drawn on the ground and called \"marked points\" ( _pontos riscados_ ). Many reflected dual Kongo and Roman Catholic influences, and were essentially cosmograms drawn in the form of a Latin cross. Nevertheless, some are used in a Kongo manner to \"center\" consecrated water and other important liquids in vessels for spirits (Plate 66). The Afro-Brazilian term for these visual invocations of spirit, _pontos cantados e pontos riscados_ , or \"sung points and marked points,\" recalls the Kongo custom of simultaneously singing and marking the centering of spirit ( _iyimbila ye sona_ ).\n\nAs time passes, the ancient cruciforms are complicated by aspects borrowed from the iconography of the Yoruba and enriched by the attributes of Roman Catholic saints identified with Yoruba deities. Even Satan was identified with a Yoruba deity, Eshu, to challenge goodness creatively. Thus the \"signatures\" of Eshu, associated with the crossroads, sudden changes of fortune, and \"devilish,\" that is, unpredictable, behavior, are circular blazons in which Satan's pitchfork, a pinwheel sign of sudden change and motion, a crossroadslike sign, and additional mystic points are recombined:\n\nPLATE 66\n\n_Ponto Eshu Vira-Mundo_\n\n_Ponto Eshu Vira-Mundo_\n\n_Ponto Eshu Tranca-Gira_\n\nAnd then interpreted imaginatively: \"When Eshu's trident is up, the work is for the good; upside down, the work is for evil.\"\n\nKongo \"points\" can at once invoke Almighty God and call upon the noble dead. But Rio macumba \"points\" summon a bewildering multitude of Yoruba goddesses and gods and their matching saints, plus Amerindian spirits, plus departed black elders _(paes velhos)_ , who return in the voice and body of their devotees. More than a hundred spirits are invoked today in Rio through the use of such signs.\n\nMost _pontos riscados_ , traced in chalk on shrine floors or in sand on the beaches at Ipanema, Copacabana, and elsewhere in Rio, became fleeting signs of spiritual invocation and encounter. But some were permanently rendered. The collections of the Rio Museu de Pol\u00edcia include a calabash drinking cup (Plate 67), richly lacquered black, which is incised with the _ponto riscado_ of Pai Velho, a black Kongo ancestor of special power and insight. His _ponto_ warns the world that no one except a person in his spirit, or an appropriate officiant, can use this cup. The _ponto_ , essentially a Latin cross within a Star of David within a circle decorated with six minor stars, compares interestingly with the \"sung point\" for the same spirit:\n\nHe is swung in a circle (is initiated)  \nAncient Father, sovereign one  \nDark stone coming down  \nHe turns, Great God Almighty-Oduduwa  \nAncient Father, sovereign one  \nDark stone, falling, coming down.\n\nThe descent of a meteorite, the spirit of Pai Velho, recalls the lore of Kongo where shooting stars have been interpreted as spirits darting across the sky. The song provides a context for the stars that surround and decorate the cross or cosmogram of Pai Velho.\n\nPLATE 67\n\nPLATE 68\n\nThere is a superb _ponto riscado_ for Og\u00f9n\/St. George, also in the Rio Police Museum, rendered in scarlet thread on a lime green sash of silk (Plate 68) worn with a mirroring sash on which appears the Roman Catholic signature of the same fusion-deity. Representing Og\u00f9n's roads, lines radiate from the center of this cosmogram. They are also crossroads, the element of Eshu\u2014hence, perhaps, the cryptic pitchforks at the termini of three indicated axes. This rich sign on silk captures a complex history of cultural contact and experience in a form of geometric thought. The blending has carried us far indeed from Kongo and from the kingdoms of the Yoruba, but without their encounter in the richest minds of Rio this sign might never have been invented.\n\n## _Minkisi_\n\nThe cosmograms of Kongo also reappeared in the Americas in the form of the _nkisi_ -charm. An _nkisi_ (plural: _minkisi_ ) is a strategic object in black Atlantic art, said to effect healing and other phenomena. Nsemi Isaki, himself a Mu-Kongo, wrote c. 1900:\n\nThe first _nkisi_ , called Funza, originated in God, and Funza came with a great number of _minkisi_ which he distributed throughout the country, each with its respective powers, governing over its particular domain.\n\nHe defined _nkisi_ as\n\nthe name of the thing we use to help a person when that person is sick and from which we obtain health; the name refers to leaves and medicines combined together.... It is also called _nkisi_ because there is one to protect the human soul and guard it against illness for whoever is sick and wishes to be healed. Thus an _nkisi_ is also something which hunts down illness and chases it away from the body.\n\nAn _nkisi_ is also a chosen companion, in whom all people find confidence. It is a hiding place for people's souls, to keep and compose in order to preserve life.\n\nThe belief in an inner spark of divinity or soul within the _nkisi_ leads the Bakongo to suppose that the _nkisi_ is alive:\n\nThe _nkisi_ has life; if it had not, how could it heal and help people? But the life of an _nkisi_ is different from the life in people. It is such that one can damage its flesh ( _koma mbizi_ ), burn it, break it, or throw it away; but it will not bleed or cry out... _nkisi_ has an inextinguishable life coming from a source.\n\n_Minkisi_ containers are various: leaves, shells, packets, sachets, bags, ceramic vessels, wooden images, statuettes, cloth bundles, among other objects. Each _nkisi_ contains medicines ( _bilongo_ ) and a soul ( _mooyo_ ), combined to give it life and power. The medicines themselves are spirit-embodying and spirit-directing.\n\nSpirit- _embodying_ materials include cemetery earth\u2014considered at one with the spirit of a buried person\u2014or equivalents such as white clay ( _mpemba_ ), taken from riverbeds, or powdered camwood, the reddish color of which traditionally signals transition and mediation to Bakongo. Spirit-embodying materials are usually wrapped or concealed in a charm, but such objects as mirrors or pieces of porcelain attached to the exterior of the _nkisi_ may also signify power\u2014the flash and arrest of the spirit.\n\nThe vital spark or soul within the spirit-embodying medicine may be, according to the Bakongo, an ancestor come back from the dead to serve the owner of the charm, or a victim of witchcraft, captured in the charm by its owner and forced to do his bidding for the good of the community (if the owner is generous and responsible) or for selfish ends (if he is not).\n\nSpirit- _directing_ medicines instruct the spirit in the _nkisi_ \u2014by way of puns and symbols\u2014how to hunt down evil or, say, make a person more decisive in daily affairs. Seeds, stones, herbs, or sticks represent action as aspiration. The spiritual commandments of certain medicines are the prerogatives of the head of a clan. Therefore, some significant _minkisi_ bear major Kongo clan names such as Nsumbu and Mbenza.\n\n_Nkisi Nkita Nsumbu_ exemplifies the outward simplicity and inner complexity of Kongo charms. It is a somewhat heavy bag of folded raffia cloth, tied at the neck with a cord. Double _kunda_ wooden bells tied to the neck of the charm suggest its inner powers, as _kunda_ are believed to activate medicines and drive out specters. When _Nkita Nsumbu_ is unwrapped (Plate 69), revealing its medicines, it is like looking through clear water at the pebble-strewn bottom of a river.\n\nThe medicines are embedded in whitish kaolin. The gleaming whiteness of the bottom of the charm, beneath the seeds and pieces of crystal and stones and other things, suggests the lower half of the Kongo cosmogram. _Nkita Nsumbu_ is extraordinary for its large quantity of rock crystals, perhaps because as the Bakongo explained to Karl Laman at the turn of the century: \" _Nkita_ throws stones at the sick person.\" The righteous purpose of the charm\u2014to protect a person from diseases of the skin, which, according to the Bakongo, are caused by supernatural knives and needles thrown at him\u2014may account for the presence of the blade of a knife among the assembled \"medicines.\" Puns on assuagement and healing may lie concealed in the syllables of the the Ki-Kongo words for the beans, plant buds, and various kernels that rest upon the whitish river clay.\n\nThe square-shaped black stone with a concave center near the top of the illustrated center of the charm is used to pulverize kaolin to make a paste that is applied around the eyes of a ritual expert, granting him mystic vision. The foot of a hen and other claws suggest the captivating power of the spirit in the charm. A pearshaped seed called _kiyaala-mooko_ (\"who holds out hands\") is probably included because of its resemblance to the image of two cupped palms joined and extended in a gesture of generosity. According to a Kongo proverb, \"he who holds out his hands does not die\" ( _kiyaala-mooko kufwa ko_ ). Finally, the gleaming white egg near the center of the photograph, according to Fu-Kiau, \"is a symbol of danger, the kind of egg used by Kongo sorcerers to conjure up tornadoes and to bring down thunder.\" Mystically stoning the immoral with diseases of the skin, protecting the righteous, and creating storms and other natural phenomena, Nkisi _Nsumbu_ is believed to represent the world in miniature.\n\nPLATE 69\n\nOther Kongo charms are informed by this metaphor of cosmos miniaturized, such as _Nkisi Mbumba Mbondo_ , which protects persons from swellings of the body or inflicts such illnesses on deserving criminals or enemies. The container of this _nkisi_ is European cotton covered with thick red camwood impasto (Plate 70). White buttons of porcelain and glass are sewn on the charm for glitter. A braided raffia string has been crisscrossed around the bottom and wound tightly at the top to suggest the arrest of spirit. Around the top, which resembles a neck, is a necklace of five strands of green, blue, and white glass beads. This Ter\u00fcren Museum charm is capped by resin, in which feathers have been inserted in the manner of certain feathered headdresses worn by important chiefs and priests in Kongo. Feathers in Kongo connote ceaseless growth as well as plenitude. So if the earth within the charm affirms the presence of a spirit from the dead\u2014from the underworld\u2014feathers capping the charm suggest connection with the upper half of the Kongo cosmogram which represents the world of the living, and the empyrean habitat of God.\n\nPLATE 70\n\nThe mediating function of _minkisi_ is dramatically represented by charms carved in the shape of a dog. In Kongo these are sometimes Janus-like, staring in opposite directions, emphasizing their roles as seers extraordinaire. According to the Bakongo, \"between the village of the living and the village of the dead there is a village of dogs.\" Fu-Kiau extends the metaphor: \"Mirror ( _talatala_ ) and dog ( _mbwa_ ) symbolize the same thing among Bakongo.\" Thus a dog or doglike _nkisi_ is often used by Kongo mystics to see beyond our world.\n\nIn Kongo mythology, Ne Kongo himself, the progenitor of the kingdom, prepared the primordial medicines in an earthenware pot set on three stones above a fire. Clay pots have therefore always been classical containers of _minkisi_. The Royal Museum of Central Africa in Terv\u00fcren, Belgium, has a collection of pottery- _minkisi_ , including one smeared with white clay to represent the other world, and another covered with a mirror to symbolize the water between the realms of the living and the dead. These vessels are filled with spirit-embodying earths and spirit-directing stones and shells.\n\nKongo-inspired _nkisi_ vessels and bundles were profuse in western Cuba in the nineteenth century. Many _minkisi_ produced in Cuba and in Afro-Cuban barrios of the United States today\u2014especially those in Miami and New York\u2014are contained by large three-legged iron cooking pots. Afro-Cubans call such _nkisi_ vessels _prendas_ (pawns), reflecting the ritual obligations shared by the owner of the charm and the spirit within. Here is a Cuban _nganga_ composing his _prenda_ , re-creating the Kongo cosmos in miniature:\n\nFirst one draws a cross, in chalk or white ashes, at the bottom of the kettle. The kettle must be new. One places over this sign five Spanish silver reales, one at the center, the others at each end of the cross... one places to the side a piece of sugarcane filled with sea water, sand and mercury, stoppered with wax, so that the _nkisi_ will always have life, like the flow of quicksilver, so that it will be swift and moving, like the waters of the ocean, so that the spirit in the charm can merge with the sea and travel far away.\n\nThe body of a black male dog may be included to grant the charm the sharp sense of smell associated with that animal... on top of these objects is poured earth from an ant-heap and small pieces of wood. Sticks [from some twenty-seven species of trees] are placed around and leaves and herbs also added... After completion of this level, one throws over it chili, pepper, garlic, ginger, white onion, cinnamon, a piece of rue, pine seed. The work is completed by the addition of the skull of a woodpecker or buzzard.\n\nThis charm is informed by the structure of the sign of the four moments of the sun. And in it are commingled objects associated with flight, through quicksilver, and avatars of earth and sea. Makers of important Afro-Cuban _prendas_ knew exactly what they meant by the ingredients they used:\n\nPLATE 71\n\nPLATE 72\n\nThe _prenda_ is like the entire world in miniature, a means of domination. The ritual expert places in the kettle all manner of spiritualizing forces: there he keeps the cemetery and the forest, there he keeps the river and the sea, the lightning-bolt, the whirlwind, the sun, the moon, the stars\u2014forces in concentration.\n\nOne of the most celebrated and feared of all the _minkisi_ of Cuba was inherited by J. S. Bar\u00f3, a black ritual expert who lived in Marianao, a suburb of Havana. It was an _nkisi_ -kettle (Plate 71), probably originally made by his ancestors in the second half of the nineteenth century and replenished several times in the twentieth. Bar\u00f3's _nkisi_ bears a deliberately long and impressive name: Tree-of-the-Forest-Seven-Bells-Turns-the-World-Round-the-Midnight-Cemetery\u2014a name replete with cosmological allusion. Its ascending structural sequence\u2014round container, encircling sash, luxurious spray of plumes\u2014mirrors that of _minkisi_ forms still seen today in Kongo (Plate 72). Tree-of-the-Forest-Seven-Bells contained bones and earths for the capture of spirit, and beads, and stones, and other matter to tell the spirit cryptically what to do. It was even believed to be enlivened by the \"flash of the spirit,\" the glitter of a falling star, mystically absorbed, as in the case of another famous Cuban _prenda_ , Seven Stars:\n\nThey celebrate this prenda not in the house but in the forest.... the stars come down to this charm. There is an hour in the night when the nkisi is left by itself in the forest, so that the stars may come down, to enter into its power. When you see something brilliantly coming down\u2014it is a star, entering an nkisi.\n\nPLATE 73\n\nPLATE 74\n\nIn addition to _prendas_ , Kongo-Cubans of the nineteenth century made _minkisi_ -figurines to mystically attack slaveholders and other enemies, and for spiritual reconnaissance. Lydia Cabrera has described them: \"magic doll-like figurines about 50 centimeters high, carved in wood... with magic substance inserted in a small cavity.\" Among these figurines figured a so-called _matiabo_ image, documented in 1875 (Plate 73). It was strongly Kongo-influenced, and came equipped with horn _(mpoka). Matiabo_ were runaway slaves who sometimes joined forces with rebel forces in Cuba's nineteenth-century war of independence against Spain. They probably used such charms\u2014even as human figurines mounted on antelope horns were used in Kongo\u2014to expose sorcerers, heal the sick, and locate game (in Cuba the quarry was approaching Spanish soldiers).\n\nAs in many examples of classical Kongo sculpture (Plate 74), the knees of the _matiabo_ image are bent, symbolizing vitality; the eyes sparkle with visionary glass; and medicine has been inserted at the abdomen and in the horn, the latter stoppered with a piece of mirror, again for mystic vision.\n\nIn Haiti, Western Hispaniola, ingenious reformulations of _nkisi_ charms, sometimes called _pacquets-congo_ , rival Afro-Cuban charms in density and allusion. The more elegant _pacquets_ are wrapped in silk (Plate 75) instead of ancestral cotton (Plate 72) or raffia cloth; are tied with broad silk ribbons (secured with pins) instead of cord; are adorned with sequins as well as beads; and sometimes crowned with plumes made of metallic cloth instead of actual feathers. Two _pacquets-congo_ made in 1979\u2014one with a feathered stem called Simbi-of-the-Leaves _(simbi makaya);_ the other, shorter, with arms akimbo called Queen-of-Kongo _(reine kongo)_ \u2014are the work of a _vodun_ priestess and her entourage living on the western outskirts of Port-au-Prince, and represent visual creolization of traditional _nkisi_ forms (Plates 75, 76). Just as the cruciform ground-signs of Kongo expanded to absorb the blazons and iconographic detail of a bewildering number of Yoruba and Dahomean deities in Brazilian _pontos_ , so the persistence of a basic stem-on-globe-shaped-base structure, as evidenced by a comparison of _Nkisi Mbumba Mbondo_ (Plate 70) in Kongo with an important kind of _pacquet-kongo_ in Haiti called _Simbi Macaya_ (Plate 75), cannot hide enormous amounts of creative change. The narrow cords, which bound up the spherical base of the charm in Kongo, have become in Haiti a rich interplay of broad silk ribbons, one of which, horizontal, emphasizes the girth of the charm, while the others, vertical, break up the sphere into armillary-like aesthetic sections. The binding of the charm with these ribbons, carefully secured with pins, emphasizes the capture of forces guarding the households that own such charms.\n\nPLATE 75\n\nPLATE 76  \nCourtesy Terv\u00fcren Museum, Belgium\n\nThe Kongo spirits of the dead, _bisimbi_ , are believed in part to preside over the making of _pacquets-congo_ in Haiti. A priest in _vodun_ told Alfred M\u00e9traux that _pacquets_ were \"guards,\" capable of exciting and heating up the deities in favor of their owners. Deprived of such \"points,\" the deities lose their force. Haitian _pacquets_ , like _prendas_ and _minkisi_ , are therefore sometimes interpreted cosmo-grammatically. They are \"points,\" mediating protective grace between the living and the dead.\n\nThe strong Kongo-Angola influence on the people of Brazil accounts for another _nkisi_ tradition in the New World\u2014Brazilian charms for love and war. The _ponto de segurar_ (\"securing point\") was a small charm in a cloth container that was designed to arrest a spirit or attract a person to its owner. The tight crisscrossing cords\u2014three along one axis, six or more along the other\u2014decisively represent the enclosure of spirit.\n\nCharm from black Rio: _ponto de segurar_ , twentieth century, probably made before 1941.\n\nThe form and function of _pontos de segurar_ resemble those of miniature Haitian charms called _pwe_ (\"points\"), and both types are analogous to the Kongo-Cuban _nkangue_ charms. Cuban _banganga_ make _nkangue_ to \"tie\" a lover for a client, to keep that person from straying from the client's arms. _Nkangue_ literally means \"one who arrests\" in Ki-Kongo, and, in the charm-making process, originally referred to the moment when the _nganga_ \u2014having chanted all incantations and completed filling and binding the charm\u2014says, \"I close the door,\" and the spirit is said to be arrested in the charm as in a tiny habitation (Plate 77). This Afro-Cuban diminutive object\u2014only two inches long\u2014contains a _carga_ (\"charge\") of cemetery earth and powdered bones. Around its carefully folded cloth container, string has been wound tightly. It compares with the symbolically tight binding of Kongo charms (Plate 76). Lydia Cabrera, an authority on the folklore of Cuba, maintains that Afro-Cuban _banganga_ often tie _nkangue_ with four or seven symbolic knots to suggest various sacred meanings. The shape, size, and binding elements of _nkangue_ are similar to those of _muselebende_ love charms of Manianga in northern Kongo today. _Muselebende_ literally means \"to make like a leopard\" _(kala nsele bende)_ \u2014\"for the leopard is a very serious animal; so, when the soul of a lover is put into that charm, it takes the lover by force as does a leopard.\"\n\nUntil very recently the United States was held to be virtually devoid of African-influenced visual traditions. Yet I have discovered that in black communities throughout the States there is a surprisingly strong _minsiki_ -making tradition. Not that the heritage always came direct from Kongo and Angola. The well-known practice during slavery of \"seasoning\" blacks by residence on West Indian islands before bringing them to continental plantations meant that, in some instances at least, the Kongo _nkisi_ tradition was probably already transformed before reaching the United States via Charleston, New Orleans, and other parts.\n\nPLATE 77\n\nThe Kongo heritage is clearly evident in the making of love charms in black American communities\u2014charms whose purpose is to bring back errant lovers. And to the degree that they involve the folding in and tying up of a name, they recall Afro-Brazilian _pontos de segurar_ , Afro-Haitian _pwe_ , and Afro-Cuban _nkangue_. Robert Bryant, a black from New Orleans, describes the making of an Afro-American love charm:\n\nGet a strip of red flannel about a foot long and three inches wide, together with nine new needles. Name the flannel after the absent person.... Fold the flannel three times _towards_ yourself, so that half of it is folded, saying with each fold, \"Come (fold) on (fold) home (fold).... Then turn the other end towards yourself and make three more folds: \"Papa (fold) wants (fold) you (fold).\" Then stick the nine needles in the shape of a cross, working each one toward yourself and sticking each three times through the fabric, saying with each shove such phrases as \"Ma (stick) ry (stick) Smith (stick). Won't (stick) you (stick) come? (stick)\n\nFu-Kiau glosses Robert Bryant's charm as follows:\n\nThe whole action of folding cloth toward my body and inserting pins\u2014this is exciting a girl toward me. This is a kind of _nkisi_ which we use to bless or punish, wrapped up in a small sachet or cloth container called _futu_. It also sounds like _Nkisi Mpungu_ , one of the more powerful _minkisi_ known in Kongo, which you use when you want to make love with a person who doesn't really see you as a lover. You chant three times her name, three times your name. Each time you call her name, and each time call your name, you stick a pin into the charm. This has to be done very carefully, however, for there exists the danger that if one of the needles break, the lover may become deranged. Folding the cloth, to \"tie,\" the lover or person in the charm is called _futika_ (to hem, fold, bind, tie up) _nkisi va taba_ , folding a part of the cloth that wraps up an _nkisi_. The entire action, folding and sticking in a needle while calling a lover's name\u2014all that process is called _siba ye kanga_ , \"calling and tying,\" taking her name, or his name if the charm is for a woman, and putting it in the object with the inserted needles _(zinongo)_ and folding gestures. The _futu_ (sachet) is like a house, and when I have completed the _siba ye kanga_ , I \"close the door.\" He can't go out, he's put inside the charm, he cannot act now by himself.\n\nRobert Bryant's charm is therefore very Kongo; it reaffirms the \"point,\" verbally and materially renders it. Moreover, his practice strongly recalls the making of _n'kondi_ , those famous Kongo statues bristling with half-inserted blades and pins and nails and wedges, each of which may represent a vow or legal agreement.\n\nFrom nineteenth-century Missouri comes another Afro-American _nkisi_ , which was believed to be informed by \"the flash of the spirit,\" and which was supposed to bring its owner good luck:\n\nA more complicated \"luck ball\" was one made for Charley Leland. This contained, briefly, four lengths of white yarn doubled four times (four is a \"luck number\"), four lengths of white sewing silk folded in the same way (to tie your friend to you, while the yarn ties down the devils) and with four knots tied to the whole. Four such knotted strands were used, giving sixteen knots in all. These skeins were made up into a nest, whiskey spit upon them to keep the devils from getting through the knots, and _into it was put tin-foil (representing the brightness of the spirit who was going to be inserted in the ball)_ [emphasis added].\n\nFu-Kiau glosses Charley Leland's charm:\n\nThe \"Charley Leland luck ball\" sounds like the kinds of _minkisi_ we make in Kongo against powers or authorities, to sway these powers in our direction, helping us to find a job. Folding the cloth symbolizes \"tying\" the company or persons to your concern. If they say \"come back and we will discuss your job in three days,\" you tie three knots on the charm, measuring the time, to aim the power of the charm, upon the person or company, with accuracy. If, in another instance, I wish to reply to a prospective employer in six days and I tie only four knots, the _nkisi_ can have no effect. The knots _(makolo)_ have incantations in them; their number records matters of time or space involved in the private affair of the owner of the charm, and they therefore constitute a kind of African ritual mathematical system. The folds, the knots, the insertions in this kind of charm excite the spirit, excite the patron or the lover in your favor.\n\nThe Ki-Kongo verb \"to fold\" _(futika)_ also means \"to bind, to tie up in a packet,\" a double meaning that one may intuit in the Afro-Missourian charm, which was intended to bind the owner to his friends, arrest his enemies in their tracks, and enhance his luck.\n\nBakongo returning from Kinshasa to their villages consult, in many cases, _banganga_ for charms such as Charley Leland's.\n\nAccording to Kongo mythology, the very first _nkisi_ given to man by God was Funza, distributor of all _minkisi_ , himself incarnate in unusual twisted-root formations. So \"when you see a twisted root within a charm,\" Fu-Kiau Bunseki comments, \"you know, like a tornado hidden in an egg, tthat this _nkisi_ is very, very strong\u2014you cannot touch it; only _nganga_ can touch it.\" The association of twisted roots with enormous reserves of power persists in black America, where such charms are called \"high\" or \"big.\"\n\nThe most famous Afro-American charm of this kind is High John the Conqueror, a gnarled and twisted root. If it has a long extension it is considered male; if its salient is short, it is considered female. In _Voodoo in New Orleans_ , Robert Tallant writes: \"Thousands of Negroes carry Johnny the Conqueror roots, not only in New Orleans, but all over the country, for quantities of them are sold in Harlem, in Chicago, in Atlanta and Charleston.\" A man named Abner Thomas told Tallant that \"for love and gambling the _power_ of Johnny is considered supreme.\" He added: \"There is Big John and Little John.... High John is the same as Big John; that is the strongest.\" So, not surprisingly, the blues of the Mississippi delta\u2014an area not far from New Orleans\u2014sometimes make cryptic references to Kongo-influenced charms:\n\nI got a black cat bone\n\nI got a mojo tooth\n\nI got John the Conqueroo\n\nI'm gonna mess with you\n\n\"Hoochie Coochie Blues\"\n\nFinally, there are anti-hex roots galore throughout black America today that are usually wrapped in red flannel, \"so that nobody can put evil on you\u2014if they do it will turn on _them_.\" To the Bakongo these American charms appear to derive from _minkisi wambi_ and _minkisi wa nsisi_ \u2014\"danger _minkisi_ \"\u2014which are contained in crimson cloth.\n\n## **Nzo a Nkisi: The Grave**\n\nNowhere is Kongo-Angola influence on the New World more pronounced, more profound, than in black traditional cemeteries throughout the South of the United States. The nature of the objects that decorate the graves there, as well as in places as diverse as Haiti and Guadeloupe in the West Indies, reveals a strong continuity. That continuity might be characterized as a reinstatement of the Kongo notion of the tomb as a charm for the persistence of the spirit. Recall the container of the Kongo charm or sacred medicine, charged with activating ingredients\u2014a human soul, spirit-embodying and spirit-directing objects.\n\nIn the case of a burial site, the coffin and the mound are the obvious containers; the soul of the deceased is the spark. In addition to the tombstone or headstone, there are decorative objects that, both in Kongo (Plate 78) and the Americas (Plate 79), cryptically honor the spirit in the earth, guide it to the other world, and prevent it from wandering or returning to haunt survivors. In other words, the surface \"decorations\" frequently function as \"medicines\" of admonishment and love, and they mark a persistent cultural link between Kongo and the black New World.\n\nPLATE 78\n\nPLATE 79\n\nBoth Kongo and Kongo-American tombs are frequently covered _with the last objects touched or used by the deceased_. Here is the Kongo rationale for this striking practice:\n\nPlates and cups and drinking-glasses are frequently selected for placement on the surface of a tomb. It is believed that _the last strength of a dead person is still present within that sort of object_... My own mother died while I was away. When I return to my village, and visit her grave, I shall touch her plate and cup. After I touch them, later I will dream... according to the way my mother wanted. By touching these objects automatically I comprehend the _mambu_ (affairs, matters) my mother was willing to transmit to me.\n\nIn black North America the last-used objects of the dead are also believed to be specially charged with emanations, traces of the spirit. One can chart the continuity of this belief from plantation times (1845\u201365)\u2014\"Negro graves were always decorated with the last article used by the departed\"\u2014to St. Helena Island, Georgia, 1919, and Brownsville, Georgia, c. 1939: \"They used to put the things a person _used last_ on the grave. This was supposed to satisfy the spirit and keep it from following you back to the house.\" The Kongo believe that the deposit of such objects safely grounds the spirit, keeping it from harming the living remains. The arrest of the spirit in last-used objects ( _kanga mfunya_ , literally, \"tying up the emanations or effluvia of a person,\" or in another translation, \"tying up the anger of the dead\") directs the spirit in the tomb to rest in peace and honors its powers on earth.\n\nA similarly spirit-directing \"medicine\" surmounts many tombs in Kongo and Kongo-influenced North America: the image of a white chicken _(nsusu mpembe)_. In Kongo it is thought by some that the powers of \"the white realm,\" the kaolin-tinted world of the dead, are released by the sacrifice of a white chicken. In fact, the placement of images of white chickens on Kongo graves symbolizes the presence of the dead within the honorific whiteness of their realm. Again an image both honors the dead and situates their spirit properly. Thus, a nineteenth-century drawing shows a hen carved in wood placed atop a funeral carriage in Kongo. (It was later laid to rest upon the surface of a tomb.) No later than 1816 the custom had been noted in the Caribbean: \"the white washing of tombs is repeated carefully every Christmas morning and formerly it was customary on these occasions to kill a white cock and sprinkle his blood over the graves of the family.\" And on Sapelo Island, off the coast of Georgia, in 1939, a source reported: \"They kill a white chicken when they have set-ups to keep the spirits away.\" Myriad pressed-glass chickens form _nsusu mpembe_ surrogates on twentieth-century Carolina graves, and upon a modern tomb for a child in western South Carolina, dated 1967:\n\nan enormous white rooster guards the tomb, itself sparkling with a careful covering of white driveway gravel and enlivened with further living touches: a pair of miniature shoes in metal, and a small lamp for mystic illumination, like a night light for the bedroom of a child, who will wake up in glory and walk to God, in silver-colored shoes, feet crunching on glittering white gravel.\n\nAnother mediating force on Kongo tombs is the seashell, believed to enclose the soul's immortal presence. Witness a Kongo prayer to the _mbamba_ seashell:\n\nAs strong as your house you shall keep my life for me. When you leave for the sea, take me along, that I may live forever with you.\n\nKongo seashell imagery lingers lyrically in the words of Bessie Jones, a twentieth-century black artist of St. Simons Island, Georgia:\n\nThe shells stand for the sea. The sea brought us, the sea shall take us back. So the shells upon our graves stand for water, the means of glory and the land of demise.\n\nToday the gleam of seashells illumines and identifies Kongo- and Angola-influenced graves from St. Louis, Missouri, through Algiers, across the Mississippi at New Orleans (Plate 80) to Jacksonville, Florida, and from the United States to Haiti (Plate 81) and Guadeloupe. In Guadeloupe the black custom is especially dramatic, with sometimes entire mounds covered over with large conch shells. But nowhere is this Kongo-American custom more beautifully practiced than in the Carolina low country (Plate 82), where the tombs of both early twentieth-century men and women and black soldiers who perished in the tragic conflict in Vietnam are honored by this ancient Kongo emblem of perdurance. The contrast between such burials and Anglo-American tombs (Plate 83) is obvious and striking. In fact, the Kongo-inspired tradition, in further creolization, wherein a cover of gleaming white shells from the sea is replaced by walls of gleaming white bathroom tile\u2014correlated with purity and water\u2014may explain, at least in part, the phenomenon that both modern Kongo and Haitian (Plate 84) cemeteries boast structures built in this striking medium.\n\nPLATE 80\n\nPLATE 81\n\nPLATE 82\n\nPLATE 83\n\nTrees planted on graves also signify the spirit; their roots literally journey to the other world. Hence Kongo elders plant trees on graves (Plate 78), explaining: \"This tree is a sign of spirit, on its way to the other world.\" The mooring of spirit with trees on graves appears in southern Haiti, where the rationale is phrased this way: \"Trees live after us, death is not the end.\" In the continental United States, at Hazelhurst, Mississippi, we learn that \"at the funeral preachers are given a chance with their carefully composed sermons. It is then that the evergreen is planted on the grave. These trees are identified with the departed, and if the tree flourishes, all is well with the soul.\" In other words, the tree stands sentinel above the grave as the immortal presence of the spirit, an image that graces countless Afro-American burials\u2014for example, those in western South Carolina (Plate 79) or Dallas, Texas (Plate 85), where stone and tree represent together the departed person.\n\nPLATE 84\n\nPLATE 85\n\nAmong other Kongo influences on New World black burials are deposits of lamps to light the way to glory (evoking earlier Kongo bonfires lit on graves for this purpose); bottle-enclosed mounds (mirroring similarly represented miniature enclosures on Kongo tombs) to keep evil from the spirit and to prevent the latter's emanations from wandering back to the living; deposits of pipes of all kinds, representing voyage, through smoke or water, from this world to the next; and modern emblems of spiritual mediation, echoing the thought behind the addition of wheels upon a modern Kongo tomb (Plate 86); the rendering of an automobile in concrete, headlights invisibly blazing for eternity (Plate 87); or a toy metallic airplane, such as the one on a Carolina grave (Plate 88), meant to help the spirit to \"get to heaven fast.\"\n\nPLATE 86\n\nPLATE 87\n\nPLATE 88\n\nPLATE 89\n\nA little-noted fact, taken for granted by casual observers, is that numerous Afro-American traditionally decorated graves are adorned with flowerpots, either _turned deliberately upside down_ and embedded carefully in the soil or set right side up but adorned with green floral paper _turned deliberately inside out_ , revealing the gleam of the inner tinfoil (Plate 89) in intimation of the flash of the departed spirit. Both traditions are gestures to the dead. The inversion of pierced white basins and other vessels is common in many Kongo cemeteries. Indeed, the verb \"to be upside down\" in Ki-Kongo also means \"to die.\" Moreover, inversion signifies perdurance, as a visual pun on the superior strength of the ancestors, for the root of _bikinda_ , \"to be upside down, to be in the realm of the ancestors, to die\" is _kinda_ , \"to be strong,\" \"because those who are upside down, who die, are strongest.\"\n\n## **Bottle Trees**\n\nIn addition to the massive reinstatement of Kongo and Angola traditions of grave decorations in the western hemisphere, there is a persistent Kongo-derived tradition of _bottle trees_ \u2014trees garlanded with bottles, vessels, and other objects for protecting the household through invocation of the dead. Our earliest reference to the custom, dated 1776, is from the coast of northern Kongo at Loango:\n\nAll, after having cultivated their field, take care, in order to drive away sterility and the evil spells, to fix in the earth, in a certain manner, certain branches of certain trees, with some pieces of broken pots. They do more or less the same thing before their houses, when they must absent themselves during a considerable time. The most determined thief would not dare to cross their threshold, when he sees it thus protected by these mysterious signs.\n\nJust fifteen years later, in 1791, the coming of this custom to the black Americas had been detected on the island of Dominica in the West Indies. Thus Thomas Atwood marveled at the confidence of the blacks of the island\n\nin the power of the dead, of the sun and the moon... nay, even of sticks, stones, and earth from graves hung in bottles in their gardens.\n\nPLATE 90\n\nAtwood was one of the first to note, without realizing the full cultural and historical implications of what he was observing, the rise of the Creole tradition of the bottle tree. It flourishes today in the Caribbean\u2014the Berbice area of Guyana, in the Djuka (Suriname maroon) _kandu_ tradition of tying bottles and other objects to trees to protect a house or property from thieves (Plate 90), and on the island of Trinidad, where the custom has been enshrined in a short story by Samuel Selvon:\n\nPLATE 91\n\nWhen the mango tree began to flower, Ma Procup tied colored bottles and animal bones to the trunk.... Roaming boys spotted the mangoes, hesitated when they saw the dangling bones and bottles. \"Obeah,\" one of them muttered, \"I not climbing that tree.\"\n\nIt is, however, in the United States that most Kongo-derived bottle trees are to be found\u2014from the Sabine River area in eastern Texas to the coast of South Carolina, with concentrations in Virginia, southern Arkansas, northern Mississippi, and southeastern Alabama. Eudora Welty has described a variety of them:\n\na line of bare crepe-myrtle trees with every branch of them ending in a colored bottle, green or blue [Plate 91] there could be a spell put in the trees, and she was familiar from the time she was born with the way bottle trees keep evil spirits from coming into the house\u2014by luring them inside the colored bottles, where they cannot get out again.... Solomon [a black man] has made the bottle trees with his own hands over the nine years... sometimes the sun in the bottle trees looked prettier than the house did.\n\nToday the function of similar expressions presiding over Kongo graves (Plate 92) is the blocking of the disappearance of the talents of the important dead. Lifting up their plates or bottles on trees or saplings also means \"not the end,\" \"death will not end our fight,\" the renaissance of the talents of the dead that have been stopped, by gleaming glass and elevation, from absorption in the void.\n\nPLATE 92\n\nPLATE 93\n\nIn Mississippi these trees (Plate 93), shorn of life, bearing cold, glittering bottles\u2014visual statements, again, of death and arrest of the spirit\u2014simply block or ward off evil. The custom compares with that in Texas, where \"grave glass will keep the 'evil spirits away' or 'keep away the man's spirit.' \" In that sense Afro-American bottle trees are fugitive specters from a graveyard realm, just as bottle-lined burials are horizontal bottle trees.\n\nPLATE 94  \nCourtesy Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.\n\n## **Coda: Two Afro-American Artists**\n\nThe same cultural forces that sparked the reemergence of the Kongo _nkisi_ tradition in the New World may well account for the medium and the glitter of the late American artist James Hampton's _Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly_ (Plate 94). _The Throne of the Third Heaven_ represents a unique fusion of Biblical and Afro-American traditional imagery. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan has closely studied this amazing monument, a complex of a hundred and seventy-seven paired architectural pieces set about a central throne crowned with the legend FEAR NOT. She argues inspiration from the Book of Revelation and she is right\u2014therein the Son of Man says, \"Fear not... fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer\"; therein is described a throne set in heaven, with four and twenty seats about the throne; elders clothed in white and crowned in gold, beasts full of eyes and four of these with six wings full of eyes within. It is a vast and intimidating messianic vision. But the genius of James Hampton was to take and abstract these images\u2014seated elders in white and gold, and wings with eyes\u2014and fuse them with the throne itself. The winged furniture of another world therefore appears before our eyes, informed by flash and poetic flight.\n\nRevelation did not tell James Hampton _how_ to impart glitter to his sacred throne. For that he relied on Kongo-American modes of decoration, covering curved or spherical forms, light bulbs and jars of glass, and cast-off furniture with gold and silver foil. The selection of tinfoil, as the covering of the sacred, strikingly recalls the foil-wrapped flowerpots, glass jars, and coffee tins on graves in Louisiana, Carolina, and Florida; the metallic cloth on _pacquet congo_ in Haiti; the insertion of tinfoil to attract spirit into a charm; and many other sources.\n\nHampton was born in 1909 and reared in Elloree, South Carolina, in the heart of an area of strongly decorated Afro-American graves. As he made his sacred furnitures, c. 1950\u201364, in Washington, D.C., apparently for the founding of a religion he never lived to practice, his genius was to shape the images of Revelation as if they were vast receptacles of the spirit, wrapped in gold and silver tinfoil, for siting on a Carolina tomb and perpetually suggesting, in the sparkle, the attainment of God's glory.\n\nWhile James Hampton was piecing together his _Throne of Third Heaven_ , Henry Dorsey, a stonemason of Brownsboro, Kentucky, was transforming the walls and reaches of his property with decorations of celebratory humor (Plate 95). He fashioned a series of interlocking material puns on mediation and transcendence by recombining objects taken from their original industrial functions, thus giving them new meanings. He playfully related one kind of motion to another. His was a consciousness determined in part by knowledge of the structure of traditional Afro-American graves. Dorsey shaped his decorations as a gift, a proffered personal idiom of transcendence, fashioned out of plumbers' pipes and plastic dolls and wheels and doors and axles and pulleys and tires and even an upside-down agitator from a washing machine (Plate 96).\n\nThe pulsating metaphors of this playful universe were gathered in frequently climactic combinations, e.g., a man, under a wheel banner, who is forced to leap onto a horse through a giant hoop under a tiny wheel into a cabin with a doll over a door opening on a phantom booth (Plate 97). Or: a doll on a horse on a stafflike metal stem appears to gallop through the branches of a tree, with a stray tire, hung on other branches, as on a bottle tree. Henry Dorsey may never have heard of Mbanza Kongo or Loango\u2014he did not have to. I suggest that he was their progeny by virtue of the culturally open and responsive spirit of his imagination.\n\nWhen Henry Dorsey hoisted a liquor jug and fan blades (Plate 98), he was not only quoting, indirectly, the image of the bottle tree but adding new dimensions to the form to satisfy his restless mind and to entertain his neighbors. He was vaunting his control of the forces of motion in the modern world. Like the spectral pulleys, wheels, and switches on a modern Kongo drum, he brought together a liquor jug, the blades of an electric fan, and a metal disk to form a material constellation of objects divorced from their functions in the real world and given different meanings by his imagination. With such constructions he begged the questions \"What does it _do?_ \" and \"What does it _run_ on?\"\n\nPLATE 95\n\nPLATE 96\n\nPLATE 97\n\nPLATE 98\n\nThe sculptures ran on combinatory wit and humor, not on electricity (though, to be sure, toward the end of his career, Dorsey took the plunge into electrokinetic art, characteristically mastering fully the intricacies of electrical wiring). The operating currents were, in fact, traces of the theory of correspondences that shaped his mind. What his works did, as in Kongo when seed and claw were commingled in _minkisi_ , was to send to spirits punning messages of positive execution. Dorsey, for example, devised a shining white metal hubcap with images of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph that whirled. The birth of Jesus, the expansion of Christianity throughout the world, were conjured up in the flash of moving chrome. Brilliant gyres in motion were to Henry Dorsey what winged silver thrones were to James Hampton, what mirror-embedded constructions were to black Georgians and the Bakongo.\n\nHenry Dorsey was born the grandson of Maria Prewitt, one of the most famous black women of Oldham County, Kentucky, who lived for a hundred years. She was born a slave in the early 1820's and died in 1924. Her second husband was Louis White, a black man. One of their children was Alice White, who married Clarence Dorsey, a black farmer of Brownsboro. Their son, Henry, was born in 1897.\n\nIn the summer of 1922, while Henry was working in the kitchen of a tearoom on Fourth Street, in Louisville, improper ventilation caused the room to overheat terribly. Dorsey fainted. When he regained consciousness in a hospital, he found himself well-nigh tone-deaf. As if to compensate for the nightmarish loss of one of his senses, Dorsey set off on an odyssey of escape and self-rediscovery. He was twenty-five years old. He rode the rails, as a hobo, as far west as San Francisco. He worked his way south as a roustabout on a steamboat, down the Mississippi to New Orleans. From New Orleans he traveled east, working on the railroads of Mississippi and Alabama. He sometimes saw, in the segregated South of the 1920's, things cruel and horrible:\n\nHenry, he saw a black man have a falling-out with the boss about something, and the boss take this man on the hand-car with him, killed him, and buried him near the railroad in the woods, and come back on the hand-car all alone. I'll tell you, he seen awful tough things in his travels.\n\nHis travels through Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi took him through bottle-tree territory, past cemeteries gleaming with the traditional deposits, past black houses with automobile tire sculptures in their yards, past other fleeting images of artistic motion redistilled in the folk propensity to sing of bluesy strains of love and yearning. Such was the grief and joy of being black in the U.S. South in the 1920's. And then one day, just before the Great Depression, Dorsey came back home. He had trained in Brownsboro as a stonemason and, despite the Depression, \"was lucky enough to have as much work as he could do.\" Dorsey married Laura Johnson, a black woman, and lived in the house that his father had inherited from the Dorsey clan. Henry and Laura had four sons and two daughters. By 1956, approaching sixty and feeling his infirmities, he showed his brave and generous nature by countering his physical ailments with images suggesting important cheerful matters. These deliberately entertaining figurated constellations, in iron and plastic and other media from the industrial West, were to occupy him for the rest of his life. He died November 8, 1973. His wife, Laura, died soon thereafter. And the decorated house they lived in remained enigmatic to their neighbors. Few had walked around the house, seen it whole, put Dorsey's labors in cultural perspective.\n\nIt was out of an interaction of house and cemetery, clan and person, that the art of Henry Dorsey emerged. The key to his intent was a sign by his door that said, \"You are welcome as the flowers of May\" (a tag line Joyce himself used in _Ulysses:_ \"Alo! _Bonjour_ , welcome as the flowers of May\").\n\nDorsey taught us to master things rather than to complain about them, to subdue them with artistic weapons of humor and generosity. This is instanced by the care with which he traced the dates of the birth of his own children on a concrete tablet discreetly recessed into a wall on the chimney behind his house. (Plate 99). The tablet shows, for example (Plate 100), that his late son, Zack, was born on 29 May 1930, with the citations of the other children's initials and dates of birth. The _D_ in the Dorsey of Zack's name is decorated with a tiny commemorative white piece of shell; the _D_ in the name of a surviving daughter, Costella A., is similarly embellished. The tablet attests to his historical consciousness. In the beginning he felt these things privately, behind his house, but then, c. 1956, he felt the need to counter his existential void with celebrations of names in a far more assertive and public manner. He began to decorate the front of his house for the entertainment of the world.\n\nPLATE 99\n\nPLATE 100\n\nThe decoration of his house with motifs of industrial detritus can be partially characterized as an idiosyncratic act, and partially as an appreciation of the sensibility implicit in the embellishment of graves with porcelain objects and of trees with bottles.\n\nThe evidence of Dorsey's contact with these traditions exists within his own county, at least with respect to burials; and his travels through black Mississippi and Alabama sharpened his consciousness forever and told him, visually, who he was and where he was coming from.\n\nThe old black families in Oldham County had buried their loved ones with china figurines, last-used cups and saucers, and other material representations of spirit. In 1967\u201368, when the builders of Interstate Highway 71 sliced through one of the oldest black burial sites\u2014the very cemetery in which Alice White Dorsey, mother of Henry, had been laid to rest\u2014the tombs were moved. Guy Dorsey, a surviving brother, remembered: \"When they come, they took up graves, took up dolls, plates, cups, china, all sorts of things. Put 'em in boxes 'n buried them with the bodies at Peewee Valley.\" Eva Dorsey Williams, Henry's sister, added: \"It broke my heart, for Mother to be moved that way.\"\n\nSo Henry Dorsey knew all about black burials. He had buried his own father, Clarence Dorsey, and carved the latter's headstone (Plate 101) and dated it 1937. The design of this stone\u2014sphere over sphere\u2014provides us with a master icon.\n\nThe theme of mirrored circles informs one of his early motion-sculptures, dating from the 1950's (Plate 96). It is a tractor tire that has been transformed into a tondo, framing ice trays clustered about an upside-down washing-machine agitator to form a never-never propeller. The precision and intricacy of these interlocking metaphors of motion reveal a genius for parallel construction.\n\nIn the genial decoration of the ample grounds of Dorsey's house there were multiple hints\u2014the suspension of metal plates on iron trees of pipe (Plate 98) and the making of a garden of hubcaps, suspended like metal zinnias on metal stems\u2014that he had seen and was impressed by the flash of bottle trees in the South.\n\nPLATE 101\n\nHis charm reflected resistance to suffering, through visual contentments and splendidly humorous elaborations. This was made clear by his reaction to the rejection by his brothers and sisters of a headstone that he made in 1963 with his own hands for his late and beloved sister, Bernice. The other members of the family quietly purchased a commercially rendered granite marker and placed it on her grave. Characteristically, Henry did not dwell on the hurt, did not destroy his headstone in a fit of meaningless pique. Instead he took the handcrafted headstone and set it up, in a corner of his yard, atop a boilerlike coffer of iron (Plate 102), a mock tomb anchored on his earth. He flanked this \"grave\" with an abstract silhouette of a locomotive\u2014not unlike the isolated wheeled structure that haunts the funeral processionists of Clementine Hunter's c. 1948 painting, _The Funeral on Cane River_. Dorsey's locomotive is half edifice, half vehicle, for it has only one wheel and is rooted to the ground with miniature supports.\n\nPLATE 102\n\nPLATE 103\n\nA train beside a tomb leads us to a master metaphor: his house as spirit-train. The placing of tractor wheels at certain corners of his house and along the edges of his property implied that the earth itself was wheeled, could be mentally set in motion. Indeed he set his name in motion many times over in the decoration of his house's fa\u00e7ade (Plate 103). He wrote his initials, \"H.D.,\" in pierced green and yellow bleach bottles, threading them, like giant beads, on pipes. He placed this dazzling projection above another act of self-commemoration, a frieze proclaiming:\n\nHenry Dorsey\n\n1956 PRODIGAL SON ALICE'S BOY\n\nAnd then he set this above paired wheels. The point where the frieze is dated \"1956\" is marked with a cluster of seashells (Plate 104). The symbolic shells, lifted out of Afro-American funerary context, become doubly death-defying, a celebration _before_ his death of the permanence of his name. PRODIGAL SON refers to his travels in the South, ALICE'S BOY to coming home. His life is unified and framed with shining shells. As his good-natured vision ripened, Dorsey advanced his art.\n\nHe mastered electrical work. Now he was working with actually moving pulleys, wheels, and wires. Now he was rendering explicit what was once implied. By this time, the late 1960's, writers had come to his door, attracted by the continuous notices of his work in the press of Louisville:\n\nHe seems to have a complete understanding of the maze of electrical cords and fan-belts and bicycle-wheels-made-into-flywheels. He fashioned the thing out of empty space, defining it with cast-off icons. He built it and he certainly knows its music.\n\nHe was painting metaphoric motion, an aspect of the black imagination that led James Hampton to fasten wings on every major portion of _The Throne of the Third Heaven_ , that inspired black musicians to add the sound of disappearing trains to complete an atmosphere of yearning in their blues. Hampton set the rubric FEAR NOT above his composition; Dorsey sited a smiling clown head, a figure of laughter and self-effacement, high within his series of motion-compositions, like a benediction.\n\nPLATE 104\n\nDedicating himself to work that was play, to labor that was festive, displaying his art in a communal round, Dorsey rescued objects thrown away by persons trained to see only single functions in them, recycling them in a deeper sense (Plate 105).\n\nMy appreciation of Henry Dorsey and his art in this chapter on Kongo and Angola influence on New World art is a declaration of marvelous things to come, as black artists everywhere awaken to the implication of this current in Atlantic black art history. The tone of Dorsey's work, his concern with righteous mediation, reflects continuous contact with the _mambu_ (matters) of the graveyard\u2014one block down the street on which he lived. His ancestors had indicated ways of realizing spiritual transcendence through material metaphors. To the degree that he extended their insights he extended the Kongo Atlantic world.\n\nThe house of Henry Dorsey remains a secular _nzo a nkisi_ , a charm for the denial of hurt, for the redirecting of spirit, to greet provocateurs with laughter and generosity, teaching us how to endure, how to bestow honor, even as the ancient Greeks taught their progeny to honor the gods, parents, and strangers.\n\nHenry Dorsey discovered reflections of the Kongo _nkisi_ tradition on his own. The man in touch with his origins, so the Bakongo say, is a man who will never die _(mu kala kintwadi ya tubu i mu zinga)_. Thus the house of Henry Dorsey stands, at the end, as an intimation of the meaning of existence in terms as the Bakongo might have phrased them: If you know where you are going, and where you are coming from, you can decorate the way to other worlds\u2014the road to the ancestors and to God; and your name will merge forever with their glory.\n\nPLATE 105\n\n# **Three**\n\n# **THE RARA  \nOF THE UNIVERSE**\n\n# **_Vodun_ Religion and  \nArt in Haiti**\n\nVoodoo, according to the _Oxford English Dictionary, is_ \"a body of superstitious beliefs and practices including sorcery, serpent worship and sacrificial rites, current among negroes and persons of negro blood in the West Indies and Southern United States, and ultimately of African origin.\" Superficially understood by Westerners since the eighteenth century, voodoo _(vodun)_ has been reviled as abominable primitivism and vulgarized and exploited in countless racist books and films. _Vodun_ , which was first elaborated in Haiti, however, is one of the signal achievements of people of African descent in the western hemisphere: a vibrant, sophisticated synthesis of the traditional religions of Dahomey, Yorubaland, and Kongo with an infusion of Roman Catholicism. What is more, _vodun_ has inspired a remarkable tradition of sacred art.\n\nFrance took formal possession of the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1697. Soon thereafter this part of the island\u2014modern Haiti\u2014developed a vigorous indigo and sugarcane plantation economy. Western Hispaniola, built on the backs of black slaves, became the most profitable French colonial possession in the world, necessitating an enormous increase in the importation of slaves. In 1697 there had been three Europeans to every African in western Hispaniola, but a hundred years later the proportion had radically changed: there were approximately eleven blacks to every white.\n\nThe men and women of African descent who populated Haiti came primarily from Kongo and Angola, but also from Dahomey, Yorubaland, Bamana, and Mande territories in West Africa, with assortments of Igbo, too. As C. L. R. James remarks in _The Black Jacobins:_\n\nTwo-thirds of the population of French San Domingo (at the commencement of the Haitian revolution in 1791) had made the Middle Passage. The whites had emigrated or been exterminated. The Mulattoes who were masters had their eyes fixed on Paris. Left to themselves, the Haitian peasantry resuscitated to a remarkable degree the lives they had lived in Africa. Their method of cultivation, their family relations and social practices, their drums, songs and music, such art as they practiced, and above all their religion which became famous, _Vodun_ \u2014all this was Africa in the West Indies.\n\nActually, _vodun_ was Africa _reblended_. The encounter of the classical religions of Kongo, Dahomey, and Yorubaland gave rise to a creole religion. This religion has two parts: one called _Rada_ , after the slaving designation for persons abducted from Arada, on the coast of Dahomey, itself derived from the name of the holy city of the Dahomeans, Allada; and the other called _Petro-Lemba_ , or simply _Petro_ , after a messianic figure, Don Pedro, from the south peninsula of what is now Haiti, and the northern Kongo trading and healing society, Lemba.\n\nChiefly from Dahomey and western Yorubaland derived the _vodun_ worship of a pantheon of gods and goddesses under one supreme Creator\u2014deities who manifested themselves by possessing (\"mounting\") the bodies of their devotees. This aspect of _vodun_ was reinforced by contact with French services for Roman Catholic saints who were said to work miracles. Chiefly from Kongo and Angola derived _vodun_ beliefs in the transcendental moral powers of the dead and in the effectiveness of figurated charms for healing and righteous intimidation.\n\nBoth _Rada_ and _Petro_ partake of these sources of African influence; neither is traceable to just one source. Both are at once African-inspired and indigenously created. _Rada_ , predominantly Dahomean and Yoruba, is the \"cool\" side of _vodun_ , being associated with the achievement of peace and reconciliation. _Petro_ , predominantly Kongo, is the hot side, being associated with the spiritual fire of charms for healing and for attacking evil forces. The great Haitian painter Andr\u00e9 Pierre, himself a _vodun_ priest, has called _Rada_ \"civilian,\" _Petro_ \"military.\"\n\nIt is important to stress, however, that the two fundamental _vodun_ sections fused similar religious aspects of different African cultures. Thus, the \"hot\" sorcerous potentiality of an otherwise cool Yoruba riverain goddess was reassigned to the _Petro_ side of deities. Correspondingly, the cool, creative Kongo _simbi_ spirits were lifted from the realm of Kongo-inspired \"attack\" charms and reassigned to _Rada_ , where their positive powers were akin to those of the gods and goddesses of Dahomey and Yorubaland.\n\n## **Dahomey: A Distant Paradigm**\n\nThe Dahomean kingdom once flourished in what is now the Benin Republic between Togo and Nigeria on the west coast of Africa. It lacked vast rivers and mountain ranges and therefore was accessible to Yoruba migrations from the east. From Tado, west of modern Abomey, the Adja branch of the ancient Yoruba migration from present-day Nigeria moved south. Around the fifteenth century, according to tradition, Aligbonon, the King of Tado's daughter, while seeking water in a forest, met and was made love to by a leopard spirit; the mystic union resulted in the birth of Prince Agasu, legendary ancestor of all the Fon of Dahomey, whose name is remembered in Haiti.\n\nAgasu's descendants founded the holy Dahomean city of Allada. About 1600 three of his sons contested the throne of the sacred town. The eldest won; the middle son took the throne of Ajase-Ipo (modern Porto Novo); and the youngest, Do-Aklin, trekked north and founded Abomey, capital of Dahomey.\n\nBy 1700 the French had established a permanent slaving base on the Dahomean coast at Ouidah. The link connecting Dahomey and the West Indies, especially western Hispaniola, had been forged. The slave trade intensified the Dahomean warrior way of life. Quickly Abomey emerged from relative obscurity to become a major power in West Africa, with an efficient army, a stable cowrie-shell currency, a strong balance of trade, and firm control of political and social affairs. Defense and economic welfare provided a rationale for military expansion. Abomey struck south, conquered Allada in 1724, and three years later reached the Atlantic Ocean, seizing the trade in European firearms that flourished on the coast. Already Abomey had captured or was raiding Mahi, Savalu, Ketu, and the Anago Yoruba.\n\nPaul Mercier underscores an important aspect of Dahomean cultural history\u2014the transformation of the deities of immigrants and of conquered peoples into Dahomean spirits. The cultures of the conquered\u2014Mahi to the north, Ketu and Anago Yoruba to the east\u2014were fairly close to the Dahomean way of life. Thus their gods and goddesses were assimilated by the Dahomeans.\n\nHowever, the deities of the Yoruba had already made their presence felt in Dahomey over hundreds of years. Yoruba deities were served under different manifestations in Allada before 1659. Therefore, the Abomey conquests brought together Yoruba deities already transformed into Ewe and Fon local spirits, in addition to deities from Ketu and Anago Yoruba. The encounter of Ewe-Dahomean spirits with pure Yoruba _orisha_ in Haiti produced still another synthesis of Yoruba-descended religious practices that, in the course of Dahomean history, had become separated from one another. Fusion and refusion of Yoruba spirits, first in Dahomey and then all over again in Haiti, go a long way toward explaining the phenomenon of multiple avatars of the same Dahomean-Yoruba god. It also helps explain the persistence of the concept of the _orisha_ in the black New World.\n\nThe very Afro-Haitian term for spirit, loa, encapsulates the subtle nature of the syncretions that took place. In Abomey, deities are called _vodun_ (mysteries); in Yoruba, diviner-herbalists are called _babalawo_ (father-of-mysteries), a term creolized by Haitians into _papaloi_ (the name for a _vodun_ priest) through ingenious Afro-Gallic punning. The Haitian words for deity, _loa_ or _myst\u00e9re_ , therefore appear to derive from the Yoruba _l'awo_ for \"mystery.\" The interrelationships binding the gods of Dahomey to the Yoruba pantheon and both to the _loa_ of Haiti are fascinating to behold:\n\nNote that two Ewe-Fon deities merge into a single Haitian spirit, Aizan Velekete. Continuity by combination is a process that throws light on the apparent disappearance of Yemoja, Oya, and Oshoosi in Haiti. Their attributes may have been absorbed in iconographically similar cults.\n\nWith the coming of deities shared by Ewe, Fon, and Yoruba to Haiti, the stage was set for their involvement with the religions of Kongo and Roman Catholicism.\n\n## **Dahomean Influences on Haitian Sacred Art**\n\nThe Dahomean war deity G\u016b was destined to live momentously in an alien land peopled primarily by persons brought from Kongo and Angola. On the Kongo-influenced side of _vodun_ in Haiti, he became the _Petro_ spirit Og\u00fan-Bonfire, or Ogun-of-the-Blazing-Torch. Dahomeans know G\u016b as the personification of iron's cutting edge, which exists in the blade of a razor, in the slicing force of machetes, in the piercing jab of an iron-tipped spear. G\u016b's own sword is represented by one of the monuments of Dahomean iron, the ceremonial blade called _gubasa_ (Plate 106). The image of the openwork disk of the sun relates this weapon to the sky. The master smith who fashioned it in Abomey, probably in the late nineteenth century, attached to its side more than forty miniature iron implements\u2014tiny swords, cutlasses, guns, arrows, hoes, hooks, lances. Arrows thrust out from the cutting edge, like myriad spitting vipers, intensifying the killing aura of the instrument.\n\nPLATE 106\n\nA masterpiece of Dahomean brass-smithing (Plate 107) enlarges our comprehension of this dread power: an image of G\u016b, the iron god himself. This striking figure has been tentatively attributed by Abomey elders to a court brass-smith of Kings Ghezo and Glele, Azidji. When this image arrived in Paris, near the end of the nineteenth century, it was still dressed in its complement of ritual garments (Plate 108), a brass hat for Age (the Dahomean god of the hunt), a cloak in Dahomean-made raffia cloth, a brass pendant and silver charm, and a loincloth of the kind Dahomeans and their Yoruba neighbors associate with forest cultivators, hence suggestive of brute forest energies. The image brandishes with both hands the _gubasa_.\n\nThe bite of iron is matched by the snapping of a lion's jaws in another striking form of Dahomean visual praise (Plate 109). In this example, a lion rampant carved in wood, attributed to the great nineteenth-century court carver, Sosandande Likohin Kankanhau, monumentalizes Glele's famous praise name: \"When the lion shows his pointed teeth, he terrifies the world.\" Fragments of this visual lore of war were brought to Haiti by captives from the Dahomean region and fused in a new cult of the god of war. United with Og\u00fan, the Yoruba god of iron, from whom G\u016b himself originally derived, G\u016b became Papa Og\u00fan. Papa Og\u00fan was, in turn, associated with the warrior saints of the Roman Catholic Church.\n\nIn Haiti, visual representations of the saints of the Roman Catholic Church were viewed with informed sympathy by the blacks. In such imagery they perceived\u2014unbeknownst to the whites\u2014ties to truths they already knew. They noted striking parallels in the lives and attributes of the saints, the _vodun_ of Dahomey, and the _orisha_ of Yorubaland.\n\nThe Church distributed among the slaves, who were forcibly baptized by law, inexpensive woodcuts and lithographs of the saints, demonstrating, didactically, their individual attributes. These were potent images indeed for minds informed by the visual cultures of Dahomean _vodun_ , West Yoruba _orisha_ , and Kongo _minkisi_. In the course of supposed Westernization, Haitians actually transformed the meaning of the Catholic icons by observing their similarities to African spirits. Haitians restructured the identity of the saints of the Catholic Church in terms of their own religious language. Consider Saint James. Michel Leiris remarks:\n\nPLATE 107\n\nPLATE 108\n\nPLATE 109\n\nBecause of a secondary figure, the picture of Saint James the Great [Plate 110]... will receive a double interpretation. The picture shows Saint James on horseback with sword and shield, fighting the Infidels, and escorted by a knight in armor, bearing a red standard with a white cross. All my informants agreed that the principal figure is the blacksmith and warrior god, _Ogun Ferraille_... (the essential attribute of which is a saber and, together with the other Ogun, the color red) but according to some, the figure in the background is _Ogun Badagri_ , the brother of _Ogun Ferraille_ , while others identify him rather as a guede, or graveyard spirit; this is because of the lowered visor of the helmet of the figure in question, which seems to recall the chin-cloth and other attributes of a corpse.\n\nThe vision of _killing by iron_ observed within the lithograph distinctly fits the martial paradigm of Dahomean G\u016b. And just as the _gubasa_ is the central sign of war and smithing in Dahomey, so the _saber_ became the chief icon of Og\u00fan Ferraille in Haiti, in a new and wondrous context, often flanked by honorific banners, symmetrically displayed and inclined, as if nodding in honor of Lord G\u016b.\n\nThe shape of the shafts of the important flags that traditionally flank the sword of the saint in ground-paintings (and the sword of the master-of-ceremonies in _vodun_ dancing) extend a little-noted accent of militaristic assertion. The flags' shafts reverse the S-curved saber's handguard; they are cryptic swords of cloth, following and flanking the lord of the cutting edge, even as a white cross on a field of red in the chromolithograph accompanied the warrior saint.\n\nIn many instances, then, swords and flags are compared and the enlargement of the original meaning of _gubasa_ has been effected by new visual influences of the iconography of Catholicism on the Afro-Haitian aesthetic.\n\nWhen a person becomes possessed by the spirit of Papa Og\u00fan Ferraille, an iron bar, standing in the earth near the altar dedicated to his name, is heated in a fire. The possessed person will then take this staff or some other equally heated bar and dance with it in his or her bare hands to prove that the possession is genuine. Deep mastery of self is the point of the play with fire and heat.\n\nPLATE 110\n\nAn artistic monument of Dahomey also involved with resistance and self-restraint is the circular pendant (Plate 111) symbolizing steadfastness, which the great brass figure of the iron god, now in the Charles Ratton collection in Paris, once wore against his abdomen. It is a disk of brass to which a snarl of brass wire has been attached. Behanzin himself is supposed to have worn this pendant about his person to invoke the spirit of his father, King Glele. The pendant is a praise name of Glele materially rendered: _Togodo_ , The-Circle-of-the-Earth (literally, \"round thing\") a word that connotes a deeper meaning, namely, that Glele, the king (the earth), resists, without moving, the hot, dry, northern winds. The sphere is the earth, and the tangled skein of wire the winds\u2014all of which glosses one of the strongest names for King Glele, \"one knows not how to raise the earth aloft,\" i.e., the king is a force that can never be dislodged. The resistance of earth to wind cosmologizes the king's collectedness of mind and steadfast sense of mission. Glele's intimidating presence promised peace and order. In the realm of zoology the same concept is conveyed by the image of a frog (Plate 112), whose presence correlates with water's coolness, hence with peace imposed by statecraft that is strong and just. These were ancient ideas in Dahomey, long predating their particular association with nineteenth-century kings.\n\nPLATE 111\n\nPLATE 112\n\nPLATE 113\n\nPLATE 114\n\nAnother animal present in Dahomean art\u2014D\u0101 or Dan, the good serpent of the skies\u2014appears not only in Haiti but also in Cuba (Plate 113), and, in mixture with the Yoruba rainbow deity, Oshumare, in Brazil (Plate 114), that is, wherever the Fon and their neighbors arrived as captives.\n\nThe highest deity of the Fon, Mawu-Lisa, combines female (Mawu) and male (Lisa) valences. Mawu is cool and gentle\u2014she is the moon. Lisa is strong, tough, fiery\u2014he is the sun. Their union represents a Fon ideal.\n\nThe good serpent of the sky, D\u0101, is a metaphor for this primary, combinatory sign of order. Like Mawu-Lisa, D\u0101 combines male and female aspects, and is sometimes represented as a pair of twins. Many are his avatars, but principal among them is Da Ayido Hwedo, the rainbow-serpent. Coiling a resplendent bichromatic body about the earth, D\u0101 shaped its globelike form and sustained its balance and existence. Color symbolism in the lore of this rainbow-serpent is potent and direct: \"The male is in the red portion, the female in the blue.\" Aggression and compassion are thus writ large across the skies.\n\nIn one Dahomean myth recorded by Mercier, Da Ayido Hwedo set up four pillars cast in iron at the four cardinal corners of the earth. He did this to hold aloft the sky. And then he twisted around these columns in brilliant spirals of crimson, black, and white to keep the pillars upright in their places. These were colors of night (black), day (white), dawn and twilight (red). Clearly the iridescence of the sacred serpent signified to Dahomeans more than danger. It becomes a perfect metaphor for mind's own ordering motion.\n\nNeedless to say, Dahomean-influenced folk in Haiti, steeped in such lore, were impressed by the chromolithograph of Saint Patrick (Plate 115), dressed in full regalia, and shown at a critical juncture, driving the snakes from Ireland. They saw an elder, white of beard (things white are African attributes of D\u0101), making a gesture of power with his right hand. Instead of a saint treading vermin, banishing all evil\u2014exorcism\u2014they saw multiple embodiments of the serpent of the sky. The proof of this assertion, as will be seen, is how they rephrased this chromolithograph to fit their own religious language (Plate 116).\n\nPLATE 115\n\nIn addition, it can be imagined what an elder from Kongo thought when confronted with such a picture: here was an obvious ritual expert, with a staff of mediatory power, communing with forces incarnate in amphibian reptiles at the watery and grand boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead. Fon titles for this spirit are D\u0101, Dan, and Dan Bada, but the creole name in Haiti is Damballah. This overlaps, in form and meaning, the Ki-Kongo word for flatheaded rainbow-serpent, _ndamba_. MacGaffey elaborates:\n\nPLATE 116\n\nNdamba puns on the Ki-Kongo word for \"to sleep\" in the sense of the ecstatic love-making of two serpents, one male, the other female, who wrap themselves around a palm tree to carnally unite.\n\nThis is remarkably similar to the image summoned by calling the names of Dan and his wife, Ayida Hwedo, in Afro-Haitian _vodun_ and identical with the image used in _vodun_ blazonry to call and designate these spirits.\n\nV\u00e8v\u00e8 ground-painting for Damballah and Ayida Hwedo, Port-au-Prince, twentieth century.\n\nThus, in a commonsensical way, the iconographies of two classical African religions came together: the center post, a ritual site around which _vodun_ devotees dance, is often painted with rainbow stripes or embellished with relief representations of serpents intertwined.\n\n## **Kongo Influences on Haitian Sacred Art**\n\nMoreau de Saint-M\u00e9ry wrote in the eighteenth century regarding a certain _danse \u00e0 Dom P\u00e8dre:_\n\nIn 1768 a black man of Le Petit-Goave [a village on the north shore of the southern peninsula]... taking advantage of the credulity of the blacks with superstitious practices, gave them the idea of a dance analogous to that of the _vaudoux_ , but in which the movements were more sharp and sudden. To give the dance even more of an effect, the blacks mixed well-crushed gunpowder in the cheap rum they drank while dancing... this dance, called Danse \u00e0 Dom P\u00e8dre or simply Dom _P\u00e8dre_ has caused the death of certain blacks....\n\nIn this account, \"superstition\" is mixed with substance. Saint-M\u00e9ry believed that the Dom P\u00e8dre \"dance\" began in 1768, and literally endangered those who danced it. Contesting this image, Melville Herskovits, the American anthropologist, wondered whether _Petro_ spirits derived in fact from a species of African-derived ancestorism, for a Haitian black had told him that he believed _Petro_ was an intimidating _vodun_ priest who had died with the spirit of a god not properly released from his head. Evil and positive divinity therefore lived on within the spirit of this person, perpetually commingled.\n\nActually, lost here was not paradise but understanding. A ritual expert in Kongo today would have little difficulty in explaining plausibly the significance of these hazily remembered legends: Dom P\u00e8dre was a messianic figure or an ancestor come back from the grave to renew his usefulness to the living in the body of a priest or healing charm. In fact, there are figurated healing bundles, or _pacquet congo_ , in Haiti today that bear Dom P\u00e8dre's name. The great ethnologist, Alfred M\u00e9traux, writing in that vein of scientific skepticism tempered with artistic charm that was his alone, could sense\u2014without identifying them\u2014sub-Saharan origins in the legend of Dom P\u00e8dre:\n\nIn the word _petro_ we recognize the Pedro discussed above. Only a very naive person could believe that the complicated (petro) liturgy, which is inseparable from the worship of the petro divinities, could have been introduced by one man, however inspired... In contemporary Voodoo, Domp\u00e8dre is a powerful god who is normally greeted by the detonation of gunpowder. And so it seems certain there must have once been a _hungan_ whose impact was so profound that his name took the place of African \"nations\" who today worship gods bearing his name, _petro_ , and not theirs.\n\nToday additional evidence suggests that those \"African nations\" lie within Ki-Kongo-speaking Central Africa.\n\nIn some parts in the north of Haiti, people sometimes call _Petro_ Lemba, the name of an old and most important Kongo trading society. The doyen of Afro-Haitian studies, Jean Price-Mars, stressed the Lemba- _Petro_ equivalence thirty years ago. If the same cycle of rites is called by a Kongo name\u2014a creole term in the south\u2014in northern Haiti, then _Petro_ must be a rite, not a person; a concept, not a name.\n\nThe fiery militance of the _vodun_ realm was fully evident in 1768 when first contrasted with the idealized coolness of many of the deities of Dahomey. _Petro_ ritualized aggression would seem logically to derive from the spiritualized militancy pervading the world of \"attack medicines\" of Bas-Z\u00e4ire and neighboring territories. The earliest mention of _Petro_ associates the rite with sharp, staccato motions and the tasting of gunpowder\u2014practices sharpened and confirmed by time. Today _Petro_ dancing is defined as \"distinctively intense, almost nervous.... Dancers, instead of riding the beat, as in Rada and Ibo, seem to be running in front of it, as if the beat were whipping them forward.\"\n\nThe gestures of a _Petro_ spirit, filling momentarily the body of a possession priest or priestess, are characteristically stern, hard, fierce:\n\nWhereas Erzulie, the Rada Goddess of Love... is concerned with love, beauty, flowers, jewelry... liking to dance and be dressed in fine clothes... the figure of Erzulie-Red-Eyes, on the _Petro_ side, is awesome in her poignancy. When she possesses a person, every muscle is tense, the knees are drawn up, the fists are clenched.\n\nHere is a spectacle that recalls possession by _bisimbi nganzi_ in northern Kongo, spirits of those who died violently. The Haitian propensity for re-creating and marshaling these incandescent forces is based on a belief in the spirits of _Petro_ 's power to make things burn in a positive healing sense; their flames, their whips, their exploding charges of scattered gunpowder are summoned when cooler _Rada_ cures have failed. _Petro_ altars, in the context of the _houmforts_ (the religious centers of _vodun_ ), powerfully reflect this notion of salvation through extremity and intimidation.\n\n_Houmforts_ betray more than a hint of the spatial arrangement of many compounds in Central and West Africa: the construction of a series of rooms about an open courtyard. The focus of the _houmfort_ is the peristyle, a roofed-over dancing court with sometimes brilliantly embellished posts. The center post ( _poteau mitan_ ), at the center of the dancing area, is a mediating object par excellence, through which the deities are believed to ascend from the watery regions of the dead or come down from the skies. It is the still point of the spinning world of _vodun_ dance: ground-paintings and the dances in honor of the deities symbolized by these paintings are centered on its axis.\n\nThe influences of several African visual traditions are readily discernible in this single column. Firstly, as we have seen, according to a Dahomean belief, the Creator, Dan, \"set up four iron pillars at the four cardinal points to support the sky, and twisted round them in spirals threads of the three primary colours, black, white, and red, to keep the pillars upright in their places.\" There are _poteaus-mitan_ in Haiti showing spiral decoration in the colors of Dan's own rainbow, or serpents entwined around its shaft. Secondly, a cardinal tenet of Kongo culture is that \"a tree stands up tall on the earth, like a chief witness to boundaries.\" Haitians talk about the central column in their songs as a \"planted post\" _(poteau plant\u00e9)_ , as if it were a tree. Thirdly, among the eastern Igbo and the Ejagham who inspired them, there has existed since at least the eighteenth century the tradition of a special central column in the Ngbe (leopard society) house, a column erected with an important stone set before it. The column is planted in a raised, cylindrical dais of shaped clay\u2014details again matched by those of the _poteau-mitan_.\n\nAdjoining the dance court with its all-important center post is usually a building sheltering several shrines that open directly upon the peristyle. Each is a room containing one or more concrete or stonework altars _(pe)_. Each altar, dedicated to particular spirits, displays multiple niches, recessed within its base, in which offering bowls and other objects are placed by the servitors. In _Rada_ shrines, in the area between Port-au-Prince and L\u00e9ogane, one often sees one single, large, dramatic opening for offerings of food to the spirits in the center of the altar's bottom tier. In shape and location this opening resembles the niches or alcoves recessed in Haitian tombs for food offerings on special occasions.\n\nMany _vodun_ altars are built in rising tiers upon which myriad objects, crowded and stained by actual use, impress the beholder with a sense of spiritual aliveness and activity. The power of these altars lies in their representation of complex ideas by specially selected objects:\n\nA vodun altar is a veritable bric-a-brac display of ritual objects: jars and jugs for the deities and for the dead, plates consecrated to twin-spirits, vessels for inititiated priestesses, thunder-stones, swimming in oil, playing-cards, ritual rattles and emblems of the gods, as well as bottles of wine and liquor offered to the deities.... chromolithographs are pinned to the walls. Near the sword for Ogun, driven into the earth, one still finds, in some shrines, _assein_ , those curious supports in iron which are still to be bought in the market of Abomey in Africa.\n\nIt would be appropriate to compare such altars to the store of an apothecary, for herein are also gathered all kinds of bottles and vessels, in different shapes and colors, many meant to lend spiritual confidence, or a healing sense of security, for troubled suppliants brought before the altar. The close gathering of numerous bottles and containers, on various tiers, is a strong organizing principle in the world of _vodun_ altars.\n\nThat unifying concept, binding Haitian _Rada_ altars to Dahomean altars in West Africa, precisely entails a constant elevation of a profusion of pottery upon a dais, an emphasis on simultaneous assuagement (the liquid in vessels) and exaltation (the ascending structure of the tiers). The intermingling statuary and containers on altars in Dahomey and graves in Kongo become the Haitian mingling of chromolithographs of Catholic saints on the wall and offertory and other vessels on the several tiers below.\n\nIn the Port-au-Prince area the _Petro_ room is often one of several chambers adjoining the peristyle. Such rooms are striking for the touches, sometimes of deliberate horror, meant to suggest the moral terror of this fiery side of vodun. Thus a shrine to the _Petro_ spirit Criminel at the sanctuary of Madame Romnus in Bizonton in 1970 included a human skull embedded in a kind of dado near the bottom of the altar dais. The head of a cat, glassy eyes staring eerily ahead, was suspended on a thread above the altar. Elsewhere, in the region between Gressier and L\u00e9ogane, I have seen _Petro_ altars built apart, in a small habitation separated from the main cluster of altars about the peristyle, emphasizing distance and great danger. And there we sometimes find a table, laid for \"work,\" healing, or acts of mystic aggression, instead of a dais with tiers for display of ritual objects.\n\nPLATE 117\n\nI was allowed to photograph a _Petro_ table on the south peninsula of Haiti in the spring of 1975. Deriving from Kongo on this table is the feathered image (Plate 117) of Simbi Macaya, to the right of a skull and in front of a bottle\u2014a promise of the power of _Petro_ to render urgent healing. A cluster of three transparent bottles each with a miniature crucifix within, dramatically displays points of spiritual contact\u2014crossroads in miniature, ensconced in spirit-attracting glass\u2014and deepens the allusion to the dread powers of the _Petro_ spirits. Playing cards have been laid on this table. They are for divination. Renamed in _Petro_ terms, the Queen of Diamonds, for example, has become Erzulie-Red-Eyes, whose poignant possession style we have observed. There is even a human skull, as in Madame Romnus's shrine, here associated, so it was alleged, with the mystic killing of cruel or evil persons through the propitiation of the deity shown seated at this table.\n\nNo sooner do I come into this room than a servitor is instantly possessed with the spirit of Danger-Malheur, Danger-And-Ill-For-tune, a _Petro_ avatar. Face frozen, he wears his traditional crimson hat. Sequinned bottles for assuagement refer in their glitter to the flash of the spirit that has descended here and add beauty to undertones of terror and moral vengeance. To the left of the table the top of an actual cemetery cross in wood rises from a mock grave and in another portion of this room a great black flag guards a carefully deposited piece of meteoritic stone and a long red coffin, lined with silk, has been set upon two chairs, like a presence in a mortuary.\n\nThe art history of the _Petro_ table-altars of southern Haiti remains to be completed, but the presence of a strong Kongo element\u2014fused with ingenious invention and an imaginative local sense of visual structure, pace, and timing\u2014already seems quite clear.\n\n## **_Vodun_ flags**\n\n_Vodun_ flags appear at the beginning of _vodun_ ceremonies and herald the coming of a god or goddess, the possession of devotees. _Vodun_ flags are profoundly liminal. Unfurled and paraded in _vodun_ rites, they stand at the boundary between two worlds. The late _houngan_ ( _vodun_ priest) Loudovique Elien of Gressier told me in April 1970 that _vodun_ flags were used to \"greet the deities\" _(saluer myst\u00e8res)_. Madame Romnus, the mambo of Bizonton mentioned earlier, also in 1970 told me that the meaning of the flags could be summed up in a single word: respect! _(resp\u00e9!)_. When a Haitian approaches another Haitian's yard, making his presence known by shouting _Hono!_ (Honor!), he does not, by the rural rules of etiquette, cross the threshold until he hears from within the corresponding cry of _Resp\u00e9!_ The resonance between this custom and the association of the flags with _resp\u00e9_ underscores the power of these banners as mediating forces. These are creole variations on a fundamental Kongo theme\u2014 _nikusa minpa_ \u2014the ritual agitation or unfurling or \"dancing\" of squares of cloth to open the door to the other world. M\u00e9traux gives us a fine description of _vodun_ flags in ceremonial context:\n\nThey are brought out at the beginning of a ceremony or when a \"great loa\" possesses one of the faithful. Also, important visitors are entitled to the honor of walking beneath two crossed flags. When the moment comes to fetch these flags, the flag party, which consists of two women, goes into the sanctuary escorted by the _la place_ waving his sword. They come out backwards and then literally charge into the peristyle behind their guide who is now twirling his weapon.\n\nThis can inspire a song for Sogbo, lord of thunder and patron of flags, whose thunderous nature, like the sound of cannons on the battlefield, makes an appropriate accompaniment to the use of banners. Then:\n\nThe trio maneuvers and from the four cardinal points salutes the _poteau-mitan_ , the drums, the dignitaries of the society, and finally any distinguished guests, each according to his rank. The la-place and the standard bearers prostrate themselves in turn before them. These show their respect by kissing the guard of the sabre, the staff of the flag, and make the la-place and the standard bearers pirouette. The return of the standards is accomplished in a remarkable rite: the two priestesses, still preceded by the la-place, pointing his sabre before him, run around the _poteau-mitan_ , often making quick changes of direction. This musical ride goes on till the la-place leads them off towards the sanctuary door through which, having first recoiled from it three times, they pass at the double.\n\nThe balancing of a male-handled sword with two female-carried flags suggests a trace of Dahomean influence in the pairing of the sexes, and also perhaps reflects the sharing of power between male and female officiants in _vodun_ in general. Note that two women pair with a single male, as if their banners were co-wives to the spirit. And there is yet one more indication, in formal terms, that the flags themselves embody spirit\u2014the fact that in some styles the silhouettes of deities honored by the banners are carefully described by shining beads on a field of gleaming spangles. In such cases the beads are often reserved for the direct visual rendering of the deity on the banner. In the spring of 1975 the locally famous healer-diviner \u00c1lvares told me in his sanctuary near L\u00e9ogane why he draped shining beads about the tops of swords embedded upright in the earth before his _Petro_ altar: \"These are _kanzo_ beads. They have to be here. We place them on the heads of sabers because there is a spirit in them.\" And, similarly, the bead-embroidered silhouettes of the goddesses and the gods, on those _vodun_ flags where such additional embellishment is found, suggest the presence of spirit within their gathered brilliance, foretelling that mediation is about to happen or confirming its completion.\n\nPLATE 118\n\nTwo masterpieces of the _vodun_ flag tradition\u2014works of the utmost clarity and precision\u2014were fashioned by Adam Leontus, a former dock worker, later celebrated as \"the master decorative artist of Haiti.\" These flags, made c. 1945 in Port-au-Prince for Saint James\/Og\u00fan Ferraille and for Saint Patrick\/Damballah and Ayida Hwedo, incorporate the whole of their tradition (Plate 116). They carry inscriptions identifying the powers for whom they were made. Like the Catholic chromolithographs, they sparkle with allusion to the attributes of the saints. Like the costumed \"majors\" of Haitian _Rara_ street paraders, they achieve maximum glitter with sequin-covered surfaces. And like the head of the sword for G\u016b, the Fon deity of war and iron, observed in the _Petro_ shrine of \u00c1lvares near L\u00e9ogane and elsewhere, the portions of their composition indicating the silhouettes of sacred beings\u2014or their attributes\u2014are covered with bead embellishment.\n\nThe flag for Damballah and his wife, Ayida Hwedo, the serpents of the sky, is cut from a bolt of pale blue silk (Plate 116). It flashes with countless silver sequins. The serpents crushed under Saint Patrick's foot in his chromolithograph (Plate 115) disappear; they reemerge as twin-beaded serpents in the sky, joined in sacramental love about the swordlike palm tree, the sign of Aizan, the wife of the Dahomean trickster Legba. Aizan \"marches\" with the twin serpents. Leontus transformed the color of the snakes into gleaming silver, an affective suggestion of the richness of their powers and their purity. They stand, entwined, as rainbow-serpents, sources of creative coolness. The straightforward opposition of good and evil in the chromo has been transmuted into an extraordinary evocation of divinity and love. The intermingling of Damballah's body with that of Ayida is a sign of union and ecstasy, a sign that echoes throughout the composition, in the pairing of hearts, crosses, and rainbows meeting in a jar. Overmastering sensations of ecstatic union are stated and restated within a field whose starred corners suggest it is the universe itself.\n\nLeontus's other flag bears equal witness to his power to shape a vision of two worlds. Gold sequins sewn on crimson silk outline the passage of the mounted warrior-saint across the composition, as if he were caught in a ray of sunlight (Plate 118). The dissolving of the scene of fallen warriors and abandoned shields of the chromolithograph (Plate 110) releases the saint from a single point in space and time and makes his action heroically continuous and iconic. He, too, is set within four stars, which suggests the translation of the action to the skies.\n\nThe parting of two flags about the standing sword at the bottom of the composition\u2014precisely the act within the peristyle that heralds the coming of the spirit within the flesh of a dancing and initiated servitor\u2014suggests that the hovering mounted figure above this motif is a spirit descending to this world. The miniature banners within the banner not only link this textile to its contexts but also create raking accents that mirror the shaftlike cartouches in which the spirit's Christian name is sited, above the mounted figure. These names descend, like arrows of God, pointing toward the corresponding Dahomean titles. Adam Leontus totally transcended his source of inspiration; he masterfully transformed a single battle against the Saracens into an endless arrest of supernatural power to inform the moral wisdom of this world.\n\n## **_V\u00e8v\u00e8_ : Ritual _Vodun_ Ground-Paintings**\n\n_V\u00e8v\u00e8_ , the celebrated blazons of the vodun goddesses and gods, are traced by priests or priestesses in powdered substances (normally cornmeal) on the earth about the central column of the vodun dancing court. Symmetrically disposed and symmetrically rendered, they praise, summon, and incarnate all at once the _vodun_ deities of Haiti.\n\nThey take their name from an archaic Fon term for palm oil used in the making of simplified squares or rectangles on the ground for certain Dahomean deities. Essentially they take their structure from a reinforcing merger of Fon and Kongo traditions of ritual ground designs, with the cruciform cosmograms of Kongo and neighboring territory the dominating influence not only in terms of design but, critically, in point of context and process, too. Thus John Janzen:\n\nthe tracing of ritual spaces in the Petro phase of the loa service offers some striking resemblances to... Kongo rituals. In the staking out of the cardinal points with candles, the [ritual expert] used a common, perhaps worldwide motif. However, in circling this space in a counter-clockwise direction, and then dividing it into two, one half representing the domestic realm (governed by \"lord of the house\" Mait' Habitation, the other half the realm of the wilds, the deep, of water (governed by \"lord of the deep\" Mait' Source) he was tracing a cosmogram the way it is done in many Kongo contexts.\n\nAnd there are analogous ground-signs, mediatory cruciforms, found among the Tu-Chokwe of northern Angola, the Ndembu of northwestern Zambia, and the Pende of western Za\u00efre, doubtless fragments from a larger, yet to be discovered western Bantu field of visual expression. The Tu-Chokwe have especially developed ground-designs of intricacy and beauty, as illustrated by an ideograph that artfully fuses various motifs:\n\nThe top of this design indicates the realm of God, whom the Tu-Chokwe, like the Bakongo, call Kalunga. There a human figure is shown standing. Twinned serpentlike forces mark the cosmic crisscross, framing the center of the design where nucleated lozenges indicate the sign of the _muyombo_ tree. Myth says that God asked the stars, \"On which side of the cosmos is man found?\" And the stars replied, \"On the side opposite yours.\" God observed: \"Then man will die,\" thus identifying the bottom of the ideogram as representing the realm of the dead, and explaining why a the human figure therein represented lies in a recumbent pose of eternal sleep.\n\nThe symbolizing, with nucleated patterning, of a tree at the center of the cosmos compares closely with Kongo and Angola custom and also with the Haitian tradition of drawing _v\u00e8v\u00e8_ around a treelike post in the center of the peristyle, as shown below. On the other hand, the contrast between the Tu-Chokwe and Haitian illustrated signs of cosmos not only clearly distinguish the creole blazons from their Central African antecedents but also suggests why the explosive variety of _v\u00e8v\u00e8_ emerged. Both the Tu-Chokwe and Haitian signs are centered on cosmic trees, but there the similarity ends. The Central African cosmogram states the same pattern four times. The Haitian illustration combines icons of various traditions and sources\u2014the upper right patterning is for Simbi, the Kongo-descended spirit, with an alphabetic S, and a sacrificial bullock bearing a Masonic emblem, in celebration of Masonic-like mysteries that surround the power of Simbi; at lower right appears a heart for the Dahomean-derived goddess of lovers, Erzulie, with the _M_ of her Catholic counterpart, Mater Dolorosa; at lower left we find the star-nucleated diamonds of Og\u00fan Badagri, framed with volutes relating, by one scholar's reckoning, to French grillwork; and finally, at upper left, the poised and balanced Dahomean serpents of the sky, Damballah and Ayida Hwedo. In other words, this is more than a crisscross of the earth at point of contact with the sky. In effect, this _v\u00e8v\u00e8_ complex provides geometric focus for a constellation of Dahomean, Kongo, and Roman Catholic forces constituting the very fabric of Haitian cultural history. The Kongo and Angola cruciforms invoked God and the collective dead, but the Haitian ground-painting invoked a host of deities and emblems inherited from many lands. In the reduction of historical multiplicity of experience to single New World forms, _v\u00e8v\u00e8_ constitutes the quintessential form of Afro-Haitian art.\n\nPLATE 119\n\nEverywhere in _vodun_ art, one universe abuts another\u2014the gathering of the \"chromos\" of the saints upon the altar walls; the standing of embottled souls upon the altar; the flash of the double _vodun_ flags and swords (cf. Plate 119) about the peristyle; the coming of the deities, responding to this brilliance through the pillar at the center of the dancing court. Luminous force then radiates, so it is believed, from the bottom of this pillar in the form of the blazing chalk-white signatures of the goddesses and gods. These signs, these _v\u00e8v\u00e8_ , are then erased by the dancing feet of devotees, circling around the pillar, even as, in spirit possession, the figures of these deities are redrawn in their flesh. And then the goddesses and gods themselves revolve about this tree, this rainbow, this standing serpent that helped God build the world, creating unities so splendid it is permissible to greet black Haiti as the _coumbite_ of the western hemisphere, the _rara_ of the universe, a school of being for us all.\n\n# **Four**\n\n# **ROUND HOUSES  \nAND RHYTHMIZED  \nTEXTILES**\n\n# **Mande-Related Art and  \nArchitecture in  \nthe Americas**\n\nLimned in one of the masterpieces of Mali oral literature as generous, strong, and brilliant, Sundiata established the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century. He organized men of his age into an army and defeated his principal enemy, Sumaoro, by discovering and exploiting the latter's _tana. Tana_ is a crucial Mande concept. It is an inherited taboo, an animal-familiar that the inheritor should not kill or even touch, for he would thereby lose the concentration of the powers of his ancestors within himself. Sumaoro's _tana_ was the spur of a rooster. He made the fatal error of bragging to Sundiata's sister about his source of power, unaware that she merely pretended to be in love with him in order to uncover precisely this intelligence. She swiftly relayed her finding to her brother. Sundiata is said to have shot an arrow, to which the spur of a rooster had been attached, at Sumaoro, sealing his doom.\n\nAfter this victory, Sundiata went on to unite the twelve towns of Mande, \"the twelve doors of Mali,\" pacifying them and bringing prosperity to the land. About 1240 he absorbed the remnants of the earlier empire of Ghana. After his death the armies of Mali conquered Timbuktu and the Niger town of Gao c. 1325. Mali was then supreme, from the waters of the Gambia and the Senegal to the inland delta of the Niger. Subsequent to these victories, and the establishment of Mali, Mande traders (Dyula) spread Mande civilization to the south, almost to the gates of what would be the emergent civilizations of the Akan in what is now the Ivory Coast and Ghana. For example, the Dyula town of Kong, in what is now the northeast of the Ivory Coast, was founded at the beginning of the eighteenth century, not far from the northwestern marches of the Akan.\n\nThe Mande diaspora did not diminish their cultural identity. Such was the Mande strength of ethnicity that the cultural focus of the civilization was maintained, even among its widely dispersed members: \"the merchants who established trading colonies in Kong and Bonduku in the Ivory Coast, and those who colonized the Gambia, sent their sons back to the Mande to learn the finer points of Mande culture and perhaps to return with a wife.\"\n\nMande partly resolved the tension between tradition and innovation through their rich and extensive oral literature: animal stories; hunting songs; and, especially, the literature of the courts, sung by professional bards. The bards, \"men of words,\" traveled widely, maintaining the integrity of their language, Mande-kan. Thus they themselves contributed to the amazing cohesiveness of Mande culture. Because they were sent to do their apprenticeship at training centers in such places as Kangaba and Keyla in the core area, and because they convened for important national ceremonies, the bards of the Mande\u2014as Charles Bird points out\u2014virtually constituted an academy. They tempered cultural diversification with ancient norms. The Mande prize clarity, strength, and force of character, and they especially admire generosity and adherence to ancient custom.\n\nThe primary Mande aesthetic value is the search for simplicity, for the elegance of science. Thus the Mande-kan word _woron_ \"to get to the kernel\" also means \"to master speech, music, song, any aesthetic endeavor.\" As Charles Bird observes, one masters something in the Mande world by stripping away the superficial covering, by discovering its inner and true nature, as in the poetic concept of _yere-wolo_ (giving birth to yourself), in which a person finds his or her true self, his or her true essence. And Patrick McNaughton has shown that the making of Mande figural sculpture and designs painted in earth on cloth _(bogolanfini)_ is governed by _jayan_ , \"precision and clarity.\" As the cadres of rigorously trained bards kept the language of ancient Mali from splitting into mutually unintelligible languages, so the Mande propensity for the essential apparently preempted the emergence of a tropical baroque in spite of centuries of complex urban life and leisure. The search for the _kolo_ , the kernel, the nucleus, the essential structure, militated against ostentatious display or mindless presentations of one's wealth, which is regarded as being in bad taste.\n\nThe expansion of the Mali Empire had profound cultural effects throughout West Africa that are still being felt today. Two of the most important Mande artistic traditions disseminated by Mande warriors and traders were cone-on-cylinder architecture and the making of multistrip textiles in vibrant colors\u2014with the main accents of one strip staggered in relation to those of an immediately adjoining one but coordinated with those of another and so on. These aspects of Mande visual tradition survived\u2014indeed still thrive\u2014in certain regions of the Americas, where they were first introduced by slaves from Mande or Mande-influenced regions in West Africa. Moreover, they have been blended with local elements and improvised upon for so long that in most cases the practitioners of these traditions have no specific memory of Mande origins.\n\n## **Black Space**\n\nIn the Mande heartland, the basic architectural module is the clay round house (or wattle-and-daub round house) with a conical thatched roof\u2014a mode that has remained unchanged in Mande country since the time of the Mali Empire. According to tradition, the most important cone-on-cylinder building in the land is the famous Mande Bolon, constructed by the workers of Mansa Soulemane as a repository for the sacred texts this leader brought back from Mecca about 1352. This splendid round structure (Plate 120), specially white-washed and written over with Mande ideographs, some of which are alleged to refer to \"Mali\" and to the \"glory of Sundiata,\" is located in the culturally important settlement of Kangaba, where the bards of Mande assemble every seven years to chant the history of the land. And Portuguese explorers observed cone-on-cylinders buildings with straw roofs in the sixteenth century. These documents, material and literary, attest the existence of the cone-on-cylinder round-house tradition in Mande country at the time of the sixteenth-century exportation of Mande and Mande-area slaves to Mexico. For despite its inland position near the headwaters of the Niger and the Senegal, Mande was vulnerable to the reach of European slaving from its earliest period.\n\nPLATE 120\n\nIn the sixteenth century Spain decimated the Native American population on a portion of the west coast of Mexico known locally as the Costa Chica (the little coast), territory 70-odd miles down-coast from the famous port of Acapulco, by bringing smallpox to the land: in 1552 there were 323,00 Native Americans; in 1582, 1,807. As her need for labor intensified, Spain began importing slaves from West Africa. And thus descendants of Sundiata appeared on the Costa Chica in southwest Mexico:\n\nThe great Mande group were, without a doubt, the one who exercised the greatest influence in Mexico during the entire 16th century.... it is easy to prove in colonial archives the role they played in the integration of patterns of culture of the colony, and the persistence of their influx will surely be recognized when ethnographic investigations, motivated by the black groups which still live in Mexico, are undertaken.\n\nSlaves in western Mexico on the Costa Chica were often organized in groups of ten or twelve, and they lived in camps thirty miles or less from one another. In the rugged isolation of the Costa Chica the blacks found themselves in a familiar, tropical environment with unusual opportunites for autonomy: \"What is important to realize is that the Negroes of this coast were no longer slaves... they lived alone with their families... away from the presence of the [absentee] owners of the ranches, free to improvise responsibilities.\" In the process, the blacks intermarried with the surviving Native Americans, as reflected by the physical type prevailing on the Costa Chica. But there were black runaways whose African manner of cultivation and architecture was noted as early as 1591:\n\nI have been informed that in a hilly place called Coyula, two leagues from said town... there are black runaway slaves. And to the present time they are there, _with their houses, maize cultivation, cotton-growing, and other things, as if they were in Guinea_. [Emphasis added.]\n\nPLATE 121\n\nPLATE 122\n\nThe priority of arrival of Wolof and Mande in Mexico and most likely the re-creation of \"their houses\" there by 1591 is a momentous event in the history of African-influenced architecture in the New World.\n\nIn western Mexico, _redondos_ , or rondavels (round habitations with conical thatched roofs), appeared (Plate 121) and are still being built by Afro-Mexicans and their Native American neighbors. A consideration of the building techniques of the African round-house maker, as they have been studied, sharpens our appreciation of the Afro-Mexican rondavels.\n\nThere are four basic techniques of construction in Mande: 1) the superimposition of rows of sun-dried clay bricks sealed by wet clay; 2) the superimposition of string courses of puddled clay left to dry, one after the other; 3) the plastering over of woven wicker walls with a wet clay mix; 4) the arrangement of a ring of posts to support a conical thatched roof. Of the four modes only the last two mentioned\u2014technically the simplest\u2014were mainly practiced in Mexico, evidently because of missing elaborate Mande crafts and because of the exigencies of the new environment.\n\nThe first two techniques enable the making of relatively massive and thick-walled habitations (Plate 122), as evidenced by a photograph of a compound in Kangaba, in the heart of ancient Mande territory, in 1975. But the builders of the black and maroon villages on the Costa Chica availed themselves of the thin-walled wattle-and-daub technique (Plates 121 and 123), and when they built kitchens, where ventilation was a critical issue, they simply drove a ring of posts into the ground, placing over them a conical thatched roof (Plate 124).\n\nThe common housing unit of the central Mande area has four posts emerging from the very summit of the roof (Plate 125), whereas to the north of the core Mande region, the Soninke people complete their conical roofs without the four posts, using instead a woven ring of vegetal matter to hold the roof in place, as Afro-Mexicans do. Among the latter the securing-ring is called the _corona_ (Plate 126). Another hint of a possible Soninke influence on the architectural style of the west coast of Mexico is the fusing of a rectangular dwelling and a cone-on-cylinder kitchen by means of a veranda, a complex strikingly similar to certain constructions in Soninke country.\n\nPLATE 123\n\nPLATE 124\n\nPLATE 125\n\nPLATE 126\n\nCore Mande and perhaps the Soninke contributed builders during the formation of the Afro-Mexican round-house style, and Labelle Prussin, a leading authority in the study of African building traditions, after examining a series of recent photographs of Afro-Mexican _redondos_ observed strong affinities with modes of southern Mandingo\/Malinke construction. \"I am reminded,\" she writes, \"of innumerable 'palaver hosues' in the center of villages in the northern Ivory Coast and further west, i.e., the houses of the male elders of the villages.\" What is more, the spatial arrangement of round houses in Afro-Mexican compounds, in circular plans, evinces further cultural ties to western Africa. Thus, among the Wolof of Senegambia round houses are \"generally grouped in a circle, the house of the compound head being opposite the entrance.\" The reconstellation of round houses in circular compounds was also the prevailing plan on the Costa Chica for which, evidently, there was no clear Iberian nor Native American precedent. The rationale for the grouping of the round houses in circular compounds was given Susan Yecies in the course of fieldwork conducted among a number of villages in the summer of 1970 and the spring of 1971:\n\nCritics constantly told me that my drawings were not complete because the other _redondos_ (round-houses) that form a compound were missing. \"This drawing does not represent a house; know why? Because the other round-houses are missing and without them, there's no balance, between man and man.\"\n\nThe Mande word _lu_ refers not only to a lineage but to the circular compound inhabited by that lineage. Similar usage prevails in Africa wherever Mande influence is strong, such as northern Ghana:\n\nThere is an apparent absence of the concept of \"house\" or \"dwelling\" as a discrete entity among the traditional Western Sudanese cultures. Fortes, in his description of the way in which the Tale of Northern Ghana view their homesteads, notes that no linguistic distinction is made between the name for an extended family unit and the name for the physical architecturally circular compound which such a unit inhabits. Both are _yir_.\n\nTo repeat, as Tod Eddy rightly points out, there is no concept of the solitary habitation among the Mande: \"I refer to the cone-on-cylinder as a multi-habitational unit instead of a house. It is not merely an architectural structure but a representation of the individual within his or her social universe.\" In like fashion descendants of Africans on the west coast of Mexico find the concept of the single round house meaningless or socially askew.\n\nThe strong links between the Mande round houses and circular compounds and the spatial planning and architecture among the blacks and their neighbors on the Costa Chica south of Acapulco indicate the latter's general provenance. But local ingenuity and adaptation to new conditions have considerably transformed the Mande tradition. Old Mande round houses were closely spaced together when villages had to be strongly fortified against attacks by enemy outsiders or slave-raiding parties. The round houses of the Costa Chica are in general spread more apart, because Afro-Mexicans were subject to, chiefly, absentee landlords and because relations with neighboring Native American groups generally were good. Compounds such as those found in the hill-girt town of Amusgo (Plate 127) onspicuously lack the enclosing walls of Mande village compounds in Mali.\n\nPLATE 127\n\nNative Americans on the west coast of Mexico have, over the centuries, adopted the Mande-influenced module as their own. Aguirre Beltr\u00e1n, in his classic study of the black population and culture of the area, writes:\n\nThe Amuzga, Mixtec, and Trique cultural groups also have, as their traditional form of architecture, the round-house form. In this case, we think it is a phenomenon of cultural borrowing, by the Native Americans, from the blacks.\n\nThe adoption of these buildings by the Native Americans occasioned subtle changes in details of construction and plan that distinguish Afro-Amerindian structures from Afro-Mexican. For example, the Amuzga Native Americans use reinforcing crossbeams inside their round structures but this detail is missing from Afro-Mexican rondavels, as in Montecillos village on the Costa Chica.\n\nThe presence of Mandeizing round houses among Native American buildings of the Amuzga, Mixtec, and other indigenous peoples of the Costa Chica in western Mexico raises the possibility that round houses with conical thatched roofs inhabited by Arawak Indians in northeastern Colombia, in South America, might also have reflected certain Mande influences. Colombia was surpassed only by Brazil and the United States in the massiveness of its black population during the Atlantic trade. Colonial Colombia imported slaves from the Mande area as well as from Angola. Among the Arawak of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, in the extreme northeast of the republic, there is a distinct rondavel tradition: cylindrical walls, made of branches coated with clay and topped by a thatched conical roof (Plate 128). These elements are proportioned and scaled in a manner that recalls the world of Mande architecture.\n\nPLATE 128\n\nAlready certain Western architects have experimented with the elegance, simplicity, and the power of social cohesiveness written into round-house forms from other parts of Africa. The Ndebele-inspired Jack Lenor Larsen house in East Hampton, New York, and the Rice House of Christianburg, Virginia, a romantic replication of rondavels from what is now Zimbabwe, are twentieth-century examples. Ideal black architects, availing themselves of increasing knowledge of Mande-influenced round houses in Africa and the Americas, will turn these historical presences into occasions for creative homage and elaboration. The round houses of Mali in the Atlantic world keep families together in socially binding spaces. They will be rediscovered\u2014and maintained.\n\n## **Rhythmized Textiles**\n\nA particular style of Mande and Mande-influenced narrow-strip textile, enlivened by rich and vivid suspensions of the expected placement of the weft-blocks (Plate 129)\u2014thus characterized by designs virtually to be scanned metrically, in visual resonance with the famed off-beat phrasing of melodic accents in African and Afro-American music\u2014introduces to the history of art an extraordinary idiom, unique to the black world.\n\nPLATE 129\n\nThe Mande \"country cloth\" tradition spread west to Senegambia, east to the Djerma, among the Songhai of Niger, and\u2014this is crucial\u2014south by way of Mande Dyula traders to Kong and Bonduku (in what is now the Ivory Coast), then to Gyaman and Akan settlements proper in what is now Ghana, and again down, via the Songhai region, south into Dahomey and among the Ewe of Togo and eastern Ghana. Thus on the west coast of Africa various enslaved peoples, bound for America, converged, sharing Mande-influenced or Mande-related ideas about the composition of textiles. These traditions were reinstated in diverse ways in the Americas\u2014in Brazil, in Suriname, and in the United States, among other places.\n\nBut the creolized cloths of Bahia, the over-one-shoulder capes of the Djuka and Saamaka maroons in Suriname, and the string-quilts of the black South in the United States are not by any means \"pure African textiles.\" Rather, they are works \"carried out in terms of African tradition.\" Variables of Mande and Mande-related cloth-making remain indelibly intact in these Mande, West African-influenced regions of the New World. The recombination of these variables to form novel creole art\u2014also embodying European influences\u2014is an autonomous development in the history of Afro-American visual creativity, especially in Suriname. Nevertheless, the vibrant visual attack and timing of these cloths are unthinkable except in terms of partial descent from Mande cloth, a world of metrically sparkling textiles.\n\nWest African \"country cloth\" was made on the men's narrow horizontal loom in characteristic widths ranging from nine to fifteen centimeters. Neither in Europe, nor in the Middle East, according to Venice Lamb, a ranking authority, do we find such emphasis on narrow-strip weaving, nor such dramatic fusion of such strips in the making of multistrip cloths and textiles. Akan _asadua_ cloth may be made up of as many as twenty-four strips of cloth. Some Nigerian garments call for as many as one hundred narrow strips, each one inch wide. Thus as multiple meter distinguishes the traditional music of black Africa, emphatic multistrip composition distinguishes the cloth of West Africa and culturally related Afro-American sites.\n\nNarrow-strip weaving has been pervasive in West Africa since at least medieval times. Archaeologists, working at the site of the Tellem caves in modern Dogon country, central Mali, have discovered hundreds of old narrow-strip cloths. Some hailed from Berber weaving centers across the Sahara. Others were indigenous. The tradition of the West African multistrip cloth thus dates from the ninth to the twelfth century, a heritage more than seven centuries old. The weight of the tradition has resulted in a related predilection among West Africans for imported striped cloth. Narrow stripes were preferred as equivalent to narrow strips. On this simple substitution, stripe for strip, was to turn a major aspect of the Africanness of certain forms of Afro-American dress.\n\nPLATE 130\n\nThe earliest cloths from Tellem (Plate 130) show a strong use of blue against white, a hint that African cloth has for centuries, as it is today, been distinguishable by deliberate clashing of \"high-affect colors,\" dark blue against bone white, and so forth, in willful, percussively contrastive, bold arrangements.\n\nAnother variable in the making of a number of Mande or Mande-related \"country cloths\" is a vibrant propensity for off-beat phrasing in the unfolding of overall design. As multiple strips are sewn together by their edges, the major accents (weft-blocks) of one strip may be staggered in relation to those of an adjoining strip, with careful alignment of further elements in the same cloth preempting any assumption of accident and indeed confirming a love of aesthetic intensity through this form of special contrast.\n\nOne of the oldest examples of an African textile exhibiting this trait is a robe collected by one Christoph Weichmann \"on the coast of Benin,\" probably in the early seventeenth century (Plate 131). The strips composing the right arm sleeve are staggered in relation to the siting of those of the left arm. Visual aliveness emerges in two related traits: one, a deliberate clash between patterned and unpatterned strips, some white with patterning, some pure dark indigo without a trace of pattern; and, two, the cutting of broadloom cotton (in this case dyed dark indigo) to narrow-loom strip size to complete a multistrip, multidecorative composition. The latter technique, breaking the bulk of received foreign stuff, grants freedom to the maker of the costume: he can achieve a rippling effect by alternating narrow strips in union even without access to strips made from the West African narrow loom\u2014he merely cuts imported cloth down to cultural size, to the frequency modulation, as it were, of the narrow-strip, multistrip style. This was of obvious importance as a precedent for Afro-Americans recapturing the flavor of the past in spite of the loss of the narrow loom.\n\nPLATE 131\n\nPLATE 132\n\nAnd thus emerged strategies for recovering in a special West African way spontaneity in design, without which there can be neither vividness nor strength in aesthetic structure. The prevalence and diffusion of this tendency toward metric play and staggering of accented elements can be demonstrated by a brief consideration of a Fulani _welmare_ 36 cover from Mali and a cloth attributed to the Wolof from Senegal (Plate 132). Both are surcharged with visual syncopation. A detail of the Wolof textile reveals two weft-blocks aligned in the top two rows, three aligned in the next two, the latter design staggered with yet another triple patterning below.\n\nIn the early nineteenth century similar subtleties were achieved in textiles from the Mande trading towns Kong and Bonduku, in what is now the Ivory Coast. Witness a cloth attributed to a weaver who migrated to Bonduku from the Mande settlement of Kong. His work displays multistrip phrasing. There is no symmetry in the top and penultimate strips, but there is in the second and fourth. Red center-striping is continuous, like scarlet drones. There is an equally sustained \"checkerboard\" rhythm (Plate 133).\n\nPLATE 133\n\nThe northeast of Brazil imported slaves from no fewer than three major civilizations with traditions of rhythmic cloths\u2014Mande via the Cacheu slave trade in what is now Guinea-Bissau, Ewe from the slave coast, and Hausa from what is now northern Nigeria. In the pulsating African-inspired ceremonial life of the city of Salvador, multistrip textiles were used by blacks as garments. These textiles were called _pano da costa_ (\"cloths from the coast\"). According to Nina Rodrigues, this originally meant cloths brought by slaves from Cacheu, where Mande influence was strong.\n\nSurprisingly, the narrow-loom complex itself was also reinstated in Salvador. It is alleged that originally there were narrow looms in use among black folk in Cachoeira, across the bay from Salvador, and on the island of Itaparica, in the same harbor. Today, however, only one narrow-strip weaver remains, the master black craftsman Abdias do Sacramento Nobre (Plate 134). About seventy years old in 1980, when I interviewed him, Abdias do Sacramento Nobre inherited his loom from his godfather, Alexandre, who himself had inherited the technique of narrow-strip weaving from his West African forebears, possibly \"Tapa\" (Nupe) in what is now Nigeria. The tradition is said to extend back to the nineteenth century in Bahia.\n\nNevertheless, Abdias's loom is a richly creolized thing. As Beth Jeffe has observed in a recent study, \"The West African Narrow-Strip Weaving Tradition in the New World\": \"Abdias' loom suggests a Portuguese or Portuguese-influenced floor loom later adapted for use as a horizontal narrow-strip loom.... some of the components of his loom also indicate Mande influence, namely the shape and form of the tension bar disks and the nature of the foot pedals.\" Marvelously, inventively, the carrying out of tradition in partially Mande terms is also evident in the composition of resplendent multistrip cloths Abdias has fashioned. There is a handsome collection of his works, evidently dating from the 1970's, in the Museu da Cidade in Salvador.\n\nHere is an example (Plate 135). Though the particular shaping and staggered siting of the narrow, red, rectangular weft-blocks seems Mande, the interpolation of larger squares is an inventive touch by the artist; and he has elaborated his delicate parallel pinstripes in turquoise and dark blue in a manner reminiscent of the dark blue and purple pinstripes of the Fon\/Ewe\/western Yoruba. Moreover, inasmuch as these ritual cloths were meant to be worn in _candombl\u00e9_ ceremonies in Bahia, the colors have symbolic Yoruba-Dahomean meanings. This particular cloth is for Oshoosi, god of the hunt, whom we met in Chapter I; a similar multistrip cloth in red and white honors Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3; a rainbowlike gathering of strips in many delicate hues honors Oshumare, Yoruba serpent-rainbow of the sky, and so forth. In sum, Abdias's creole art fuses off-beat phrasing in the Mande manner with Yoruba-influenced niceties of expression. It could be said that to a heroically singular extent Abdias unfolds and improvises upon the richness of a multiple African heritage of art.\n\nPLATE 134\n\nPLATE 135\n\nAs the special history of Abdias and his Afro-Brazilian forebears indicates, slaves shipped from ports filled with captives from inland Mande-influenced areas certainly must have included weavers who would have remembered their craft in captivity. Indeed, there is another notice of a West African narrow loom having been set up in the Americas, in a black maroon village in French Guiana in 1748. The village was located in forested territory west of Cayenne near the so-called Lead Mountain, where:\n\n... the women spin cotton when the weather is bad and work in the fields in good weather.... Couachy, Augustin, and Bayou weave cotton cloth, which serves to make skirts for the women and loincloths for the men... this cotton material is woven piece by piece and then assembled and decorated with Siamese cotton thread.\n\nThere must have been similar memories of West African multistrip cloth among black runaways of neighboring Suriname, for in 1823 Ferdinand Denis describes and illustrates (Plate 136) an article of dress, given as Carib: \"Men cover what modesty demands with a _camiza_ , or loin-cloth made from a strip of cotton.\" The illustration of this loincloth reveals a telltale multistrip style. Not only that, but two patterned narrow strips are separated by a single band of continuously unpatterned cloth in a manner that points back to early Asante cloths of the nineteenth century (Plate 137), when weavers were working under Mande influences radiating from Kong and from Bonduku, northwest of the Akan and north of Cap Lahou, whence sailed to Suriname 50 percent of a sample of Dutch slaving ships.\n\nPLATE 136\n\nPLATE 137\n\nPLATE 138\n\nBut then there is a mysterious gap, between the multistrip loincloth of 1823 and the splendid multistrip capes, variously called by runaways _as\u00e9esenti_ or _as\u00e9esente_ , that apparently did not emerge among the inland Saamaka maroons until the early decades of this century (Plate 138). Slightly earlier, multistrip cloths called _as\u00e9esenti_ , made by the Djuka maroons of eastern Suriname, brought the tradition closer to its putative early-nineteenth-century roots in whatever area the Carib bought the multistrip loincloth Denis illustrates (for Native Americans of Suriname themselves in general make and prefer solid red loincloths). In addition, the Djuka have elaborated a vernacular terminology for aesthetic assessment of multistrip cloths that betrays full consciousness of its metric play. Thus some Djuka distinguish between _dobi sten_ (\"double voice\") patterned strips and _stiipi_ (literally, \"single stripe\") continuously unpatterned strips in _as\u00e9esenti_ elaboration. \"If one adds one _dobi-sten_ in the middle of two unpatterned strips it's beautiful,\" said Ma Apina of Dii Tabiki, capital of the Djuka, in December 1981. She added:\n\nWhen Djuka paint something, the colors must clash [ _kengi_ , literally, \"argue\"], and where you stop, there must be another color not looking like the one you end with but far away from it [in color].\n\nThis particular prizing of elements in contrastive alternation recalls the consciously clashed elements of the Weichmann robe of the early seventeenth century, as well as early, Mande-influenced Akan cotton multistrip cloths of the nineteenth century (Plate 137).\n\nAn art history of Suriname that considers the visual traditions of the plantation blacks of the coast and those of the inland maroons as an artistic continuum may well find links between Saamaka _as\u00e9esente_ of the twentieth century (Plate 138), Djuka _as\u00e9esenti_ of the late nineteenth century, and coastal black patchwork textiles ( _mamio_ ) of even earlier facture. _Mamio_ , \"different pieces of cloth sewn together\" (Plate 139), is likely to be a link between West Africa and the inland maroons. It crosscuts both sub-Saharan phrasing and Western quilt-making patterns. The latter connection would explain why some examples of Saamaka multistrip cloth look like Afro-American quilt-tops and vice versa without invoking a mysterious collective black consciousness. Both in coastal patchwork, a coastal costume called _a meki sanni_ , \"she makes the moves\" (Plate 140), and in maroon multistrip textiles, we find color-clashing, alternation of patterned and unpatterned strips, and staggered accents. These are abiding traits in the Mande textile world but were recombined differently in Suriname, resulting in the evolution of new styles that reached their culmination in Djuka and Saamaka multistrip expressions of the early twentieth century (Plate 141).\n\nPLATE 139\n\nThe traits that announce an African quotient in Suriname are also present in U.S. black quilt-top making. William Well Brown's My _Southern Home_ documents a period immediately after 1865 at Huntsville, in northern Alabama, where a black-assembled \"queer-looking garment made of pieces of old army blankets\" was observed. Random elements of size, siting, and accent may well have accounted for the strangeness of this multipiece garment to Western eyes. What is certain is that an Africanizing (Mande-izing?) wool blanket was fashioned around 1890 by Luiza Combs of Hazard, Kentucky. Her blanket provides a missing link between the rhythmized cloths of the western Sudan and the similarly vitalized quilt-tops of black North America. Kenneth Combs, the late quilt-maker's grandson, told me in 1980: \"My uncle told me Luiza was born in Guinea... and that she made other such blankets but they are lost.\" The stripes of this two-strip blanket are deliberately staggered in relation to one another (Plate 142). Luiza Combs would have been ten years old in 1863, when presumably she came as a child from \"Guinea.\" There are two-strip cloths among the Tukulor and similarly deliberately skewed striping systems among the Bamana, suggesting the possibility of direct crossover from these western Mande-related areas to Kentucky, but only time and future research can confirm this.\n\nPLATE 140\n\nPLATE 141\n\nDominic Parisi in the summer of 1979 traveled to Hazard, Kentucky, the town where Luiza Combs worked, and interviewed Margaret Adams, a black quilt-maker. What she told him confirmed an abiding taste, in the assembling of cloth strips, for separation by color contrast, a rationale cognate with the Suriname maroon notion of seeking colors that \"fall\" (clash) well in combination, of seeking energy and vitality in juxtaposing _dobi sten_ and _siteepi_ , strips patterned and strips nonpatterned, in the making of Djuka as\u00e9esenti: You don't want no two reds together, no two blues together. Try to get those colors separated.\n\nPLATE 142\n\nPLATE 143\n\nRandomizing sitings of Western-design blocks (\"nine-patch\" and so forth) in the work of black quilt-makers like Lucinda Toomer of Dawson, Georgia, or Amanda Gordon of Vicksburg, Mississippi (Plate 143), suggest a trace of Mande visual influence. But only a trace. Aspects Anglo-Saxon and other African forces have complicated these splendid textiles. They gleam at the center of the traditional Afro-American home (Plate 144), as illustrated by a photograph by Maud Wahlman of the bedroom of Susie Ponds, a quilt-maker of Waverly, Alabama.\n\nOne final question demands an answer: Why the frequent, seemingly imperative suspension of expected patterning? In the British West Indies patchwork dress keeps the _jumbie_ , a spirit, away from a resting place. In Haiti a man procures from a ritual expert, when necessary, a special shirt made of strips of red, white, and blue to break up the power of the evil eye. Nelly Bragg, an old black woman of Warrensville Heights, Ohio, was asked \"Why one red sock and one white sock worn deliberately mismatched?\" to which she replied, \"To keep spirits away.\" For similar reasons, traditional Afro-American cabins once were wall-papered with deliberately jumbled bits of newsprint and crowded squares of magazine illustration. In Senegambia it was important to randomize the flow of paths, since \"evil travels in straight lines.\" And the Mande themselves coded, in discretionary irregularities of design, visual analogues to danger, matters too serious to impart directly. Not all textiles blazing with interrupted patterning communicate such symbolism across the Mande Atlantic world. Nevertheless, those pilgrims of the Mande concept of _fadenya_ (individuality, with all its attendant dangers)\u2014hunters and warriors, heroic wearers of off-beat textiles\u2014continue to venture into disordered regions, mirroring them, deflecting them with their dress, and come back, as Mary Douglas has memorably phrased a parallel accomplishment, \"with a power not available to those who have stayed in the control of... society.\" The double play of Mande influences, _individuality and self-protection_ \u2014suggested by the rhythmized, pattern-breaking textile modes, and the _group affiliation_ mediated by communal rounds of cone-on-cylinder houses\u2014completes a history of resistance to the closures of the Western technocratic way.\n\nPLATE 144\n\n# Five\n\n# **EMBLEMS  \nOF PROWESS**\n\n# **Ejagham Art and  \nWriting in Two  \nWorlds**\n\nThe ideographs of the Ejagham people of southwestern Cameroon and southeastern Nigeria explode the myth of Africa as a continent without a tradition of writing. The Ejagham developed a unique form of ideographic writing, signs representing ideas and called _nsibidi_ , signs embodying many powers, including the essence of all that is valiant, just, and ordered.\n\nNumerous Ejagham women and men in traditional institutions\u2014\"the whole country is honeycombed with secret societies,\" an English explorer observed early in the twentieth century\u2014wear ritual dress and make gestures strongly influenced by the patterns of _nsibidi_ , extending the reach and complexity of Ejagham traditional writing. Titled elders in major institutions (Nnimm, Eja, Ngbe) establish power or prestige by mastering arcane signs of sacred presence and recollection, luminous ciphers of the founding rulers and most important women. The force of _nsibidi_ is a mystery. Some traditional Ejagham continue to regard this mystery as rationale governing their lives and labor.\n\n_Nsibidi_ , in the Ejagham language, means roughly \"cruel letters.\" _Sibidi_ means \"cruel\" in classical Ejagham, according to Peter Eno of Mamfe, Cameroon, an authority on the art and language of his people. P. Amaury Talbot, an English author, discovered while traveling through Ejagham country that _sibi_ meant \"bloodthirsty.\" Consider _nsibidi_ writing, then, as justifiable terror in the service of law and government. As might be expected, the traditional executioner society\u2014men who killed convicted murderers or launched peremptory strikes against outside enemies\u2014was called the Nsibidi Society.\n\nFew see the richest and most awesome of the signs of the _nsibidi_ corpus, the intricate diagrams drawn upon the ground to control a crisis or honor the funeral of a very important person. As Peter Eno remarks: \" _Nsibidi_ signs represent the heart, the very depth of our ancient Ejagham societies, showing the last stage, the final rites, and only the core of the members can come out to view such signs.\" Ejagham ideographic writing both exalts the power of privileged persons and points to a universe of aesthetic and intellectual potentiality. Poetic play and stylized valor, artistic battles of mime and \"action writing\" enliven, with pleasure and improvisation, the dark dimensions of _nsibidi_.\n\n_Nsibidi_ do not derive from Western writing systems. There are no Arabic or Latin letters in the script. It is wholly African. The invocation of divine beginnings occasions the writing of certain of the most important signs, even as does the centering of power upon a seat of final justice. The moral and civilizing impact of _nsibidi_ betrays the ethnocentrism of an ideology that would exclude ideographic forms from consideration in the history of literacy. Educated Western persons continue to assume that black traditional Africa was culturally impoverished because it lacked letters to record its central myths, ideals, and aspirations. Yet the Ejagham and Ejagham-influenced blacks who elaborated a creole offshoot of _nsibidi_ in Cuba have proven otherwise.\n\nEjagham and Ejagham-influenced captives arrived in western Cuba primarily during the first four decades of the nineteenth century, as a result of the immense rise in sugar cultivation in that portion of the island. The slaves included members of the all-important male \"leopard society,\" called Ngbe in Ejagham. These men founded their own \"society,\" promulgating Ngbe values of nobility and government and remembering the master metaphor of masculine accomplishment, the leopard, who moves with perfect elegance and strength. Ngbe in Cuba was known by the creole name, Abaku\u00e1, after Abakpa, a term by which the Ejagham of Calabar are designated.\n\n_Nsibidi_ signs emerged in Cuba no later than 1839, when the archives of the police of Havana received confiscated papers from a black man's raided premises, papers emblazoned with Ejagham-influenced ideographs, signatures of high-ranking Abaku\u00e1 priests. The sacred signs and signatures of Cuban Abaku\u00e1 are chiefly called _anaforuana_ , among other names. More than five hundred signs have emerged among the blacks of the traditional barrios of six cities in western Cuba: Marianao, Havana, Guanabacoa, Regla, C\u00e1rdenas, and Matanzas. Most of these ideographs are hypnotic variants of a leitmotif of mystic vision: four eyes, two worlds, God the Father\u2014the fish, the king\u2014and the Efut princess who in death became his bride. These signs are written and rewritten with mantraic power and pulsation. Mediatory forces, the sacred signs of the _anaforuana_ corpus, indicate a realm beyond ordinary discourse. They are calligraphic gestures of erudition and black grandeur, spiritual presences traced in yellow or white chalk (yellow for life, white for death) on the ground of inner patios or on the floor of sacred rooms, bringing back the spirit of departed ancestors, describing the proprieties of initiation and funereal leave-taking.\n\n## **Nnimm and Sik\u00e1n**\n\nAt the core of the Ejagham artistic phenomenon we find men and women involved in continuous, intensely spirited, brilliant play. The propelling force of the culture\u2014hidden by some of the densest forests in West Africa\u2014is a conscious choice to create objects and sequences of human motion through the playful application of vision and intelligence. In all the arts and rituals the Ejagham play for the sake of formal excellence, transcending, like the Greeks, their material existence through acts of aesthetic intensity and perfection. Their culture naturally made them the envy of neighboring civilizations\u2014the people of Efut, Ibibio, Igbo, and Banyang territory, who eagerly borrowed the artistic fire of the Ejagham.\n\nAlthough traditionally engaged in the clearing of forests for cultivation and other hard work (e.g., digging yam heaps), many Ejagham men left most farm tasks to women or hired laborers. And even their minimal cultivating duties were performed by peer groups, whose members urged one another on with songs and rhythms. The Ejagham male was essentially an artist, a hunter, and a warrior. The beauty of his life was that these roles were for the most part sportive. Wars were few and far between. The Ejagham male could therefore concentrate on what were for him real, important matters: the pursuit of excellence in the making of string-net costumes, body-painting, poetry, mime, and processioneering. He devised new dances or entire dramas and sold them with their appropriate emblems to less talented neighboring civilizations.\n\nBut it was the Ejagham female who was traditionally considered the original bearer of civilizing gifts. Ejagham women also engaged in plays and artistic matters. Their \"fatting-houses\" ( _nkim_ ) were centers for the arts, where women were taught, by tutors of their own sex, body-painting, coiffure, singing, dancing, ordinary and ceremonial cooking, and, especially, the art of _nsibidi_ writing in several media, including pyrogravure and appliqu\u00e9.\n\nIt could be argued that the more Ejagham women, like their men, devoted themselves to creative consciousness and \u00e9lan, the more they liberated themselves from subservience and came into their own. Talbot, in his classic study of early-twentieth-century Ejagham, _In the Shadow of the Bush_ , extolled Ejagham women's \"mastery of outline... far beyond the average to be expected from Europeans.\" In fact, the high quality of Ejagham and Ejagham-influenced women's arts had caught the eye of European observers such as T. J. Hutchinson, who remarked that \"the women of Old Calabar are not only the surgical operators, but are also artists in other matters. Carving hieroglyphs on large dish calabashes and on the seats of stools; painting figures of poeticized animals on the walls of the houses....\"\n\nTheir ultimate triumph was the spreading of the Ejagham \"fatting-house\" tradition among the women of Ibibio and Efik country, where Ejagham arts of feminine elegance and power were taught to women of other Cross River cultures. Efik women, in particular, were fiercely proud of what they borrowed from the Ejagham. Thus Madame Grace Davis, an Efik woman of Calabar, has said:\n\nIt used to be thought that the girls just went into the fatting-house to get fat and idle away their time. This is nonsense. Actually, during the time of their seclusion they were given serious instruction in dancing, comb-making, care of children, embroidery, and many other things, including how to make symbolic appliqu\u00e9d cloths [ _mbufari_.] That is how our Calabar appliqu\u00e9 cloths came into existence.\n\nThe gift of an appliqu\u00e9d _mbufari_ cloth with _nsibidi_ patterns reflected \"cool\" norms, knowing how to make presents judiciously and with style. Artistically underscored acts of generosity in Calabar included acts of honorific submission or service, as in the Efik phrasing \"shows obedience to the person\" _(suk ibuut no enye)_ , which literally means \"cool one's head in relation to a person.\" The women of Calabar continue to give presents on multiple levels of ideographic meaning, for example, by carefully aligning bottles of gin and lager and other refreshments in a brass tray _(akpankpan)_ , itself chased with floral patterning made by women, patterns that in the nineteenth century were richly intermixed with _nsibidi_ signs. The bottles in the tray are covered over with the bannerlike _mbufari_ cloth, bearing appliqu\u00e9d symbols of benison and honor. This orchestrated act of stylized giving\u2013tray, gin, appliqu\u00e9d cloth covering\u2014can be mounted on a traditional stool richly carved with symbolic figuration (Plate 145).\n\nPLATE 145\n\nPLATE 146\n\n_Mbufari nsibidi_ patterning reflects the status of the woman who devises it and the status of her husband. Her proper training and individual wit are both implied in the careful use of symbolic color\u2014with white, for example, standing for \"peace\" or \"stability of relationship\"; red equaling \"success in bringing children into the world,\" a \"sign of life\"; green meaning \"plants,\" \"good harvest\"; gold, \"the light of the sun, the feeling of contentment\"; and blue, \"water... in case your husband hopes to be a fisherman.\" A woman's depth of accomplishment is evidenced by a detail of an _mbufari_ cloth attributed to the grandmother of Mma Eme Abasi Effiom of Calabar, a piece of textile provisionally dated c. 1938 (Plate 146). This cloth communicates a vision of water by means of a chain-motif border in blue. Repeated floral patterns, in red and gold, evoke simultaneous visions of children and contentment.\n\nThe brilliant honorific modes of symbolizing ideas with pieces of cloth (as adapted by Efik and Efut women in Calabar) inform Ejagham wall paintings among the remote forest villages of the Ekwe clan. The wife of Amaury Talbot sketched a mural on an important house at Nfunum, between Lake Ejagham and Ndebiji, just inside what is now western Cameroon:\n\nThe painting is emblazoned with a scalloped border at the top, casting the composition in a watery mode, consonant with important Ejagham myths about the origins of the male and female societies, Ngbe and Nnimm, within the river. Petaled, leafy elements, pulsing like starfish under clear transparent water, add, like _mbufari_ green, notes of power and abundance, thus enhancing and exalting the checked (signifying leopard pelt) and feline symbols of sovereignty and government.\n\nEjagham women with the prestige of membership in the Nnimm Society had even greater occasion to exercise their sharp aesthetic faculties. A woman entered Nnimm as a young girl, before marriage. Partaking of powers mystic and political, she became a leader among women. Nnimm women, in full regalia, were virtual walking charms, laden with material allusions to forces in the skies and in the depths of streams and rivers. Their ritual dress was rich and sumptuous; their body-painting sure and cursive, not unlike the calligraphy of the southern Sung of China.\n\nThe same petaled elegance of line that danced across the walls of the \"treasure house\" at Nfunum here achieves equipoise upon the initiate's brow and cheeks. Glints of forest power, signaled by a feline silhouette and a long-tailed leopard at Nfunum, are materially suggested by the myriad shells and calabash containers making up the bristling initiate's dress. A crown of feathers adorns the head of the Nnimm woman. Monkey bones project starkly and enigmatically from the sides of her impressive coiffure. Concentric necklaces, bound in leather, go about her neck and rest upon her shoulders. Finally a cowrie-fringed wrapper of palm fiber, dyed crimson, completes her costume (Plate 147).\n\nMost important was the single descending bowlike feather emerging from the back of the initiate's head. This was the Nnimm feather. It specially identified the Nnimm woman, marking her as different from ordinary persons. The first Nnimm woman, so it is believed in Ejagham, came down from heaven with this special feather in her hair. Nnimm women moved, as the forest moves, as the sea moves, in a swaying, chiming mass of fibers, bones, and shells. Beyond use, beyond disruption, the image of the Nnimm woman was a multitextured manifestation of potentialities, resisting the pigeonholing of women as purely instruments of labor. Fear of what these women had intuited and stored within their objects provided checks against injustices that might have been committed against them by men or other women.\n\nPLATE 147\n\nPLATE 148\n\nPLATE 149\n\nIn Ejagham country, women maskers wear an impressive plumed headdress called \"calabash-head\" _(echi okpere)_. The flashing twinned light of mirrors can be added to such structures, warding off all evil. Stately plumes, dyed blood-red, rise like feathered sentinels. The plumes can stand for titled women within the Nnimm Society (Plate 149).\n\n_Aban_ dancer with \"hoop-skirt\" _(nkpin)_ , feathered headdress, and beaded panoply. After Kenneth C. Murray, 1939.\n\nLike the bristling \"medicines\" that adorn the Nnimm initiate's body, the calabash-head headdress is characterized by a dazzling recombination of elements: blood-red standing plumes, red and white strands of cotton, diamond-form devices dyed forest- or harvest-green, and miniature versions of the Nnimm feather appearing at the summit of the plumes.\n\nThe structure of these plumes is special to the Ejagham, hence unmistakable when they reemerge in Cuba to attain full and lasting value. Nnimm as an institution did not survive the shock of the Middle Passage. But the whole point of Ngbe ceremonial was to honor, in part, the mother of the sounding leopard, Ebong\u00f3, who in Cuba was replaced by another female figure, Sik\u00e1n. And wherever Ebongo or her Cuban counterpart appeared, we very often find Nnimm-like plumes and decorations. Afro-Cubans, in fact, assume that Sik\u00e1n belonged to some powerful \"matriarchal\" society (i.e., Nnimm) and that women knew the secrets of Ngbe, its rites and writings, before men did.\n\nThus the theme of silence and femininity recurs in the iconographies of Ngbe and Abaku\u00e1. Feather symbolism, connoting silence for instance, informs Ngbe and Abaku\u00e1 sacred musical instrumentation. Ngbe mourners display \"drums of silence,\" short cylindrical, wedge-tuned drums to whose sides plumes are attached. The skin of such drums can be shaded half white, half black to form _nsibidi mboko_ , sign of the messenger of death, or, quartered by two intersecting lines, forming _nsibidi nkanda_ , sign of the \"crown\" of the seven or more Ngbe grades or branches:\n\nThe \"speech\" of Ejagham drums of silence arises from the signs chalked upon their skin and from their special plumes, with the eloquence of prestige and spiritual presence. Such drums, with their plumes, came to Cuba. We meet them in Abaku\u00e1 funerals and initiations, as the _Sese_ drum. \" _Sese_ ,\" said a black Cuban priest of Abaku\u00e1, \"is not a drum as the whites understand such instruments.\" It is an instrument of display, not for use, an instrument of significant silence, not reverberation. It is material writing, to be read, not heard (Plate 150).\n\nPLATE 150\n\nA feather seals a dancer's lips with a sign of silence in Calabar. The addition of wooden shafts wrapped with feathers to Abaku\u00e1 drums similarly transforms them into silent, honorific presences. Abaku\u00e1 consider _Sese_ an incarnation of Sik\u00e1n, a powerful female spirit at the heart of their society. And this belief deepens the continuity of the meaning of the plumes, silence and nobility, and their Nnimm-like bearing. Abaku\u00e1 state explicitly that _Sese_ represents the head of Sik\u00e1n. The drum is an abstract mask, with plumes like _echi okpere_ , representing important personages, and a triangular sign, the signature of the priest called Isu\u00e9, who alone has the right to hold this silently sounding instrument. And thus the plumed and feathered glory of Nnimm-like presence comes alive in Cuba, as documented by a drawing of a _Sese_ drum rendered by an Abaku\u00e1 member and published in 1954 (Plate 150). Tassels and volutes frame this Ejaghamizing vision; they cryptically allude to the first letter of Sik\u00e1n's name, thus complicating one form of writing with another.\n\nPLATE 151\n\nThe standing plumes of Nnimm\/Sik\u00e1n, ciphers of a circle of departed dignitaries, reemerge in a ritual mask representing Sik\u00e1n, great princess of the Efut, a civilization just to the south of the Ejagham (Plate 151). Saibeke, titled priest of Abaku\u00e1, made this mask in the Havana area, according to Lydia Cabrera, between c. 1925 and 1954. It was inadvertently destroyed in 1961. The illustrated photograph, taken by Pierre Verger in 1957, therefore reflects a vanished monument of Afro-Cuban art. The mask is called _Akuaramina_ , creolized Efik for \"Great Spirit.\" The curve of the great tassel-covered calabash with bristling plumes for Nnimm in Ejagham (Plate 149) remains in place but, here, is \"signed\" with ideographs of the priest Isu\u00e9, carefully painted at each cardinal point. Instead of honorific tassels and colors symbolizing richness of achievement and initiation, the curve of the calabash leads directly to an ingeniously constructed Janus mask, one visage staring into the future, the other at the past, symbolizing clairvoyance and presence in two worlds. This mask, honoring a great woman and her power, brings the noble plumes of Nnimm, towering and magnificent, to the world of Afro-Cuban art.\n\nEjagham believe that Nnimm women were privy to ancient secrets first given by\u2014or seized from\u2014beings in the river or the sea. They say that Nnimm is at least as old as Eja, a venerable war society concerned with \"subduing enemies and evil.\" And Eja, we know from a European document, was in existence at Calabar on the coast west of the Efut, south of the heartland of the Ejagham, in 1668. Some Ejagham aver that the Nnimm Society actually derived its powers from the waters of the Ndian River, flowing through northern Efut territory, a little-known Bantu civilization east of the Calabar and south of the Ejagham. The Efut adapted, disseminated and very richly rephrased Ejagham art and culture to the point where Efut lodges of the leopard society carried more prestige and were the costliest to join c. 1877\u201378.\n\nIt was an Efut man from Usaha-Edet, an important cluster of three Efut villages along the creeks of northern Efut, who sold the secrets of the Ngbe Society to the Efik of Calabar c. 1750. The Efik adopted the Ngbe Society and renamed it after their own word for leopard, _ekpe_. The Efik found in Ekpe (Ngbe) a source of secret vengeance and moral circumspection, an ultimate mysterious authority, rumbling \"like the belly of a guilty man\" behind a curtain in the Ngbe hall. In the name of this Voice, laws were made or canceled, debtors forced to pay, and European arrogance defied.\n\nPLATE 152\n\nA new source of authority and moral insight had entered the world of Calabar precisely when the area was heating up under the impact of the growing slave trade in the late eighteenth century. Ekpe (Ngbe) permeated the southern regions of the Cross River partly through the natural consequence of the influence and power and prestige of Calabar. And the Efut of Usaha-Edet, the link to all that was beautiful and morally impressive in Ngbe, was the tutor of Calabar. Usaha-Edet, one of whose citizens sold Ngbe to Calabar, has taken on among some Afro-Cubans the status of a holy city. Usaga\u00e9, as the latter call Usaha-Edet in creole Abaku\u00e1 idiom, is sacred because there, so it is believed in Cuba, the first secrets of God were revealed by the banks of the Ndian creek (Abaku\u00e1: Od\u00e1n, imaginatively further creolized by Christian Abaku\u00e1 as the river Jordan).\n\nAccording to Afro-Cuban informants, the origins of Ngbe are as follows:\n\nTanze was an ancient king of the Ejagham. A long, long time ago, when the king died, his spirit became a fish, which a woman captured, discovering thus in the river the fortune of the kings of Ejagham. And a man came and took this power away from her, killed this woman, and set up the religion [of the leopard society]. Lord Tanze was a departed king who entered the body of a fish and then became the body of female drum ( _Tanze so mismo rey viejo Ekoi. Ne mur\u00ed jaya tiempo, tiempo ante, y p\u00edritu di e bob\u00e9 pecao que mu\u00e9 coge, ne contr\u00e1 lo r\u00edo la suete lo rei ekoi, y var\u00f3n quit\u00e1 neye, mata mu\u00e9, pa pon\u00e9 un religi\u00f3n. Obon Tanze e rey mueto que entr\u00e1 pecao y pas\u00e1 bong\u00f3_ ).\n\nHere is a different version of the same myth:\n\nEfut were the people chosen by God to receive the Secret, there, near Efut Ekond\u00f3, the right-hand side of the Efut monarch's territory, opposite the left-hand territory, Efut Abua, in northern Efut in the region of Usaha-Edet, south of Ibunda.\n\nThere lived a princess named Sik\u00e1n, daughter of the lord of Northern Efut, Mokuire. Every day she went to fetch clear water from the Ndian from a large calabash left overnight within a hollow underneath a towering palm tree standing sentinel upon the riverbank.\n\nOn the fateful morning that she met her destiny, she took water from the river in this manner and placed the calabash-container on her head. She had not gone several paces when she felt something moving in the water in the vessel balanced on her head. A roar like thunder sounded in the water carried on her head. Sik\u00e1n Sina Yantan did not suspect that at that very moment her head had already become sacred by contact with the presence of The Almighty, nor that she, a woman, was carrying salvation to the people of Efut.\n\nThe spirit Sik\u00e1n had captured for her people was a fish who had been king, who some say was God himself. Afro-Cubans know this fish by the name Tanze, which, provisionally at least, seems a creolizing combination of the Efut word for \"lord\" or \"father,\" _Ta_ , with the standard Ejagham for \"fish\" _(nsi)_. As a lord or king, Tanze by definition had his leopard spirit, his leopard double, who leaped when he was in danger, carrying him beyond, making him athletically and milit\u00e1rily invincible. The creolized praise names of Tanze that have come down to us from ancient Efut via western Cuba make these powers plain:\n\nFish of the river\n\nFish of the sea\n\nSacred sounding Voice\n\nExcellent beyond all measure\n\nArriving grandeur,\n\nWho melts into a leopard's body\n\nWho melts into a leopard's body\n\nForce for whom our old diviners yearned\n\nEyes in the water, yellow eyes of life.\n\nAccording to another Afro-Cuban informant:\n\nThe sacred fish lived for a while in its calabash container and then it died. A grand Efut priest, Nasak\u00f3, began the rites to recapture its spirit within a sacred object in which its mighty voice could sound again. Nasak\u00f3 removed the skin from the body of the fish. Later, in his sanctuary, he traced the first symbol of the leopard society upon the skin of the fish... the symbol of renaissance and immortality.\n\nOver the skin of Tanze, Nasak\u00f3 initiated the seven sons of Ngbe, the founding persons. These represented the seven clans of Efut. These seven chiefs, born in the beginning, included titles which have come down to us in the Ngbe hierarchy, such as it was elaborated among Efut: Mokongo, Ekue \u00f3n, Isu\u00e9, Mpeg\u00f3, Iyamba, and Nr\u012bkamo. Their souls are present today in the seven plumes (of the Abaku\u00e1 lodge).\n\n... Nasak\u00f3 then began to build a sacred object for the spirit of Tanze, a base in which his Voice could again resound. He covered, with Tanze's sacred skin, the mouth of the calabash in which the Fish had lived.... But this skin-covered calabash gave back the Voice of Tanze weakly. It was but a shadow of his Voice. Nasak\u00f3's divining-instrument, _ma_  _ongo pabio_ , then spoke, saying it was imperative to bring the instrument to stronger life with Sik\u00e1n's blood. And Nasak\u00f3 then ordered Sik\u00e1n's sacrifice.\n\nBy mere contact with the presence of the Voice, Sik\u00e1n became in essence the bride of God. Hence the death of the fish predestined her demise, and she was sacrificed so that her blood, combined with his, might bring back his spirit to the secret sounding instrument. Nasak\u00f3 summoned her spirit after sacrifice by attaching her skin to the instrument even as he summoned Tanze's spirit by these means. And it came to pass that through this orchestrated union, skin on skin on wood and other media, male and female valences fused within a single object and Tanze's mighty voice\u2014\"the fish that thunders like a bull\"\u2014returned. The accomplished miracle assured the moral continuity of the Ejagham and the Efut and, centuries later, the Abaku\u00e1.\n\nThenceforth the elders could devise laws and sanction them by referring to the living roar of the Voice, the Lord, the Leopard, the Mystic Fish, sounding behind a curtain in the Ngbe hall. The site of the roar became a court of last appeal. The Voice was the moral terror that forced an erring person to mend his ways, that commanded hardened criminals or murderers to be killed, that announced a reported incidence of adultery or some other crime against the well-being of the town. Tanze, within the council hall, became the source of certainty.\n\nBut the crucial role of women in Cross River culture is emphasized by the fact that even today, among the Ejagham of Calabar, when a king dies, his leopard spirit is said to flee into the forest, and cannot be persuaded to return to proper government to start anew, until mystic chains are cast to ensnare him and an elderly woman with a rooster held aloft stands before the leopard-society house and calls out the names of the great ancestors, one by one. Only a woman can call the leopard spirit back because, so it is believed, the leopard society was first a women's society.\n\n## **_Nsibidi and Anaforuana_**\n\nThe late king of Oban in southern Ejagham told me in the summer of 1978 that _nsibidi_ emerged in the dreams of certain men who thus received its secrets and later \"presented it outside.\" That was version one. And then he told me version two: \"How nsibidi started: _mermaids_ showed us how to write nsibidi\" _(nga nsibidi adohe\u2014aku nat\u00f3ngena wud nsibidi)_. A vision of writing emerging from the places where bells and gongs echo beneath the water, when Ngbe is being played upon the land, prepares us for the resonances of this indigenously African form of script. For _nsibidi_ is more to be aesthetically played and displayed, in valiant jousting contests of erudition, than to be written and understood in any strict or linear Western way.\n\nThe power to notate most important happenings with emblems and ideographs and the confidence that comes from contact with and descent from the secret noble source, the lord Tanze within the instrument, inspired the establishment and continuity of Ngbe in Efut and creolized Ngbe (Abaku\u00e1) in Cuba.\n\n_Nsibidi_ symbolize ideas on several levels of discourse. First, there were signs most people knew, regardless of initiation or of rank in the Ngbe Society, signs representing human relationships, communication, and household objects (which themselves were in some instances used as material-ideographs):\n\nlove, unity, comparability:\n\nhatred, disunity, divorce:\n\nword, speech meeting, congress:\n\nmirror, looking-glass:\n\ntable set for drink and meat:\n\ntrek, journey, voyaging, tracks:\n\nAfro-Cuban men, who were able to scale down ceremonial drums to equivalent objects only inches high when occasions for dissembling their religion through miniaturization arose, were indeed the spiritual descendants of men and women who could conjure love within enlacements, separate and drive a wedge between curves to indicate divorce or hate, and let a simple small cross, symbolizing the intersection of two points of view, multiply, in intensity of exposition, until it came to designate a congress or a full-scale meeting. As the signs proliferated in all their variations, they came to resemble a vast musical score.\n\nSecondly, there were serious signs of danger and extremity, the \"dark signs,\" and these were often literally shaded:\n\nShaded signs designated danger, even as drums of silence announcing the death of an important Ngbe member were shaded half black and half white, both to speak of the pain caused by the departure of a family member and to prepare the path to assuagement: black stood for river mud or death, and the white stood for water or freshness and vitality, according to the proverb \"Where there is mud, there must be water.\" Thus the usage of _nsibidi_ musically counterpoints visual and verbal arts.\n\nThe syntax of _nsibidi_ signs also recalls some of the pleasures of music: repetition, call and response, and correspondence. Ritual fans bearing pyrograved _nsibidi_ illustrate the point\u2014fans called _effrigi_ , used in traditional villages in contexts involving initiation. One example, acquired by the Industrial Museum of Scotland in 1859, bears a border filled with patterning said to represent inconstant love. These signs of separated curves, almost always diagnostic of some sort of deeper separation, surround an amazing buzz of different signs, neatly rendered with the heated end of a metal stylus. Another, later example, showing fewer signs, was collected by the Nigerian Museum in Lagos in 1950 (Plate 152).\n\nPLATE 153\n\nThe concepts represented by this fan are not spelled out in treatise form but rendered through repetition, through \"visual music.\" There are twinned signs of social disintegration, harlotry, leg irons or punishment, trouble or speech upon the crossroads; young men gossiping on the council log; high levels of convocation. Emblems of speech are thus countered by ciphers of parlousness and interspersed with signs of trouble and predicament, an implied warning to those who talk idly, to those unaware of the consequences of unprincipled discourse and disputation.\n\nThus far our examples have been purely Ejagham, but the men and women of Usaha-Edet among Efut, and Bende among Igbo, and Ekeya among Okobo Ibibio were renowned for excellence in the arts of Ngbe and the writing of _nsibidi_. Here we consider _nsibidi_ as a women's art, a \"fatting-house\" accomplishment par excellence. The illustrated work is a calabash tray (Plate 153) from Ekeya, made in this century before 1938, on the right bank of the Cross above Oron. Here the _nsibidi_ \u2014stars of love, shaded triangles suggesting power and danger within the leopard society, spirals of motion, and checked patterns restating once again Ngbe grandeur\u2014revolve around the core of the calabash in a playful, vital manner. Leaflike cartouches enclose each sign. These are connected to one another by means of stems or leafy points.\n\nFinally, there were important _nsibidi_ signs of rank and ritual among the higher branches of Ngbe, Nnimm, and other societies. Ngbe houses, for example, pridefully unfurled great cotton cloths with blue and white tie-dyed blazons in _nsibidi_ script. These were the great _ukara ngbe_ cloths, privileged textiles of prestigious houses having the coveted Nkanda branch. In recent years a full spectrum of color has been added to indicate the richness of mind and elaboration represented by the Nkanda branch. A sign circumscribing radial accents could similarly indicate complexity of initiation among the Ngbe members of the Bende Igbo, who call such signs _Ns\u00edbiri_ , meaning \"you all around, you have all the secrets.\"\n\nWomen had their secrets too, knowledge of supernatural underwater transformations, lore about fish that were really leopards, leopards that were really kings, and many other forces. They slyly interposed some of these \"heavy,\" awesome images in the decoration of outwardly secular objects\u2014calabashes, stools, and trays\u2014confident that only the deeply initiated would catch the glint of power veiled by decoration. For example, a chased brass tray _(ekpankpan)_ from Old Calabar now in the Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries (1894.58d) shows two checked \"leopard\" fish beside a \"mermaid\" with a chewing stick. (The \"checkerboard\" motif is an ancient Ejagham symbol of the leopard.)\n\nIn sum, the formal world of _nsibidi_ writing was glorious and vast. It encompassed signs of love and domestic household objects and human communication, signs that the people knew and used. It encompassed shaded signs of moral terror and punishment, shaded signs of danger and extremity. And finally it encompassed complex signs and signatures of the most privileged ranks of the Ejagham societies, particularly Nnimm and Ngbe. To attain high rank was to view at last impressive calligraphs rendered on the floor of inner rooms or upon the earth in secret forest groves. Public signs, shaded emblems of terror and moral intimidation, and complex secret hierarchical signs of deepest initiation\u2014all were _nsibidi_.\n\nIn 1839, nineteen years before the British explorer Hutchinson noted the presence of women's \"hieroglyphics\" in Old Calabar, and nearly a century before a brief flurry of European articles on Nigerian _nsibidi_ appeared in print, a black dock worker named Margarito Blanco attempted to found an Abaku\u00e1 lodge in Havana. Blanco doubtless had been inspired by the success of the first lodge in Regla across the harbor from the Cuban capital some three years earlier. He had planned to take the title of Mokongo, keeper of Abaku\u00e1 justice, a title believed once held by the father of Sik\u00e1n himself, but the police of Havana arrested him before he could set up his lodge and charged him with \"conspiracy.\" They seized his papers. And thus the archives of the police of Havana came into possession of a precious scrap of paper on which Margarito Blanco had traced an early _nsibidi_ -derived sign in Cuba, a circle reported as being identical with the modern Mokongo sign, i.e., quartered and showing two pairs of staring eyes:\n\nAs the many branches of Ngbe were compacted into two in Cuba, the glory and specifications of power that make up Nkanda-branch symbolism in Calabar seem to have infused Abaku\u00e1 writing from its earliest documented instances. Margarito's sign of the Mokongo title strongly resembles the quartered-circle sign of Nkanda as well as the ancient Efut _nsipidi (nsibidi)_ of \"the child of Ngbe;\" _obonekpe_ and cognate Igbo expressions elsewhere in the _nsibidi_ -using universe:\n\nAfro-Cuban _anaforuana_ sign, the signature of the Mokongo title in Abaku\u00e1, Havana, 1839\n\n_Nsibidi_ Nkanda sign, drawn on drum of silence, Oban Ejagham, 1978\n\nAfro-Cuban _anaforuana_ , Mokongo signature, Havana, 1954\n\nAro Igbo (?) brass bangle with _nsibidi_ pattern, nineteenth century (?)\n\nEfut _nsipidi_ , child-of-Expe sign, Calabar area, 1951\n\nEfik _nsibidi_ , \"Nkanda calabash\" Calabar, c. 1925\n\n_Nsibidi_ pattern on skin of a drum collected at Akoa, Anyang area, Cameroon, 1908\n\nAnalogies to the structure of the Mokongo emblem can be found far and wide, and most have to do with the prestige of Nkanda, which a person of the rank of the father of Princess Sik\u00e1n, Mokongo, would certainly have belonged to, and with generalized Ngbe or Ngbe-related symbolism, such as signs collected among the Efut of Calabar and the Anyang of Akoa north of the upper Cross River facing the heartland of the ancient Ejagham.\n\nThe meanings that black Cubans attached to this sign show a richness of imagination and a celebration of the Ejagham sign-making tradition. They say the three plumes atop the circle stand for three settlements in Efut country, Usaha-Edet, Bekura, and Efut-nsun. The circles within the quartered area symbolize the eyes of Tanze and the eyes of Sik\u00e1n, and the fusion of their powers. Other informants in Cuba interpret this sign as symbolic of the primordial calabash in which the Voice was abstracted from the waters, echoing the plumed and quartered \"nkanda calabash\" _nsibidi_ collected in an unpublished study by Jeffreys in 1923. In sum, Margarito Blanco had taken one of the primordial signs of the _nsibidi_ corpus, a sign redolent with associations of prestige and celebration, and adapted it to symbolize a priestly title within the new creole Abaku\u00e1 Society.\n\nEarly _nsibidi_ -derived signs of Cuba had to do not only with priestly signatures but with the identification of entire towns. Thus, in 1882, _La Correspondencia de Cuba_ published the Abaku\u00e1 signature of the town of Regla, where the Abaku\u00e1 rites were born:\n\nThis illustrates the mirror-play of special quartered circles and intersecting arrows with shaded feathers. By this time in Afro-Cuban history, men of Calabar descent not only had devised heraldic devices in their own calligraphic script to signify the sugar towns of western Cuba but had also renamed them, in creolized Efut. Havana became Nunkwe Amanis\u00f3n Yorama. Matanzas was renamed Iti\u00e1 Fondaga. C\u00e1rdenas was called Iti\u00e1 Kanima Usere. There was also in existence in Cuba at this time the usage of the shaded _nsibidi_ of extremity and terror. There was a fabled nineteenth-century sign of \"war and blood\" _(guerra y sangre)_ which Abaku\u00e1 used when one lodge broke off relations with another and was about to fight. This war sign consisted of a quartered triangle with two heavily shaded feathered elements, very likely abstract shafts of war. The triangle also enclosed cross-patterns with small circles at their ends, plus an emphatically overdrawn or shaded cross in the lower right compartment.\n\nThere was another, very expressive, complex sign of \"war and blood\" that has come down to us from the \"days of the Spanish colony,\" i.e., the nineteenth century. The latter sign displays, again, a cross with small circles at each end. This special cross is superimposed on a small circle within a larger circle, the latter figure being shot through with arrows of war. Plumes at the top of the emblem suggest that the circles stand for a drum of honor, resting upon a four-sided stand, with the latter element itself sectioned into areas, many bearing additional signs:\n\nAbaku\u00e1 \"war and blood\" sign, Havana area, 1882.\n\n_Nsibidi_ of argument and poison overlapping Cuban sign\n\n\"two men have an argument every time they meet\"\n\n\"wound\"\n\n\"poisoned bow and arrow\"\n\nAbaku\u00e1 \"war and blood\" sign, northwestern Cuba, attributed to the nineteenth century\n\nShaded feathers recall the \"dark\" signs of war in the _nsibidi_ corpus (adding a note of belligerence and toughness to the nineteenth-century signature of the town of Regla, as well). The cross with circular termini would appear cognate with African _nsibidi_ of poison and danger\u2014shaded black circles.\n\nSigns of initiation were also emergent in Cuba. Talbot described Nkanda initiatory signs chalked upon the back and chest of Nigerian Ngbe postulants, \"five rings made on front and back.\" In 1882 one of the first descriptions of Ngbe-derived Abaku\u00e1 initiation was published, together with three initiatory signs (Plate 154):\n\nPLATE 154\n\nThe sign of the cross is made on his forehead in yellow chalk [yellow is a sign of life] and the design so drawn on him takes the following shape:   Another cross is made on the chest, the form of which is as follows:   This serves as a signature to be marked before the adept leaves the room, so that when he enters into the formal swearing-in those who receive him will see that he is ready to profess the faith of Abaku\u00e1. The third cross is made on his back from the neck to the waist and it takes this form:   This means he had now taken his vows.\n\nMargarito Blanco and the men who came after him concentrated their calligraphic energies on the reformulation of Ngbe signs of initiation, discipline, and funereal leave-taking. In the process, the term _nsibidi_ apparently was lost, and in its place emerged three creole terms: \"signs\" _(anaforuana)_ , \"signatures\" _(gand\u00f3)_ and \"revelations\" _(ereniyo)_. The first-mentioned word is becoming the standard name for Ejagham-Cuban graphic writing. The last term, referring to that which is seen, puts the fundamental concern of _anaforuana_ with mystic vision in perspective.\n\nFor most of the _anaforuana_ signs of Cuba, written like _nsibidi_ in lines of uniform thickness tracing essentially geometric shapes, have to do with mystic vision\u2014the theme of four eyes\u2014just as in Cameroon membership in Ngbe is synonymous with \"seeing Ngbe,\" i.e., demonstrating formal knowledge of its secrets and its constitution. Frequent _anaforuana_ patterns elaborated in western Cuba include quartered circles  , multiple crossed arrows , quartered diamond-forms with mirrored plumes  . A strong preoccupation with crossroads imagery and the mediation of power across worlds, as in Kongo art and writing, is apparent here:  Moreover, a strong liking for the image of the arrow, sign of war, token of aggression and manful self-assertion, reflects more than a trace of the Ejagham male commitment to formalized combats of aesthetic virtuosity and initiatory depth. _Anaforuana_ , a creole concentration upon certain ancient themes, hypnotically repeats and subrepeats a theme of mystic surveillance and completion. _Anaforuana_ writers impart grace and force to sign after sign through the repetition of the theme of the paired eyes of Tanze and Sik\u00e1n at the boundary between worlds. It makes no difference whether a particular sign or emblem is circular, diamond-form, open and curving, a calabash or horn design\u2014the eyes of Tanze and Sik\u00e1n ceaselessly appear:\n\nIt cannot be overemphasized that even as Westerners in the Middle Ages wrote down and memorized what was most precious, most holy to them, the founding priests of Abaku\u00e1 rendered in ideographic writing the basic images and tenets of the society. Thus, at some point after the 1830's, when Canary Islanders began to be brought to Cuba as cheap labor on a plantation where \"there was nothing but Africans and Canary Islanders,\" every Sunday afternoon the Carabal\u00ed (men and women from Calabar slaving areas) came together to relive their culture:\n\nThey used to tell stories, very beautiful stories, and, above all, they remembered their homeland. Whenever it was the saint's day of one or another of them, they would set up an ironing-board and draw with chalk upon this board something like a calabash with seven plumes\u2014\n\nMy uncle used to tell me: \"That be _ereniyo_ \u2014writing\u2014stand for woman they killed, be Sik\u00e1n and the Fish.\"\n\nIndicating the primordial calabash in which Sik\u00e1n captured the sounding fish of God within the waters of the Ndian, this nineteenth-century Abaku\u00e1 design strongly recalls Nkanda plumed calabash themes as well as feathered signs of festivities in Ejagham symbolism:\n\nIn the image of the feathered calabash the creative intelligence of the Ejagham was returned to Cuba. By the time of the present century this particular emblem had been elaborated into a superbly rendered calligraphic work of art: a central, descending arrow, marking the center of the design, led the eye from one position within the founding myth (the finding of the Fish within the calabash) to another (the circle of the instrument wherein the spirits of Sik\u00e1n and Tanze forever were combined). The central arrow, the seriousness and grandeur of which is suggested by its shaded plumes, is flanked by simpler arrows. This image unifies revelations of great power and mystery. And within the curving outline of the calabash of Sik\u00e1n four double pairs of staring eyes challenge us with the persistent vision of the ancients of Ejagham.\n\nThe common aim of _anaforuana_ signs is the unfolding and elucidation of the richness of Abaku\u00e1 art and ritual. As an Abaku\u00e1 informant himself defined them, they are \"reaffirmations of what happened in Africa at the founding of the ancient lodges... evocations, sacred authorization emblems, imparting force to what is done here [in Cuba].\" In addition to the recapture of elements of the past in certain signs such as the one we have just observed above, and the awarding of power to titled priests in the granting to each one his own particular signature, plus the ritual mapping of initiation ceremonies, and ceremonies of leave-taking of this world, _anaforuana_ declare war, maintain discipline, authorize new lodges and brotherhoods, and announce the special Abaku\u00e1 fiestas called _plantes_.\n\n\"Authorization signs\" are drawn to symbolize the swearing-in of a person to a vacant position in the Abaku\u00e1 hierarchy. The sign validates the candidate and indicates he has the permission of the brothers to assume his post. Structurally, such signs combine a representation of the calabash of origin, plus the latter's honorific plume, with a horizontal arrow bearing the emblem of the particular title being filled. In the _gesture_ conjured by this kind of _anaforuana_ sign, one kind of beginning is significantly crisscrossed with another.\n\nEach priest or highly titled member of Abaku\u00e1 also has the privilege of a special blazon, a signature called _gand\u00f3_. In the authorization sign just examined, the crossed-arrows blazon of the Iyamba title is held aloft over the calabash or origin symbol. Iyamba is \"first priest of the leopard-lord,\" and he takes as his signature four crossed arrows, two marking the cardinal points and two marking the points sited in between. The informants of Lydia Cabrera, from whose monumental study of _anaforuana_ (some 512 examples) the following evidence is culled, state that the arrow marking the sign of Iyamba stands for his personal arrow while the perpendicular one indicates his nobility (evidence consistent with the indication of rank along the horizontal axis in authorization signs). The same informants allege that the raking arrow slashing to the left in the Iyamba signature stands for his prowess in sorcery, whereas the corresponding, right-hand raking arrow indicates his prowess in the war. The interpretation here is clearly linked to left-right nuancing of objects and ideas, with the \"left\" being the covert side, where mystic war is waged by secret means, whereas open warfare belongs to the more positive right-hand side.\n\nThe crisscrossed signature of the Iyamba title, shorn of creole flourishes, points, and feathers, very much recalls _nsibidi_ variously interpreted to mean \"speech,\" \"the paw print of a forest feline,\" the sign of leopard society, and even wealth in accumulated copper bars. The latter meanings appropriately modify the image of the feline lord within the sounding instrument, which Iyamba has the honor of guarding. As a matter of fact, Iyamba is the priest in Abaku\u00e1 who actually makes the sacred sounding instrument speak. In the crisscrossing of these arrows, richness of speech and the ferocity of spiritual attack seemingly become visible.\n\nEach of the signature- _anaforuana_ of the Abaku\u00e1 recasts, rediscovers, and exalts, in different ways, essential images of the myth of Tanze and Sik\u00e1n. Sik\u00e1n's executioner, _Ekue_  _\u00f3n_ , takes as his sign an arrow across the line between two worlds whose feather has been half ruined, symbolizing loss, death, execution (Plate 155). The point is well illustrated by one further example of a sign that identifies the possessions and the presence of a high-ranking priest. The signature of Isunekue (Plate 156), guardian of the Voice of the lord within his instrument, combines a diamond with four staring eyes over a slashing arrow with four eyes over a triangle with yet another pair of staring eyes. The masklike, diamonded device at the summit of the sign recalls the signature of the most feared of the messengers of Abaku\u00e1, Nk\u00f3boro. The slashing horizontal arrow represents the martial prowess of this priestly figure and the triangular structure underneath is interpreted, by some Abaku\u00e1 members, to represent the hill at Ibon Nda, in ancient Efut, where the spirit of the lord leopard-fish, Tanze, was first invoked. And, of course, in the eyes within the Voice, the eyes of Tanze and Sik\u00e1n, the power of surveillance and vision, the deepest force of Abaku\u00e1, discloses itself.\n\nPLATE 155\n\nPLATE 156\n\nThe quartered diamond, shared by Isunekue and Nk\u00f3boro as symbolic emblem for stern and fearsome priests, especially Nk\u00f3boro, overlaps the image of dangerous or evil men in _nsibidi_ patterning collected among the Afikpo Igbo of the Cross River.\n\n_Anaforuana:_ the blazon of Isunekue\n\n_Nsibidi:_ \"bad palaver man\"\n\n_Anaforuana:_ the blazon of Nk\u00f3boro\n\n_Nsibidi:_ \"a bad man\"\n\nIf the _gand\u00f3_ or signatures of the ranking priests of Abaku\u00e1 apprehend in compact form both their individual powers and their embodiments of the essential vision and history of the Abaku\u00e1, their complex funereal signs map and indicate passage to the other world. They are structured according to the creolizing genius of the Abaku\u00e1. In other words, such signs represent an assimilation and transformation of _nsibidi_ of death and mediation. _Nsibidi_ emblems of death among Ejagham and the clans of their neighbors often appear in material media of stark and dramatic force. Near the settlement of Nko-Obubra in August 1978 I photographed a shrine to the memory of a dead person\u2014a white enamel basin suspended, upside down, pierced and nailed to the summit of a staff whitened with kaolin, the color of death, and attached to the staff were scraps of cloth fluttering in the breeze. Talbot discovered near Ekuri Eying, between Ikom and Calabar, that the death of a chief inspired the making of a striking material sign: the survivors affixed to the summit of a tall palm staff the dead man's umbrella and his coat, with the garment disposed so that the arms spectrally pointed outwards. In addition, Keith Nicklin found, in Mbubeland, Ogoja, that when a warrior or a hunter dies, the fronds of surrounding palm trees are shot so that the fronds droop earthwards thereafter. This custom is similar to the Ekwe Ejagham tradition whereby members of the Nsibidi Society mourn the passing of a brother by cutting down plantain stalks behind his house.\n\nViewed as a structural whole, these customs represent death's power both to invert all things, hence the reversal of the basin and the bending of the palm fronds, and to set in motion an upward journey to the sky, hence the elevation of the coat and the parasol and the motifs of mourning high among the ruined palm fronds.\n\nAmong the Abaku\u00e1, death was comprehended in similar visual idioms. In Cuba, when the brothers perambulate in a formal procession called _beromo_ (Plate 157), they sometimes hoist on high the goatskin of Sik\u00e1n as a flaglike evocation of her spirit, and this recalls the elevation of the tunic and umbrella of the vanished chiefs of Ekuri Eying. Death's powers of reversal similarly come to the fore in Abaku\u00e1 funereal symbolism. When a brother is sworn into the Abaku\u00e1, arrows are drawn in the yellow chalk of life upon his body, all pointing down to indicate the descent of life and grace into his body from above. When he dies, the direction of such arrows, now written in death's color, white, is reversed. Pointing toward his head, they indicate upward passage to the other world.\n\nPLATE 157\n\nUpward-pointing arrow signs of death are sometimes abstracted from the context of funereal body-painting and drawn upon the earth at funeral ceremonies. In this case they are called _eriku\u00e1_ , the \"arrow of farewell.\" _Eriku\u00e1_ arrows are sometimes rendered in strict verticality and crossed with multiple arrows of Anamangu\u00ed, messenger of death among the Abaku\u00e1, and sometimes they are wavy and cursive in design but always they point up, indicating the return to heaven. Moreover, they indicate the way to the other world at the end of lines of deliberate elongation, recalling the elevation of dress or shattered leaves at the top of shafts or trees in Nigeria. All of these signs suggest the transformation of a person into a spirit, a spirit that has vanished upward, from ruin toward higher worlds.\n\nAfro-Cuban _anaforuana:_ processioneer with goatskin of Sik\u00e1n, hoist on high as evocation of her spirit, 1950's\n\nNigerian material _nsibidi:_ \"the chief is dead,\" Ekuri eying, c. 1910\n\nAfro-Cuban _anaforuana: eriku\u00e1_ , \"arrows of farewell.\" Left arrow is crossed with multiple arrows of the messenger of death, Anamangu\u00ed, 1959\n\nNigerian material _nsibidi_ , funereal motifs, shrine to dead member of a family, Nko-Obubra, 1978\n\nAfro-Cuban _anaforuana:_ emblem of death's messenger, Anamangu\u00ed, 1959. \"Three crescent-form branches with fallen leaves symbolizing grief\"\n\nNigerian _nsibidi:_ a bamboo stick with the leaves turned backwards mourning emblem for a chief, early twentieth century\n\nAn _nsibidi_ sign announcing the death of a distant chief, which is drawn to represent a bamboo stick with the leaves turned backwards, compacts the ritual of the palm tree fired at by the survivors of a hunter or a warrior within a few calligraphic strokes. The design and meaning of this _nsibidi_ almost certainly inspired the rise of a corresponding emblem among the Abaku\u00e1, a signature- _anaforuana (gand\u00f3)_ of the society's masker of death, Anamangu\u00ed. This particular emblem of the death-messenger\u2014he has a variety of emblems\u2014displays a vertical stroke rising from a quartered circle, not unlike the Nkanda calabash sign in Calabar, with the crucial addition of \"three branches with fallen leaves symbolizing the death of the brother.\"\n\nThe signatures of Anamangu\u00ed are various, as if death were too all-encompassing to be concentrated within a single emblem. They form variations on a theme, a feather arrow ruined or rendered incomplete by death:\n\nImages of the masker of death, branches shedding leaves, a skull and crossbones, four parallel arrows, form a vital part of Abaku\u00e1 funerary art. At the death of an important member, the brothers render in white chalk on thick black paper (about 25 by 35 inches) complicated funerary ensigns. These ensigns are mounted on the walls of the inner shrine _(fo-ekue)_ of an Abaku\u00e1 lodge and are called \"altars.\" There is a mihrablike sense of concentration and sacred directionality to their design.\n\nFunereal ensign, or Abaku\u00e1 \"altar\" c. 1959. Note arrows of the masked messenger of death\n\n_Nsibidi:_ seven spears of a murderous father, seven spears used by his son in self-defense, 1911\n\nThe illustrated \"altar\" is set within a pointed frame surmounted by the cross sign of Tanze and Sik\u00e1n. Two \"arms\" bear the multiple parallel arrows of Anamangu\u00ed, phrased in a manner reminiscent of an _nsibidi_ of patricidal strife. Anamangu\u00ed's three branches with drooping leaves again recall the _nsibidi_ of the death of a ruler or a warrior.\n\nThus, Cuban Abaku\u00e1 brought to the New World aspects of the language and ritual costuming traditions of the \u00c9jagham. Together with initiatory and funereal blazons came a tradition of masked messengers of the spirit rumbling in the leopard-drum unseen but fearfully appreciated. Costumes for the messengers of Ngbe\/Tanze form, according to one Cuban folklorist, the \"maximum incarnation of Abaku\u00e1 spirit.\" But that incarnation was brought into being, shaped, and kept in cultural focus by the power of _anaforuana_ to affirm the past. In fact, the whole panoply of Ngbe\/Abaku\u00e1 messengers, with their costumes, characteristically trimmed with fiber at the wrists and ankles, could be accurately characterized as _nsibidi_ or _anaforuana_ in material form. The checked leopard pattern of a Nigerian Ibibio leopard-masker (Plate 158), which tells us where the power of the dancer is coming from, reappears, as it were, on the dress of an Abaku\u00e1 masker of the 1870's (Plate 159). The Cuban masker even crawls, symbolically, to render the feline animality, which is both the glory and means of moral intimidation of his society. Again, the quartered circle with four eyes\u2014spiritual communication and enlightenment, the core emblem among the signs of the _anaforuana_ corpus\u2014becomes, in Abaku\u00e1 masking, a Janus with two eyes seen in front and two implied (or rendered) on a disk at the back of the head (Plate 160). And just as the intersection of two lines in _nsibidi_ communicates the intersection of words of one person with words of another, with the same sign the nineteenth-century Abaku\u00e1 masker visually voices the idea of speech. He crosses broom and wand before his body to indicate a desire to speak of things positive and lasting. The richness of mediation and spiritual embodiment communicated by a nineteenth-century Abaku\u00e1 masker (Janus of mystic vision, checkerboard of feline strength, soft conical headdress characteristic of Ebong\u00f3, in Calabar given as the female dimension to Ngbe, the mother of all leopards) is a marvel of cultural reinstatement, a fusion of sartorial and ideographic means (Plate 161). It provides a measure to assess strong changes occurring now in Calabar (Plate 162), where Ebong\u00f3 is allowed metallic cloth and many mirrors for the glory of her prestige and powers of mystic vision. If Ebong\u00f3 seems purer in Havana, in some senses, than in Calabar, the old Cuban reflection of the special hoopskirted Calabar _Aban_ dancer, a reflection once vibrant and once strong in the 1870's (Plate 163), has disappeared, and only Calabar (Plate 164) continues this visual tradition. We may be sure the hoopskirt was a sign, a piece of ancient writing worn as dress.\n\nPLATE 158\n\nPLATE 159\n\nPLATE 160\n\nPLATE 161\n\nPLATE 162\n\nPLATE 163\n\nPLATE 164\n\nWe turn, at the ending of this chapter, to a climax in the Abaku\u00e1 calligraphy of the dead\u2014the sign of the lifting of the plate _(levantamiento de plato)_ , referring to the custom of taking up the plate of a dead person from his table, \"for no longer will he use it in this world.\" It is a complicated ideograph, which mourns the entire dead of a lodge that has to restore its positions. It is a mapping of a mass keening, a calligraphic machine for honoring myriad ancestors simultaneously. It has a long axis complicated by a cluster of four priestly signatures of high rank about a circular device centered upon two intersecting arrows, often given as the sign of the four winds. The line continues. It traverses a skull and crossbones of Anamangu\u00ed and two extraordinary winglike branches, bending back to form the ancient _nsibidi_ of death, as if pulled down by the weight of phantom priests whose spectral signatures constellate underneath the \"wings\" in sympathy with their curves. The line continues, collides with, and pierces, in an unceasing journey upward, more crossed arrows, a quartered circle of supernatural vision, a calabash of origin, itself crossed with arrows and gleaming with many eyes of Tanze and Sik\u00e1n, a fusillade of arrows from the deadly quiver of Anamangu\u00ed, a final crisscross of two worlds, and then, departure, into the great beyond, on the tip of the arrow of farewell.\n\n# **NOTES**\n\n#### One\n\n 1. Rev. R. H. Stone, _In Afric's Forest and Jungle: Or Six Years Among the Yorubans_ (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1899), pp. 20\u201321, 23.\n\n 2. See summary comments on Yoruba art and culture in R. F. Thompson, _African Art in Motion_ (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974). For Yoruba urbanism, see G. J. Afolabi Ojo, _Yoruba Culture: A Geographical Analysis_ (London: University of London Press, 1966), pp. 104\u201330. A classic article is William Bascom, \"Some Aspects of Yoruba Urbanism,\" _American Anthropologist_ LXIV, 4 (August 1962), 699\u2013709.\n\n 3. Oladipo Yemitan, _Ijala: Are Ode_ (Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 67. Translation from the Yoruba is mine.\n\n 4. Miss Tucker, _Abbeokuta; Or, Sunrise Within the Tropics_ (London: James Nisbet & Co, 1853), p. 165.\n\n 5. T. J. Bowen, _Grammar and Dictionary of the Yoruba Language_ (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 1858). See entries _amewa_ and _mewa_ , and also R. F. Thompson, \"Yoruba Artistic Criticism,\" in Warren d'Azevedo (ed.), _The Traditional Artist in African Societies_ (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1973), pp. 26, 60, note 10.\n\n 6. Babatunde Lawal, \"Some Aspects of Yoruba Aesthetics,\" _British Journal of Aesthetics_ , Vol. III (1974), p. 239.\n\n 7. Araba Ek\u00f3, conversations with the author, Lagos, Nigeria, 1972\u201373. The Araba, one of the leading priests of divination in Yorubaland, has been enormously kind over the years in sharing his rich knowledge of the literature of divination in relation to the nature of the _orisha_.\n\n 8. Interview with Araba Ek\u00f3, 13 January 1972, Lagos.\n\n 9. Informant: A. O. Williams On\u00e1yemin, Ilesha, 5 August 1965.\n\n 10. _Iroko_ shrines seen in the field, Ketu, Republic of Benin, summer 1972. For a spectacular document of the Afro-Brazilian continuity of this custom, blended with the cognate Dahomean Loko cult, see Caryb\u00e9, _Iconografia dos Deuses Africanos no Candomble da Bahia_ (S\u00e3o Paulo: Raizes, 1980), p. 110.\n\n 11. The definition of red \"as the supreme presence of color\" stems from Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss, _The Savage Mind (La Pens\u00e9e sauvage)_. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966), p. 65.\n\n 12. Araba Ek\u00f3, Lagos, 13 January 1972.\n\n 13. Informant: the late J. K. Adejumo, Ipokia, capital of the Anago Yoruba, 5 January 1968.\n\n 14. Cf. Denrele Obasa, _Aw\u1ecdon Akewi_ , cited in A. Fajana, \"Some Aspects of Yoruba Traditional Education,\" _Odu_ (July 1966), p. 25.\n\n 15. Babatunde Lawal, _op. cit_., p. 241.\n\n 16. \"Giving with _both_ hands,\" Henry Drewall (personal communication, 4 December 1979) points out, \"signifies as well the union of social and spiritual worlds, for the left is used in greetings by _ori_  _sa_ (i.e., possessed worshippers) to mortals. Thus it is a _sanctified_ gesture of giving.\"\n\n 17. Araba Ek\u00f3, 12 January 1972.\n\n 18. _Ibid_.\n\n 19. Babatunde Lawal, \"The Significance of Yoruba Sculpture\" (mimeographed paper read at the Conference on Yoruba Civilization, University of Ife, Ile-Ife, 26\u201331 July 1976), p. 9.\n\n 20. The late J. K. Adejumo, Ipokia, 5 January 1968. In addition, in the communication cited in Note 13, Henry Drewall further glosses this testimony: \"Opening his cap may also connote peaceful intentions; for, in contrast, the caps of hunters hold medicines for cursing. The gesture of removing one's cap to take out the medicine is an act of war, but 'opening' the cap shows friendship.\"\n\n 21. Araba Ek\u00f3, interview, 17 January 1972.\n\n 22. R. C. Abraham, _Dictionary of Modern Yoruba_ (London: University of London Press, 1958), p. 658.\n\n 23. Araba Ek\u00f3, 12 January 1972.\n\n 24. E. A. Ajosafe Moore, _The Laws and Customs of the Yoruba People_ (Abeokuta: Fola Bookshops, n.d.), p. 7.\n\n 25. For details, see Robert S. Smith, _Kingdoms of the Yoruba_ (London: Methuen, 1969), pp. 133\u201355. See also Rev. Samuel Johnson, _The History of the Yorubas_ (Lagos: C.M.S. Bookshops, 1921).\n\n 26. S. A. Akintoye, _Revolution and Power Politics in Yorubaland 1840\u20131893_ (New York: Humanities Press, 1971), p. 44.\n\n 27. Juana Elbein dos Santos, _Os Nago E A Morte: P\u00e0d\u00e9, \u00c0s\u00e8s\u00e8 e o culto \u00c9gun na Bahia_ (Petr\u00f3polis: Editora Vozes, 1976), p. 13.\n\n 28. William Bascom, _Shango in the New World_ (Austin: African and Afro-American Research Institute, 1972), p. 13.\n\n 29. Focused on the African-influenced life of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, a thoughtful and important study of the punning process in linking attributes of the saints to those of the _vodun_ (Dahomean spirits) and the Yoruba _orisha_ is Michel Leiris's: \"Note sur l'usage de chromolithographies par les vodouisants d'Haiti,\" in _Les Afro-Am\u00e9ricains_ (Dakar: M\u00e9moires de l'Institut Fran\u00e7ais d'Afrique Noire, 1953), pp. 201\u20137.\n\n 30. Bascom, _Shango in the New World_ , pp. 16\u201317: such syncretisms are not consistent, varying from place to place, even from shrine to shrine. Bascom illustrates this point with an excellent table of Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3\/Catholic saint correspondences across the western hemisphere (pp. 16\u201317).\n\n 31. Dos Santos _op. cit_., pp. 171\u201381.\n\n 32. _Ibid_., p. 179.\n\n 33. See Caryb\u00e9, _op. cit_., p. 46, for a watercolor of an Eshu-Elegbara priest in Bahia wearing a headdress that is red on one side, black on the other.\n\n 34. Hence the pitchforks of Satan, horns of the Devil, and other infernal images that cloud his true role as messenger of the deities and principle of individuality, particularly in the Yoruba-influenced religious life of Rio, where a kind of meta-literature has arisen in his name, incredibly creolized and inventive in its references, freely mixing Kongo, Yoruba-Dahomean, Roman Catholic, spiritualist, and other concepts, as illustrated, for example, by N. A. Molina, _Na Gira dos Exu_ (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Espiritualista, n.d.); Antonio de Alva, _O livro dos exus: Kimbas e Eguns_ (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Eco, 1967); and Jos\u00e9 Maria Bitten-court, _No reino dos exus_ (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Eco, 1970).\n\n 35. From a conversation with the Araba Ek\u00f3, Lagos, 18 January 1972.\n\n 36. Juana Elbein dos Santos and Deoscoredes M. dos Santos, _E_  _su Bara Laroye: A Comparative Study_ (mimeographed), Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, Nigeria (April 1971), p. 28: \"Esu is the Lord of Power, Elegbara, its controller at the same time as its representation.\" See also their \"Esu Bara, Principle of Individual Life in the Nago System,\" a paper delivered at the conference on _The Notion of the Person in Black Africa_ (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Colloque Internationaux, No. 544, 1971).\n\n 37. Interview with Lydia Cabrera, Coral Gables, Florida, September 1981.\n\n 38. Lydia Cabrera, _El Monte: Igbo Fina Ewe Orisha, Vititinfinda_ (Havana: Ediciones C.R., 1954), p. 80: \" _Propicio, modifica el peor de los destinos; hostil, ensombrece el m\u00e1s brillante_.\"\n\n 39. Witnessed in Rio, spring 1968.\n\n 40. Cabrera, _op. cit_ , p. 95: \"Eshu is an Elegba ready to do nothing but evil.\"\n\n 41. Dos Santos and Dos Santos, _op. cit_., p. 29.\n\n 42. It may well be, as Henry Drewall suggests (personal communication, 4 December 1979), that \"the iron blade\/tuft\/penis projecting from the top of the head of Esu\/Elegba seems more Fon or more precisely Ewe than Yoruba. I documented a large cement sculpture of a seated Legba figure with iron bursting from his head at the entrance to a compound in an Ewe town north of Lome.\" It is fairly certain that Fon, Ewe, and other Yoruba-influenced groups living to the west of Yorubaland \"came before\" the Yoruba to Brazil, as Drewall adds, \"not with them.\" The complex problem of the merging of Yoruba-influenced Legba imagery, from Ewe\/Fon sources, with Yoruba impulses in Brazil and Cuba will be discussed in a future publication, _The Face of the Gods_. Here it suffices to note the probable reinforcement of Yoruba imagery by already existing Fon\/Ewe customs in the Western Hemisphere.\n\n 43. Argeliers Le\u00f3n, \"Elebwa: una divinidad de la santer\u00eda Cubana,\" _Abhandlungen und Berichte des Staatlichen Museums f\u00fcr Volkerkunde Dresden_ , 21 (1962), pp. 57\u201361.\n\n 44. Letter written by Julius Oyetunde of Ibadan, dated 22 July 1919, and now in the archives of the Museum of Ethnic Art, UCLA, Los Angeles. The letter came with a shrine image carved in wood for Eshu-Elegba, attributed to Agesingbena of Ibadan (Museum of Ethnic Art: X67-600), now at UCLA. I thank George Ellis for a copy of this letter.\n\n 45. Dos Santos and Dos Santos, _E_  _su Bara Laroye_ , p. 29.\n\n 46. Joan Wescott, \"The Sculpture and Myths of Eshu-Elegba,\" _Africa_ XXXII, 4 (October 1962), 338.\n\n 47. Dos Santos, _op. cit_., pp. 135\u201337.\n\n 48. _Ibid_., p. 162.\n\n 49. Cabrera, _El Monte_. The photographs at the back of this important volume are unnumbered; what would be the tenth and eleventh pages of the plates focus on art for Elegba in the late forties and early fifties in western Cuba.\n\n 50. _Arar\u00e1_ (Afro-Cuban for Dahomean\/Ewe worship) is cognate with the Afro-Haitian term _Rada_. Both words stem from the name of an ancient town, Allada, in Dahomey. For a rewarding survey of Ewe art, see Dzagbe Cudjoe, _Tribus_ (August 1969), pp. 49\u201360.\n\n 51. Attribution by Lydia Cabrera, conversation with the author, summer 1979.\n\n 52. I heartily thank Sidney Mintz, of the Anthropology Department, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, for bringing this fine piece to my attention, and for details about its collection.\n\n 53. For a broader interpretation of projections from the head throughout Yoruba art, see Margaret Drewall's \"Projections from the Top in Yoruba Art,\" _African Arts_ XI, 1 (Fall 1977), 43\u201349.\n\n 54. Lydia Cabrera, conversation, winter 1979.\n\n 55. Roger Bastide, _Imagens do Nordeste M\u00edstico_ (Rio de Janeiro: Empresa Gr\u00e1fica o Cruzeiro, 1945), p. 129.\n\n 56. _Ibid_., pp. 129\u201330.\n\n 57. _Ibid_., photograph between pp. 160\u201361, caption reads in Portuguese: \"Exu-bara (Photo Recife Department of Police).\"\n\n 58. See Mario Barata, \"Arte negra,\" _Revista da Semana_ (17 May 1941), pp. 16\u201317, 34, where he speaks of \"macumba idols from Rio recently collected by the town police.\" \"Collected\" is a euphemism for police confiscation of objects including an interesting image for Eshu-Elegbara roughly similar to the piece under discussion. Both are now in the Police MuseumofRio. Butthepre-1941 datingoftheobjectunderdiscussionisstill no more than an informed guess, for other than this article no records of accession could be found during several visits to the Police Museum in March and August 1968. See also Mario Barata, \"The Negro in the Plastic Arts of Brazil,\" in _The African Contribution To Brazil_ (Rio de Janeiro: Edigraf, 1966), p. 38, note 21.\n\n 59. M. A. S. Barber, _Oshielle: or Village Life in the Yoruba Country_ (London: James Nisbet, 1857). Illustration faces p. 187.\n\n 60. Susan M. Pearce, _Yoruba Archaeology and Art_ (Exeter: Royal Albert Memorial Museum, 1970) catalog object no. 27 (RAMM no. 1385\/1868).\n\n 61. Pierre Verger, _Notes sur le culture des orisa et vodun_ (Dakar: IFAN, 1957), p. 134: _\u00d3 fi er\u00ed ejo fun fere_ (with the head of a snake he blows a whistle). Verger collected this praise-verse in Ketu, an ancient town over which, according to tradition, Eshu once ruled.\n\n 62. Informant: Araba Ek\u00f3, interviews, Lagos, July 1965.\n\n 63. Verger, _op. cit_., pp. 136, 138.\n\n 64. For Bahia, Verger, _ibid_., pp. 138\u201339; for Cuba, Lydia Cabrera, _M\u00fasica de los cultos Africanos en Cuba_ , Disco 4, Lado 2; for Miami, _Eru Ana: Afro-Cuban Folklore_ (Onix LP: ORLPS-004, Cara A, \"Elegu\u00e1\").\n\n 65. Valdelice Carneiro Gir\u00e3o, \"A Cole\u00e7ao Arthur Ramos,\" _Revista Ciencias Sociais_ II, 1 (1971), 105:\" (1.60.122) _Exu_ , 33 cm. high, wooden statuette, restored... [from the] Candombl\u00e9 da Bahia.\"\n\n 66. As well as in Hispanic New York City. I am indebted to Eshumiwa, a New York priest of Eshu-Elegbara, for the privilege of studying a hook for Eshu, painted red and black, Eshu's colors, made in Harlem in 1965.\n\n 67. Cabrera, _El Monte_ , ninth page of unnumbered photographs.\n\n 68. Wande Abimbola, _If\u00e1 Divination Poetry_ (New York: Nok Publishers Ltd, 1977), p. v.\n\n 69. Cf. William Bascom, _If\u00e1 Divination: Communication Between Gods and Men in West Africa_ (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1969), p. 11.\n\n 70. Abraham, _op. cit_., p. 274, _If\u00e1: aigbofa la n woke: If\u00e1 kon k\u00f2 si ni para_ (\"owing to being unskilled in divination, we are looking up at the thatch, but it is not a likely place to find him!\").\n\n 71. Wande Abimbola, _Ifa Divination Poetry_ , pp. 2\u20134. For another myth of If\u00e1, see Fela Sowande, _If\u00e1_ (Yaba: Forward Press, n.d., c. 1964). See both Abimbola and Bascom, _op. cit_., for excellent descriptions of the divination process and its instruments.\n\n 72. Fela Sowande, _Ifa. Odu Mimo_ (Lagos: Ancient Religious Societies of African Descendants Association, 1965), p. 28.\n\n 73. _Ibid_.\n\n 74. For a discussion of visual art pertaining to If\u00e1 and its Dahomean equivalent, Fa, see Bernard Maupoil, _La Geomancie a l'ancienne Cote des Esclaves_ (Paris: Institut d'Ethnologie, 1961), reprint of the 1922 edition. There is an excellent survey of If\u00e1 art in relation to the oral literature of Yoruba divination by Rowland Abiodun, \"Ifa Art Objects: An Interpretation Based on Oral Tradition,\" in Wande Abimbola (ed.), _Yoruba Oral Tradition: Poetry in Music, Dance, and Drama_ (Ife: Department of African Languages and Literatures, University of Ife, 1975), pp. 421\u201369.\n\n 75. Abimbola, _Ifa Divination Poetry_ , pp. 150\u201351. I have slightly retranslated the Ifa verse herein cited.\n\n 76. William Bascom, \"Two Forms of Afro-Cuban Divination,\" in Sol Tax (ed.), _Acculturation in the Americas_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 169\u201379.\n\n 77. Cf. Fernando Ortiz, _Los Instrumentos de la m\u00fasica Afrocubana_ , Vol. I (Havana: Ministerio de Educaci\u00f3n, 1952), p. 193, Fig. 9 (illustration of an Afro-Cuban _irofa_ and _opon ifa_ ). Bascom, \"Two Forms,\" reports (p. 172) that \"in Cuba few diviners know the use of the sixteen nuts, most of them relying on the divining chain. Similarly among the Yoruba the chain is more frequently employed.\"\n\n 78. Abiodun, _op. cit_., makes the important observation (p. 12) that \"Ifa acknowledges the power of \u00c8 s\u00f9 symbolically, placates him and solicits his cooperation through the carved face(s) of E su in the border decoration of _opon_.\" Drewall has examined an _atefa_ in the Deoscoredes dos Santos collection in Bahia which belonged to a servitor of the Yoruba gods who divined. This tray even had a circular indentation on the bottom which in Nigeria, according to my informants, means that the _opon_ is a secret drum with two membranes, one on each side. Peter Morton-Williams (with J. R. O. Ojo), _Museum of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ife: A Short Illustrated Guide_ (Ife: University of Ife Press, 1969), says, on p. 8: \"The back of the tray is hollowed so that it sounds when tapped by the diviner with his ivory rattle to invoke Orumnila.\" Drewall (personal communication, 1979) says it has to do with a covert function of cursing. All three versions dovetail within, and support, the notion of the _opon_ as a most important instrument of communication with the gods.\n\n 79. See Morton-Williams and Ojo, _op. cit_. For a brief discussion of form and meaning in the study of _agere ifa_ , see Abiodun, _op. cit_., pp. 447\u201350.\n\n 80. Roger Bastide, _Le Candombl\u00e9 de Bahia_ (Paris: Mouton, 1958), p. 51, note 77. In Brazil the _agere_ was redesignated \"box for Yemanya,\" goddess of the sea, possibly by analogy with its discovery by the sea.\n\n 81. It is important to note that while the use of the _opele_ in Cuba and Cuban-influenced North America remains strong, our early visual source published in (Fernando Ortiz, _Hampa Afro-Cubana: Los Negros Brujos_ (Madrid: Editorial America, 1906), p. 178, illustrated (Plate 20b) in this book, is actually a drawing, taken from another drawing, published in a late-nineteenth-century Havana newspaper. In translation, \"divining-chain\" became confused with \"necklace,\" and what we have are enough seeds on a chain to make _two opele_ (cf. Plate 20a) with one left over! Nevertheless, the spacing of chain to seed is identical with the Nigerian antecedent, and the same reference gives us an early document of the use of green and yellow beads for If\u00e1 in the western hemisphere (p. 177).\n\n 82. Cabrera, _El Monte_ , p. 15. The citation is a composite of two sentences in which I translate _derecho_ , lit., \"right,\" as protocol.\n\n 83. See R. F. Thompson, \"Icons of the Mind: Yoruba Herbalism Arts in Atlantic Perspective,\" _African Arts_ VIII, 3: 52\u201359, 89\u201390.\n\n 84. _Ibid_.\n\n 85. Cabrera, _El Monte_ , pp. 70\u201371.\n\n 86. For details, see my \"Icons of the Mind,\" noted above.\n\n 87. Cabrera, _El Monte_ , p. 101.\n\n 88. Araba Ek\u00f3, interview, 12 January 1972.\n\n 89. Quoted in my _Black Gods and Kings_ (Los Angeles: Museum of Ethnic Arts, 1971, p. 11\/3.\n\n 90. Informant: Julito Collazo, interviews, Hamden, Connecticut, winter 1970. The melody of an ancient Osanyin song appears in Cuba ( _Cult Music of Cuba_ , Ethnic Folkways LP FE 4410) and also in Brazil ( _Folk Music of Brazil_ , Library of Congress LP AFS L13). Harold Courlander, in the notes to the LP of Cuban black ritual music, was apparently the first to notice the implications of antiquity in the geographic distribution of this song. A full version, mentioning the immovable stone under water, was recorded in the 1950's by Lydia Cabrera, _M\u00fasica de los Cultos Africanos en Cuba_ , Record 3, Side 1 (c. 1958).\n\n 91. Teodoro D\u00edaz Fabelo, _Olorun_ (Havana: Ediciones del Departamento de Folklore del Teatro Nacional de Cuba, 1960) p. 67. The original text interweaves Lucum\u00ed (Cuban creolized Yoruba) and Castilian phrases which I elide together.\n\n 92. _Ibid_., p. 68.\n\n 93. Geraldine Torres Guerra, \"Un elemento ritual: El Osun,\" _Etnolog\u00eda y Folklore_ , Vol. III (1967), pp. 65\u201381.\n\n 94. Cabrera, _El Monte_ , ninth unnumbered page of photographs, \"Altar of a priest, for the Ni\u00f1o de Atocha, Elegba.\"\n\n 95. I am grateful to Owoeye of Efon-Alaiye for an introduction to a corpus of works of art in iron by members of the atelier of Odeleogun and his son, Ajanak\u00fa, in the winter of 1964.\n\n 96. See, for example, Bastide, _op. cit_., pp. 72 (\"tree of life\"), 111 (a bird at summit, surrounded by small branches), which Ramos took to be \"Eshu of the seven roads.\" Cf. Deoscoredes dos Santos, _West African Sacred Art and Rituals in Brazil_ (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, 1967), p. 80: \"A central bar with six smaller bars and an iron bird on top symbolizes a tree with seven branches and the bird at the top.\"\n\n 97. From oral evidence collected at Igogo-Ekiti, summer 1965, Nigeria.\n\n 98. For an earlier version of this paragraph, see Lewis M. Dabney, _The Indians of Yoknapatawpha_ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), p. 146. Finally, no reference to Osanyin is complete with mention of Pierre Verger's important booklet, _\u00c0won Ew\u00e9 \u00d2sany\u00ecn: Yoruba Medicinal Leaves_ (Ife: Institute of African Studies, University of Ife, 1967).\n\n 99. _Black Gods and Kings_ p. 7\/1. Robert Smith, _Journal of African History_ VIII, 1 (1967), 93, makes an observation that is relevant here: \"Among the Yoruba the sword was regarded essentially as a cutting weapon.\" Finally, for a superb study, see Sandra T. Barnes, _Og\u00fan: An Old God for a New Age_ (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1980).\n\n100. Told me by the Chief of Ipole, near Ilesha, winter 1963.\n\n101. A composite of praise-verses _(\u00e0w\u1ecdon or\u00edki)_ published by Verger, _op. cit_., pp. 178\u201379, verses 1, 3, 9, 8, 9 (in the last verse I expand the idiophonic _rororo_ , the sound that fire makes, into: \"leaves the forest screaming...\", pp. 175\u201377, 180\u201381, 183\u201385, 188.\n\n102. Informant: Onayemi of Ilesha, July 1965.\n\n103. _Ibid_.\n\n104. _Ibid_.\n\n105. Verger, _Notes sur le culture_ , p. 182: \"Seven Ogun in the house of Ire.\"\n\n106. Quoted in Ortiz, _op. cit_., p. 65. The object was in this text misattributed to the cult of Orisha Oko.\n\n107. There may be a trace of Kongo influence here, blended in with Yoruba practice, for some Afro-Cuban informants have told me that one works with an _nfumbi_ (creole Ki-Kongo for \"dead man\") locked in the Og\u00fan cauldron. The cauldron itself resembles a famous pot on a tripod of three stones in which the founder of Kongo primordially \"cooked up\" the first medicines of the land. Cf. the morphology of the famous Afro-Cuban Kongo charm \"Graveyard-Midnight\" (Plate 66), _supra_.\n\n108. Informant: Larry Harlow, New York City, fall 1979. Moreover, a few Afro-Cuban _bot\u00e1nicas_ (herbal stores) in New England sometimes sell protective chains of Og\u00fan to hang at the bottom of front doors, on the inside, for protection.\n\n109. Verger, _Notes sur le culture_ , p. 206.\n\n110. _Ibid_., pp. 208\u20139.\n\n111. The cited verses are a composite, from praise literature for Oshoosi and closely related hunter-deities, in Verger, \"Notes.\" The page numbers, and, in parentheses, the numbers of the verses follow: 221 (4, 5), 225 (65), 215 (village of Save, 1), 216 (4); 222 (13).\n\n112. M. A. S. Barber, _op. cit_., 1857.\n\n113. R. S. Smith, \"Yoruba Warfare and Weapons,\" in S. O. Biobaku (ed.), _Sources of Yoruba History_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 232\u201333.\n\n114. Dos Santos, \"West African Sacred Art,\" Plates 80 and 81.\n\n115. Cf. Babatunde Lawal, _op. cit_., p. 246: \"The person who wears an all-red garment is likely to be mistaken for a priest.\"\n\n116. Abraham, _op. cit_., p. 623.\n\n117. Informant: Adisa Fagbemi, _Ima\u1e63ai_ , northern Egbado, winter 1963\u201364.\n\n118. Verger, _Notes sur le culture_ p. 244. So closely does Obaluaiye relate to his Dahomean derivative, Sakpata, that I follow Verger in combining songs for both deities to illustrate the nature of the redoubtable earth deities. This particular selection is excerpted from _nukoromahan_ , bright, satiric songs of moral allusion that \"invite people to mend their ways or else incur the wrath of Sakpata.\"\n\n119. _Ibid_., p. 244.\n\n120. _Ibid_., pp. 256 (2); 257 (4); 259 (acclamations); 260 (4), an ancient image of nobility and regal poise in Yoruba poetry; 264 (10); 264 (5,6); 265 (7).\n\n121. Dos Santos, \"West African Sacred Art,\" p. 67, Plate 57.\n\n122. Source: Araba Ek\u00f3, 18 January 1972.\n\n123. Juana Elbein Dos Santos, in conversation with the author, January 1980, Bahia.\n\n124. There is a good description of this shrine, which I myself visited on 16 May 1963, in Geoffrey Parrinder, _West African Religion_ (London: Epworth Press, 1961) pp. 28\u201329.\n\n125. The priest of Nana at Dassa-Zoum\u00e9 told me (16 May 1963) that the clay pillar within the crown and sheath of straw was called _ata bukuu_ and added: \"Buk\u00fau lives in there and comes out during spirit possession.\" This spirit can force market prices to drop if the poor are suffering.\n\n126. For notes on the Ejiwa cult in Lagos, see unpublished notes of Kenneth Murray, Nigerian Museum, Lagos. The myth of Ejiwa was explained to me by Ajanaku Araba Ek\u00f3 (13 January 1972): \"Elegba while fishing is known as Ejiwa.\" Obaluaiye gave Ejiwa (Eshu) the gown of raffia because the latter had once been kind to him.\n\n127. Dos Santos, \"West African Sacred Art,\" pp. 50\u201366.\n\n128. Informant: Momuri Orilegbolodo, servitor of Buk\u00fau, Ketu, 8 September 1972.\n\n129. Dramatically pantomimed by Momuri Orilegbolodo in the process of her explanation of the staff's powers. She called it _ileesin gogo_.\n\n130. And her concern with instilling a social conscience in her followers (cf. Dassa-Zoum\u00e9 legends about Nana forcing market prices to fall to favor the poor) matches that of her fiery son.\n\n131. Informant: Babalawo Alawode Ifayemi, apparently recorded in Ketu country. Dos Santos, \"West African Sacred Art,\" pp. 58\u201365. I have retranslated portions of the original Yoruba version of the myth.\n\n132. Interview, Araba Ek\u00f3, 8 December 1975.\n\n133. _Ibid_.\n\n134. Yemitan, _op. cit_., pp. 4\u20136.\n\n135. For example, the altar to Yewa, an important riverain goddess, at Ipokia, capital of the Anago Yoruba, is circular, made of clay, and dyed a splendid indigo blue.\n\n136. Johnson, _op. cit_., p. 243: \"Burying the king in the bed of the river was regarded as an expiation made for his murder.\" The inner power of the riverain goddesses is likewise measured by the immense shield of flowing water that separates them from the world of the living.\n\n137. Judith Hoch-Smith, \"Radical Yoruba Female Sexuality,\" in Judith Hoch-Smith and Anita Spring (eds.), _Women in Ritual and Symbolic Roles_ (New York: Plenum Press, 1978), p. 265. As to the negative dimensions in the mystic use of fans, cf. Araba Ek\u00f3 (17 January 1972): \"There are fans, which the 'mothers' use, concealing poison; while fanning a 'mother' can use it as a means of throwing death or injury or madness upon a person.\"\n\n138. From a myth described to me by a migrant from the ancient city of \u1eccw\u1ecd in southern Ijebu country, winter 1963\u201364.\n\n139. Source: Henry Drewall, who has conducted excellent researches among Ketu, Egbado, and, recently, Ijebu Yoruba.\n\n140. Verger, _Notes sur le culture, p. 297_.\n\n141. Or, cf. Fernando Ortiz, _Los instrumentos de la m\u00fasica Afrocubana_ , Vol. II (Havana: Ministerio de Educaci\u00f3n, 1952), pp. 299\u2013301: \"There are serious cases when one must 'cool' a saint, or rather his stone, with five or seven fans in action all at once, according to what If\u00e1 (the oracle) indicates.\"\n\n142. Verger, _Notes sur le culture_ , p. 298, Abeokuta prayer 2.\n\n143. _Ibid_., p. 426, Ilesha verse 9.\n\n144. Jos\u00e9 Ribeiro de Souza, _400 Pontos Riscados e Cantados na Umbanda e Candombl\u00e9_ (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Eco, 1966), pp. 40\u201341.\n\n145. Informants have also mentioned that a starfish image might be intended here, for which there is good authority in Bahia. Cf. Edison Carneiro, _Candombl\u00e9s da Bahia_ (Rio de Janeiro: Tecnoprint Grafica, 1967), p. 45: \"A large starfish... in homage to Yemanya.\"\n\n146. Dr. Lawrence Longo of Los Angeles has made a film of the Oshun festival at Oshogbo, which was kindly screened for me in the summer of 1970 by George Ellis, then of the Museum of Ethnic Arts, UCLA. The film documents the flower-hurling portion of the Oshun festival.\n\n147. Verger, _Notes sur le culture_ , p. 422 (2,5,8), 423 (10,12,14,15,17), 424 (23,24,29), 425 (1,6) 426 (3,9) 427 (3), 428 (16).\n\n148. _Ibid_., pp. 429 (6,10,12,13,14), 430 (16;4), 431 (8,9), 433 (5).\n\n149. Lydia Cabrera, _Yemay\u00e1 y Och\u00fan: Kariocha, Iyalorichas y Olorichas_ (Madrid: C y R, 1974), pp. 271\u201372.\n\n150. I am extraordinarily grateful to the son of the late Oginnin for taking several days in July 1965 to explain in detail the meanings attached to this fan as his father had explained them.\n\n151. Cf. Abraham, _op. cit_., p. 622.\n\n152. I am grateful to the Alaafin of Oyo for the privilege of witnessing the annual perambulations of Alakoro in January 1964.\n\n153. For an excellent summary of the lore of Sh\u00e0ng\u00f3, see Babatunde Lawal, _Yoruba Sango Sculpture in Historical Retrospect_ (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1970).\n\n154. Verger, _Notes sur le culture_ , pp. 342 (21); 351 (121); 359 (13,14,19;3); 361 (26,30); 362 (31); 362 (48); 363 (49,56); 366 (1); 374 (30); 378 (77,88); 380 (104,112); 381 (12); 390 (12); 392 (4), lit., \"beads, rich, on king of Oyo\"; 393 (11); 395 (4).\n\n155. Morton-Williams and Ojo, _op. cit_., p. 9.\n\n156. Vivaldo da Costa Lima, _Una festa de Xango no Opo Afonja_ (Salvador: IV Coloquio Internacional de Estudos Luso-Brasileiros, Universidade de Bahia, 1959) p. 19.\n\n157. Eva L. R. Meyerowitz, \"A Bronze Armlet from Old Oyo, Nigeria,\" _Man_ XLI, 15\u201337 (March\u2013April 1941), 26.\n\n158. Fernando Ortiz, _Los Bailes y el Teatro de los Negros en el Folklore de Cuba_ (Havana: Ediciones C\u00e1rdenas y Cia, 1951), p. 235.\n\n159. It is possible the modification of the gesture in this Brazilian instance was influenced by the strong presence of the Kongo left-hand-on-hip gesture _(telama lwimbanganga)_ with right hand forward.\n\n160. From a MS. in progress by Robert Farris Thompson, _The Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of the Black Atlantic World_.\n\n161. See Carl M. Hunt, _Oyotunji Village: The Yoruba Movement in America_ (Wahington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1979), p. 63: \"Villagers are skilled in leather crafts, pottery making and cloth dyeing... some of the men are also very good artists and skilled wood carvers.\"\n\n#### Two\n\n 1. Philip Curtin, _The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census_ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 188.\n\n 2. _Ibid_., p. 105.\n\n 3. Interview with Fu-Kiau Bunseki, winter 1979.\n\n 4. _Ibid_.\n\n 5. For further Kongo and other Bantu sources in black American speech, see Winifred Kellersberger Vass, _The Bantu-Speaking Heritage of the United States_ (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, UCLA, 1979). See also J. L. Dillard, _Lexicon of Black English_ (New York: Seabury Press, 1977). This fine text is full of useful observations, such as (p. 61) \"Popular music has established a countertrend in which Black terminology has virtually taken over the domain for American English,\" and (p. 111) \"The terminology of [rootwork and conjure] differs more from mainstream language than does that of any other activity.\" The formula for the original _tobe_ charms is cited in K. E. Laman's _Dictionnaire Ki-Kongo-Fran\u00e7ais_ , Vol. II (Farnborough: Gregg reprint, 1964).\n\n 6. Robert Farris Thompson and Joseph Cornet, _The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds_ (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1981), p. 149.\n\n 7. Vicente Rossi, _Cosas de negros: Los Or\u00edgenes del Tango y Otros Aportes al Folklore Rioplatense_ (C\u00f3rdoba: Imprenta Argentina, 1926), pp. 34\u201335. The source of Rossi's observation would appear to be the French naturalist Alcides d'Orbigny, who witnessed a _candomb\u00e9_ in Montevideo in 1827 which made him recognize that in dance Africans \"regain for a moment their nationality.\" See George Reid Andrews, _The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires: 1800\u20131900_ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), pp. 162\u201363.\n\n 8. Georges Balandier, _Sociologie actuelle de l'Afrique noire_ (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955), p. 39.\n\n 9. Wyatt MacGaffey, _Custom and Government in the Lower Congo_ (Los Angeles: University of California Press 1970), p. 306.\n\n 10. John M. Janzen and Wyatt MacGaffey, _An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire_ (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1974), p. 34.\n\n 11. A. Fu-Kiau Kia Bunseki-Lumanisa, _N'Kongo Ye Nza Yakun'zungidila: Nza Kongo_ (Kinshasa: Office National de la Recherche et de D\u00e9veloppement, 1969), p. 14.\n\n 12. _Ibid_.\n\n 13. As poetically instanced by the following citation from Karl E. Laman, _The Kongo, III_ (Uppsala: Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensia, 1962), p. 42: \"A chief inheriting the kingdom of Vunda must see the mountain Ludi... before his investiture, to enable him to judge _(ludika)_ with impartiality.\"\n\n 14. For details on Kongo medicine and government, see Thompson and Cornet, _op. cit_., pp. 37\u201342.\n\n 15. A point not lost on W. E. B. Du Bois, who wrote: \"The chief remaining institution was the priest... healer of the sick, the interpreter of the unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong.\" Cited in John W. Blassingame, _The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 40\u201341.\n\n 16. From a work in progress kindly shared by Professor MacGaffey with the author.\n\n 17. Janzen and MacGaffey, _op. cit_., p. 34.\n\n 18. _Ibid_.\n\n 19. For further details on the sign of the four moments of the sun, see Thompson and Cornet, _op. cit_., pp. 43\u201352. See also Fu-Kiau Bunseki, _The African Book Without Title_ , privately published MS., 1980.\n\n 20. Fu-Kiau, Bunseki, _The African Book Without Title_ , p. 3\n\n 21. Fu-Kiau Bunseki, _N'Kongo Ye Nza Yakun'zungidila_ , p. 30.\n\n 22. Interview, Fu-Kiau Bunseki, winter 1978.\n\n 23. MacGaffey, _op. cit_., p. 25.\n\n 24. Lydia Cabrera, _El Monte: Igbo Fina Ewe Orisha, Vititinfinda_ (Havana: Edicones C.R., 1954), p. 136.\n\n 25. _Ibid_.\n\n 26. _Ibid_., p. 127.\n\n 27. _Ibid_. Wyatt MacGaffey translated this fragment of Ki-Kongo.\n\n 28. \"Como se prepara una nganga,\" in Cabrera, _op. cit_., pp. 118\u201348.\n\n 29. George Eaton Simpson, \" 'Baptismal,' 'Mourning' and 'Building' Ceremonies of the Shouters in Trinidad,\" _Journal of American Folklore_ , 79 (1966), pp. 537\u201350. Jeannette Hillman Henney, _Spirit Possession Belief and Trance Behavior in a Religious Group in St. Vincent, British West Indies_ (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1968), pp. 202\u20134.\n\n 30. Simpson, _op. cit_., p. 547, Diagram 4. Chalked circles around the eyes of initiates enable them to \"see\" when they travel spiritually, which mirrors closely Kongo belief and custom.\n\n 31. Henney, _op.cit_., p. 203. In modern Kongo, Janzen and MacGaffey report ( _op. cit_., p. 23, Fig. 3), that this is the \"membership card of the Universal Church of the Twelve Apostles. The central device is an example of _glossalalia in print_ [emphasis added]. It was originally seen 'like a billboard in the sky' by the founder of the Church....\"\n\n 32. Roger Bastide, _The African Religions of Brazil_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 206.\n\n 33. Napole\u00e3o Figueiredo, \"Os caminhos de Exu,\" _Sete Brasileiros e seu universo_ (Brasilia: Departamento de Documenta\u00e7\u00e3o e Divulga\u00e7\u00e3o, 1974), pp. 89, 96.\n\n 34. Jos\u00e9 Ribeiro de Souza, _400 pontos riscados e cantados na umbanda e candombl\u00e9_ (Rio de Janeiro; Editora Eco, 1966), p. 60.\n\n 35. _3000 pontos riscados e cantados na umbanda e candombl\u00e9_ (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Eco, 1975). According to Rainer Flasche, in his _Geschichte und Typologie Afrikanischer Religiositate, Marburger Studien z\u00fcr Afrika\u2013und Asienkunde, Seria A_ (p. 199): \"In the area of Umbanda [as opposed, apparently, to macumba] which is taken to be specially scientific, the _pontos riscados_ are today valued no longer as sacred signs that bring down the spirits but rather only as symbols that elucidate teachings [about such spirits].\"\n\n 36. I wish to thank Senhor Oresto Mannarino, director in 1968 of the Police Museum, for many courtesies involved in the study of these pieces. Both the cup and the sash are probably twentieth-century works, dating perhaps from before 1941.\n\n 37. De Souza, _op. cit_., p. 91. The text of the song combines scraps of Ki-Kongo _(zungi, Nzambi)_ and Yoruba _(Oduduwa)_ with Portuguese.\n\n 38. John H. Weeks, _Among the Primitive Bakongo_ (London: Seeley, Service & Co., 1914), p. 281: \"Shooting stars _(nienie)_ are believed to be spirits... travelling... about in the sky.\"\n\n 39. For a brief discussion of the Eshu\/Og\u00fan liaison in Afro-Brazilian thinking, see Roger Bastide, _Le Candombl\u00e9 de Bahia_ , (Paris: Mouton, 1958), p. 226, 43n. There are also clay images for Elegba in Cuba brandishing iron rods, \"roads of Og\u00fan.\"\n\n 40. Janzen and MacGaffey, _op. cit_., p. 35, 2.4.\n\n 41. _Ibid_., 1.1, 1.3, 1.6.\n\n 42. _Ibid_., 4.2, 4.5.\n\n 43. For details, see Thompson and Cornet, _op. cit_., pp. 37\u201339.\n\n 44. Karl E. Laman, _The Kongo, II_ (Uppsala: Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensia, 1957), Figs. 35A, 38.\n\n 45. Karl E. Laman, _The Kongo, III_ (Uppsala: Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensia, 1962), p. 132.\n\n 46. Interview, Fu-Kiau Bunseki, July 1975.\n\n 47. Interview, Wyatt MacGaffey, winter 1978.\n\n 48. Interview, Fu-Kiau Bunseki, November 1978.\n\n 49. Cabrera, _op. cit_., p. 123. This particular _prenda_ also included holy water from a Roman Catholic church, \"to make the medicine Christian,\" the head of a bat, the head of a chameleon, and many other things.\n\n 50. _Ibid_., p. 131.\n\n 51. Information given me by Lydia Cabrera, telephone interview, winter 1979.\n\n 52. Cabrera, _op. cit_., p. 121.\n\n 53. Lydia Cabrera, _Porqu\u00e9: Cuentos Negros de Cuba_ (Havana: Ediciones C y R, 1948), pp. 248\u201349. Cabrera mentions the names of Afro-Cuban carvers of _minkisi_ \u2014Tata \u00d1unga, Sab\u00e1 Caraballo, and Ta Rafael\u2014and a sugar plantation, Las Canas, where intensive carving of _minkisi_ -figurines was said to have occurred in Cuba in the last century.\n\n 54. _La Ilustraci\u00f3n Espa\u00f1ola_ , Ano XIX, No. XXX (15 August 1875), p. 1.\n\n 55. The _matiabo_ image was picked up from a rebel soldier in Zumarquacam, Cuba, and was said to have been filled with the ashes of Spanish soldiers. On the other hand, Fu-Kiau Bunseki (personal communication, November 1978) says the horn could have been used by an expert in peace-making as well as in war.\n\n 56. Louis Maximilien, _Le Vodou Haitien: Rite Radas-Canzo_ (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l'Etat, 1945), pp. 185\u201391. Cf. also Maya Deren, _Divine Horsemen_ (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1970), p. 275: \"Pacquets Congo are bound as magical safe-guards. [their] efficacy depends on the technique of careful wrapping.\"\n\n 57. _Ibid_., photograph facing p. 188.\n\n 58. Informant: Andr\u00e9 Phanord, March 1975, Port-au-Prince.\n\n 59. Source: Lydia Cabrera, November 1978.\n\n 60. Fu-Kiau Bunseki, interview, December 1978.\n\n 61. For example, as early as the eighteenth century in Jamaica there were, among the blacks, notices about charms enclosing cemetery earth.\n\n 62. Newbell Niles Puckett, _Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro_ (New York: Dover, 1969), p. 273.\n\n 63. Fu-Kiau Bunseki, October 1978.\n\n 64. Puckett, _op. cit_., p. 233.\n\n 65. Fu-Kiau Bunseki, interview, October 1978.\n\n 66. _Ibid_.\n\n 67. Robert Tallant, _Voodoo in New Orleans_ (New York: Collier, 1962), p. 229.\n\n 68. _Ibid_., p. 228.\n\n 69. _Ibid_., p. 229.\n\n 70. Eric Sackheim, _The Blues Line: A Collection of Blues Lyrics_ (New York: Schirmer Books, 1975), p. 432.\n\n 71. Cf. Thompson and Cornet, _op. cit_., p. 200, excerpted from a long interview with Fu-Kiau Bunseki, 30 September 1980. For a brief but brilliant analysis of symbolic usages of tombs in Kongo, see Kimpianga Mahaniah, _La Mort dans la pens\u00e9e kongo_ (Kinsantu: Centre de Vulgarisation Agricole, 1980).\n\n 72. Sarah Hodgson Torian, \"Notes and Documents: Antebellum and War Memories of Mrs. Telfair Hodgson\" ( _Georgia Historical Quarterly_ , 27, 4 (December, 1943), p. 352.\n\n 73. Georgia Writers' Project, _Drums and Shadows_ (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940); for further examples of tying the spirit of the dead person to the tomb by means of the last things she or he used, see John Vlach, _The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts_ (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978), p. 40. Cf. Peter A. Brannon, \"Central Alabama Negro Superstitions,\" _Birmingham News_ (January 18, 1925): \"A Gullah negro on the Santee river explained to me that it was their custom to place the last plate, the last glass and spoon used before death on the grave.\"\n\n 74. R. E. Dennett, _Seven Years among the Fjort_ (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1887), p. 104. The burial carriage is decorated with other items sometimes appearing on nineteenth-century Kongo tombs\u2014crockery, flags, statuary, vessels, and a wild-cat skin.\n\n 75. Alexander Barclay, _A Practical View of the Present State of Slavery_ (London: 1828), pp. 131\u201333.\n\n 76. _Georgia Writers' Project, op. cit_., p. 167.\n\n 77. Thompson and Cornet, _op. cit_., p. 201.\n\n 78. Laman, _The Kongo, III_ , p. 37.\n\n 79. Telephone interview, fall 1975, also cited in Thompson and Cornet, _op. cit_., p. 198.\n\n 80. Gilbert de Chambertrand, \"La F\u00eate des morts en Guadeloupe,\" _Tropiques_ , Vol. LII (December 1954), pp. 35\u201341. Ramona Austin brought this reference to my attention.\n\n 81. Fu-Kiau Bunseki, interview, 9 October 1977.\n\n 82. Andr\u00e9 Pierre, interview, Port-au-Prince, 22 March 1981.\n\n 83. Ruth Bass, \"The Little Man,\" in Alan Dundes (ed.), _Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel_ (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973), p. 395.\n\n 84. Thompson and Cornet, _op. cit_., pp. 193\u2013210.\n\n 85. Fu-Kiau Bunseki, interview, fall 1977.\n\n 86. L'Abb\u00e9 Proyart, _Histoire de Loango, Kakongo, et autres royaumes d'Afrique_ (Paris: Berton and Crapart, 1776), p. 192\u201393.\n\n 87. Thomas Atwood, _The History of the Island of Dominica_ (London: J. Johnson, 1791), p. 265.\n\n 88. Informant: Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Kingston, Jamaica, September 1981.\n\n 89. I am grateful to Sa. Janina Rubinowitz, who pointed out a _kandu_ tree at Godo Olo, on the Tapanahoni River in Suriname among the Djuka in December 1981.\n\n 90. Samuel Selvon, _Ways of Sunlight_ (London: Longman Group Ltd., 1979), pp. 99, 101.\n\n 91. Eudora Welty, _The Wide Net and Other Stories_ (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 156. See also the section on bottle trees in Thompson and Cornet, _op. cit_., pp. 178\u201381.\n\n 92. Thompson and Cornet, _op. cit_., pp. 208, 137n.\n\n 93. _Ibid_., pp. 197, 209, note 167. This section is but a preliminary assessment of the bottle-tree phenomenon in the Kongo New World. John Mack, assistant keeper of the Ethnography Department of the Museum of Mankind, has kindly pointed out (personal communication, 21 December 1981) the Bongo and Moru versions of the bottle tree among East African civilizations. With further evidence we may plot the distribution of intervening Bantu traditions, between East Africa and Kongo, thus revealing myriad possibilities of massive reinforcement of the tradition in the Black New World. Cf. W. and A. Kronenberg, _Die Bongo_ (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1981), Figures 54, 55, 73.\n\n 94. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, _The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly_ (Washington, D.C.: National Collection of Fine Arts, 1976); _The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly_ (Montgomery, Ala.: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1977), pp. 1\u201320.\n\n 95. The work might be characterized as monumental visual glossolalia. Hampton devised a secret script in association with his sacred furniture, itself a kind of writing in three dimensions. Study of this work in comparison with \"spiritual writing\" in Rio, Trinidad, and Cuba might unlock unsuspected resonances and intentions, particularly as regards the geometrically enclosed mystic ciphers of the ground-drawings of the holy \"pointers\" of the island of St. Vincent.\n\n 96. Literature on the work of Henry Dorsey includes John Fewtterman, \"Tinkerer Dreams Up a Forest of Things,\" Louisville _Times_ , September 13, 1960; John Christensen, \"Henry Dorsey's House as Art,\" _Scene_ (Louisville _Times_ Sunday magazine), November 18, 1972; Guy Mendes, \"Found People: Some Figures on My Urn\" _Place\/Rogues Gallery_ II, 2 (1973), 44\u201346; Ellsworth Taylor, _Folk Art of Kentucky_ (Kentucky Arts Commission, 1976); Jan Wampler, _All Their Own: People and the Places They Build_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 150\u201355; Charles McCombs, \"Modern Art in Brownsboro,\" in _Charles McCombs Almanac_ (Brownsboro: Charles McCombs, 1974).\n\n 97. Charles Duvelle, _Musique Kongo: Ba-Bembe, ba-Congo, ba-Kongo-Nseke, ba-Lari_ (Ocora LP OCR 35), accompanying essay, illustration 12: \"friction-drum, a _mukwiti_. This is an open, cylindrical drum to which one skin is nailed; a wooden stick hidden inside the body is firmly attached to one to the center of the membrane.... various metal objects of Western origin (switches, electric-light bulbs, electric cables, etc.) are attached to the body of the instrument and are supposedly connected to an earphone situated inside the drum.... While he plays the drummer operates the switches or turns a small handle....\"\n\n 98. I thank Eva Dorsey Williams, surviving sister of Henry Dorsey, who in an interview in the summer of 1974 let me copy pertinent facts from her family scrapbook, especially as regards the life and times of Maria Prewitt.\n\n 99. _Ibid_.\n\n100. Interview with Guy Dorsey, brother of Henry, February 1974. In a letter dated 21 October 1974 Guy Dorsey added a phrase that in many ways summed up the work of his departed sibling: \"My brother Henry... spent many hours of happy moments getting all his trinkets together and enjoyed showing people that stopped by to see everything in working order.\"\n\n101. Interview, Eva Dorsey Williams, fall 1974.\n\n102. James Joyce, _Ulysses_ (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), p. 49. Joyce apparently refers to a song, which itself refers to a prodigal wanderer, one of the themes of the Dorsey house. But this interesting coincidence cannot detain us here.\n\n103. Interview, Guy Dorsey, March 1974.\n\n104. Interview, Eva Dorsey Williams, July 1974.\n\n105. David C. Driskell, _Two Centuries of Black American Art_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), illustration, p. 89.\n\n106. Guy Mendes, _op. cit_., p. 46.\n\n107. Visible in Jan Wampler, _op. cit_., p. 151.\n\n#### Three\n\n 1. Melville J. Herskovits, _Life in a Haitian Valley_ (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1971), p. 31.\n\n 2. C. L. R. James, _The Black Jacobins_ (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), p. 394. See also Philip Curtin, _The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census_ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), pp. 75\u201377, 144 (graph), 181\u201383, 191\u201397, 200. Curtin points out (p. 181) that Haiti's population stemmed from slaves who had accounted for more than three-quarters of the entire eighteenth-century French Atlantic slave trade.\n\n 3. See Chapter III, sections on _minkisi_ and _nz\u00f3 a nkisi_.\n\n 4. Interview with Ralph Isham, spring 1976, kindly granted by Mr. Isham.\n\n 5. Alfred M\u00e9traux, _Le Vaudou Haitien_ (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), p. 24.\n\n 6. See Robert Cornevin, _Histoire du Dahomey_ (Paris: \u00c9ditions Berger-Levrault, 1962), pp. 74\u201382.\n\n 7. For details, Karl Polanyi's _Dahomey and the Slave Trade_ (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966) provides an excellent analysis.\n\n 8. Paul Mercier, \"The Fon Of Dahomey,\" in _African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples_ (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 212\u201314.\n\n 9. This etymology, my own, fits the fact of the intense and creative creolizing pressure brought to bear on many elements of culture from Africa on Haitian soil. The Yoruba term _l'awo_ , \"mystery,\" expands into a broader semantic range when it dovetails with the Dahomean sense of mystery, meaning \"deity.\"\n\n 10. This chart draws on many sources, including Herskovits, _Life in a Haitian Valley_ , pp. 314\u201317; Harold Courlander, _Haiti Singing_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1939); Harold Courlander, _The Drum and the Hoe_ (Berkeley: University of California, 1960); and Maya Deren, liner notes to _Voices of Haiti_ , LP (New York: Elektra Records, c. 1953).\n\n 11. Mercier, _op. cit_., p. 223: \"G\u016b is specially linked with _Lisa_ , strength and the sun.... _Lisa_ comes down to earth holding _Gu_ in his hand in the form of a _gubasa_.\"\n\n 12. I heartily thank Vincent Kinhou\u00e9 Ahokpe of the Mus\u00e9e d'Abomey and his assistant for the privilege of photographing and studying the famous monumental _gubasa_ of Abomey, 10 January 1968. It was given as an \"altar of the spirit of victory.\"\n\n 13. Informants: Sagbaju, son of King Glele and brother of King Gbehanzin, and Akpalosi, son of Sagbaju, Abomey, 10 January 1968.\n\n 14. _Ibid_.\n\n 15. _Ibid_.\n\n 16. Michel Leiris, \"Note sur l'usage de chromolithographies catholiques par les voduisants d'Haiti,\" in _Les Afro-Americains_ (Dakar: Ifan-Dakar, 1953), p. 204.\n\n 17. Alfred M\u00e9traux, _Voodoo in Haiti_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), Plate XV, print of St. James the Elder. For further argument on possible symbolism inherent in the shape of the staffs of the flags of _vodun_ , see my section of _The Four Moments of the Sun_ , pp. 172ff.\n\n 18. Seen on a field trip to Haiti, late August 1961, at Bizonton, in the company of Emmanuel Paul, who kindly led me to a rite for Papa Og\u00fan.\n\n 19. Explication of the iconography by Sagbaju and Akpalosi, Abomey, 10 January 1968. Their testimony jibes with Cornevin, _op.cit_., p. 127: \" _Gle gle ma yon ze_ fields cannot be lifted up [by the wind],\" which he, too, gives as a \"strong name\" of Glele. See also entry for _togodo_ in Julien Alapini, _Le Petit Dahom\u00e9en: Grammaire\u2014vocabulaire_ (Cotonou: \u00c9ditions du Benin, 1969), p. 257.\n\n 20. Informant: Vincent Kinhou\u00e9 Ahokpe, Abomey, 10 January 1968.\n\n 21. Cf. Maximilien Qu\u00e9num, _Au Pays des Fons: Us et coutumes du Dahomey_ (Paris: Larose \u00c9diteurs, 1938), p. 149.\n\n 22. Mercier, _op. cit_., p. 221.\n\n 23. _Ibid_.\n\n 24. I thank Wyatt MacGaffey for bringing this pun to my attention.\n\n 25. Moreau de Saint-M\u00e9ry, _Description topographique... de la partie fran\u00e7aise de l'\u00eele de Saint-Domingue_ , Vol. I (Philadelphia: 1797), pp. 210\u201311. Quoted in M\u00e9traux, _Voodoo in Haiti_ , p. 39. I have reworked the translation.\n\n 26. M\u00e9traux, _ibid_.\n\n 27. Jean Price-Mars, \"Lemba-Petro: Un Culte secret,\" in _Revue de la soci\u00e9t\u00e9 d'histoire et de geographie d'Haiti_ IX, 28 (1938). John Janzen, an anthropologist who has worked for several years in Kongo, has had occasion to analyze this text and finds many strong influences stemming from Kongo in general and the Lemba Society in particular. He discusses these parallels in a recent volume, _Lemba, 1650\u20131930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the New World_ (New York: Garland, 1982), pp. 273\u201392.\n\n 28. Jean Price-Mars, \"Lemba-Petro, un culte secret,\" in _Revue de la soc\u00ec\u00e9t\u00e9 d'histoire et de g\u00e9ographie d'Haiti_ , Port-au-Prince, 9, 28 (1938), 12\u201331.\n\n 29. Maya Deren, _Voices of Haiti_ LP.\n\n 30. Maya Deren, _Divine Horseman: Voodoo Gods of Haiti_ (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1970).\n\n 31. For discussion, see M\u00e9traux, _Le Vaudou Haitien_ , pp. 66\u201367.\n\n 32. Mercier, _op. cit_., p. 221.\n\n 33. Seen between Bizonton and Port-au-Prince during a survey of peristyles in the area of the capital in March 1975.\n\n 34. P. Amaury Talbot, _In the Shadow of the Bush_ (London: William Heinemann, 1912), p. 25, illustration.\n\n 35. M\u00e9traux, _Le Vaudou Haitien_ p. 68. Translation mine.\n\n 36. These structural observations are inspired by Karen McCarthy Brown's _The Veve of Haitian Vodu: A Structural Analysis of Visual Imagery_ (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1975), a landmark study.\n\n 37. Thompson and Cornet, _op. cit_., p. 203, suggesting links between this custom and the rhythmic unfurling and dancing with umbrellas at the traditional jazz funeral in New Orleans.\n\n 38. M\u00e9traux, _Voodoo in Haiti_ , p. 161.\n\n 39. _Ibid_.\n\n 40. And recalling the fact, as Polanyi, _op. cit_., p. 54, points out, that in old Dahomey \"everything went by pairs and even multiple pairs.... every official in the kingdom had his female counterpart.... throughout the army... every male, from the highest ranking officer down to the last soldier, had his female counterpart in the palace.\"\n\n 41. Interview with \u00c1lvares, near L\u00e9ogane, 21 March 1975.\n\n 42. Eleanor Ingalls Christensen, _The Art of Haiti_ (New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1975), p. 69.\n\n 43. I am grateful to Pierre Monosiet, curator of the Museum of Haitian Art, for bringing these flags to my attention in the summer of 1961. They have since been stolen from a private collection in New England and their whereabouts are still unknown. Monosiet himself suggested the tentative dating of 1945 for these flags.\n\n 44. John Janzen, Lemba, 1650\u20131930, pp. 284\u201385.\n\n 45. For the Tu-Chokwe design, see Eduardo dos Santos, _Sobre a religi\u00e3o dos quiocos_ (Lisbon: Junta de Investiga\u00e7\u00f5es do Ultramar, 1962) Fig. 1; for the Ndembu ground-sign, Victor Turner, _Chihamba the White Spirit: A Ritual Drama of the Ndembu_ (Manchester: Manchester University Press edition, 1969), Plate 8b; Pende drawings of cosmograms, from an unpublished MS. by R. P. de Sousberghe, were kindly shared with me, in a personal communication (18 August 1977), by Marie-Louise Bastin.\n\n 46. Cover illustration, Milo Rigaud, _La Tradition voudoo et le voudoo haitien_ (Paris: \u00c9ditions Niclaus, 1953).\n\n 47. R. F. Thompson, \"The Flash of the Spirit: Haiti's Africanizing Vodun Art,\" in Ute Stebich, _Haitian Art_ (New York: Abrams, 1978), pp. 34\u201335. _Rara_ refers to Kongo-influenced pre-Lenten street orchestras, _coumbite_ to African-influenced communal work parties fueled by percussion.\n\n#### Four\n\n 1. D. T. Niane, _Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali_ (London: Longman, 1965).\n\n 2. _Ibid_., pp. 58, 93\u201394, note 62: \"A 'tana' is an hereditary taboo, can also mean a totem... in this case Soumaoro was forbidden to touch ergot, of which a cock's spur is composed, and as long as he observed this he could concentrate in himself the power of his ancestors.\" The presence of a similar belief, in the power of the animal- _tono_ (cf. _tana_ ), among Afro-Mexicans of the Costa Chica south of Acapulco would appear to constitute an important New World Mandeism.\n\n 3. Charles S. Bird, \"The Development of Mandekan (Manding): A Study of the Role of Extra-linguistic Factors in Linguistic Change,\" in David Dalby, ed., _Language and History in Africa_ (New York: Africana Publishing Corp., 1970), pp. 154\u201355.\n\n 4. _Ibid_., p. 156.\n\n 5. Charles S. Bird, personal communication, winter 1976.\n\n 6. _Ibid_.\n\n 7. Personal communication, spring 1980.\n\n 8. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltr\u00e1n, \"Tribal Origins of Slaves in Mexico,\" _Journal of Negro History_ , Vol. XXXI (1945), p. 280.\n\n 9. For details, see Gonzalo Aguirre Beltr\u00e1n, _Cuijla: Esbozo etnogr\u00e1fico de un pueblo negro_ (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econ\u00f3mica, 1958), pp. 52\u201364. As late as 1801, authorities were complaining of the independence of the blacks of the region, \"that they didn't have a fixed residence, that they lived in the fields in scattered huts\" (p. 62).\n\n 10. Lic. Francisco V\u00e1zquez, _Ometepec: Leyenda de un pueblo_ (Puebla: Editorial Cajica, 1964), p. 74.\n\n 11. Aguirre Beltr\u00e1n, _Cuijla_ , p. 60, from a letter by the mayor of Guatulco to the viceroy of New Spain, 1591.\n\n 12. Gerard Brasseur, in his _\u00c9tablissements humans au Mali_ (Dakar: M\u00e9mories de l'Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, 1968), p. 247, reports that the primary characteristic of nuclear Mande architecture is the nearly exclusive position held by the cone-on-cylinder type in traditional villages. In this matrix emerged the four variants of the Mande cone-on-cylinder style. For details, see Tod Eddy, \"Manding Architecture from Africa to the New World: A Study in the History of African and Afro-Mexican Art\" (unpublished paper, spring 1974), pp. 3\u201340. Eddy's paper has the advantage of field study, not only on the Costa Chica but in terms of long residence in Kangaba, the heart of the nuclear Mande. It is an excellent study and I have relied heavily upon it. My own field trips to Kangaba (1975) and to the Costa Chica in Mexico (spring 1977) confirm his findings.\n\n 13. I am grateful to Se\u00f1ora Julia Venedado, of the village of Montecillos, and her colleagues, for the privilege of making a close study of their family kitchen-roundhouses in March 1977.\n\n 14. Eddy, _op. cit_., p. 42, was the first to note this trace of possible (northern Mande) Soninke influuence on the roof types of Costa Chica black architecture. For details on Afro-Mexican roofing, see Beltr\u00e1n, _Cuijla_ , pp. 94\u201395.\n\n 15. Eddy, _op. cit_., p. 52.\n\n 16. Personal communication, 29 July 1977.\n\n 17. David P. Gamble, _The Wolof of Senegambia_ (London: International African Institute, 1967), p. 41.\n\n 18. Susan M. Yecies, \"African Influence in Domestic Mexican Architecture: San Nicol\u00e1s, Costa Chica,\" May 1971, New Haven.\n\n 19. Labelle Prussin, \"Sudanese Architecture and the Manding,\" African Arts III, 4 (1970), 15. Cf. George W. McDaniel, _Hearth and Home: Preserving a People's Culture_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), p. 33: \"Many traditional African societies did not think of a house as a single building; instead, homes consisted of clusters of buildings, the 'rooms' for sleeping, eating, entertaining....\"\n\n 20. Eddy, _op. cit_., p. 27.\n\n 21. Beltr\u00e1n, _Cuijla_ , p. 93.\n\n 22. Eddy, p. 56, was apparently the first to suggest this nuance: \"Two cross beams reinforce the roof from the inside instead of the lower internal ring of [thin and flexible rings of wood].\"\n\n 23. Aquiles Escalante, _El Negro en Colombia_ (Bogot\u00e1: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Sociolog\u00eda, Monograf\u00edas Sociol\u00f3gicas, 18, 1964), p. 5.\n\n 24. _Ibid_., p. 76.\n\n 25. Marquis de Wavrin, _Chez les Indiens de Colombie_ (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1953), p. 218. In Julian H. Steward's _Handbook of South American Indians_ (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1949), Vol. 5, p. 8, it is stated that \"such houses [with a circular plan and conical roof] are reported for the Arawak of the West Indies, and for the Choco of Colombia.\" These are areas inhabited by blacks as well. The problem of mutual reinforcement of similar ideas in Colombia cannot, in the absence of fieldwork, be resolved. But it is imperative to compare the two traditions in the future on the assumption that outward Amerindian form might conceal a number of traits absorbed from runaway slave architects. Certainly to judge from a published photograph of Colombia Arawak dwellings, Mande influence seems likely.\n\n 26. Cf. _House and Gardens_ 129, 3 (March 1966).\n\n 27. _Virginia Historic Landmarks Commission Survey Form_ , no. 154-10 (June 29, 1973).\n\n 28. The phrase and explication of \"off-beat phrasing of melodic accents\" are to be found in Richard Waterman's classic article, \"African Influence on the Music of the Americas,\" in Sol Tax (ed.), _Acculturation in the Americas_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 207\u201318.\n\n 29. Venice Lamb, _West African Weaving_ (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1975), pp. 90\u2013100, 180, 190, 198. \"These Ewe blankets resemble strongly the weaving generally found in regions north of the Volta Region\" (p. 212).\n\n 30. _Ibid_., p. 20.\n\n 31. _Ibid_.\n\n 32. _Ibid_., p. 75. See also R. Vedaux, _Tellem_ (Berg en Dal: Afrika Museum, 1977), p. 76.\n\n 33. _Ibid_., pp. 86\u201387.\n\n 34. Cf. Roy Sieber's observation in his _African Textiles and Decorative Arts_ (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972), p. 190, apropos of a rhythmized _welmare_ [Fulani men's cover] \"a superb example of seemingly random placement of pattern.... the careful matching of the ends of the cloth dispels the impression of an uncalculated overall design.\"\n\n 35. Lamb, _op. cit_., p. 86.\n\n 36. Pascal James Imperato, \"Blankets and Covers from the Niger Bend,\" _African Arts_ XII, 4 (August 1979), 41. Owen Barfield's _Poetic Diction_ (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1928) is a perfect school of learning for the appreciation of rhythmized textiles like _welmare_. Cf. p. 179: \"Imagination... lights up only when the normal continuum... is interrupted in such a manner that a kind of gap is created, and an earlier impinges directly upon a later\u2014a more living upon a more conscious.\"\n\n 37. Ren\u00e9e Boser-Sarivaxevanis, _Les tissus de l'Afrique occidentale_ (Basel: Pharos-Verlag, 1972), p. 83, Fig. 7.\n\n 38. Beth Ann Jeffe, \"The West African Narrow-Strip Weaving Tradition in the New World\" (senior thesis, Yale University, May 1977), p. 13.\n\n 39. _Ibid_. See also Vania Bezerra de Carvalho, _Mestre Abdias: O Ultimo Artes\u00e3o do pano da Costa_ (Salvador: Studio Domingos, 1982), p. 12\n\n 40. Jeffe, _op. cit_., p. 17.\n\n 41. I am grateful to Juana Elbein dos Santos and to Beth Ann Jeffe for copies of photographs of multistrip cloths by Abdias.\n\n 42. When on 10 January 1980 I asked Abdias, at his atelier in Salvador, why he used offbeat phrasing in his cloths, he replied: \"The design is more beautiful with elements thus separated out\" _(Fica mais linda ainda como separado o disenho)_ , and he added that offbeat phrasing distinguishes his work, as well as his inspiration, from machine-made cloths, \"which cannot make my zigzags.\" He repeated these points in August 1982.\n\n 43. Richard Price (ed.), _Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 317.\n\n 44. M. Ferdinand Denis, _La Guyane: ou histoire, moeurs, usages et costumes des habitants de cette partie de l'Amerique_ (Paris: Nepveu, 1823), p. 130, plus illustration facing p. 131. The word _camiza_ is not Amerindian but maroon black, referring to cotton loincloth. C. Healey brought this reference to my attention.\n\n 45. _Ibid_.\n\n 46. Richard Price, _The Guiana Maroons: A Historical and Bibliographic Introduction_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 14\u201315.\n\n 47. From a conversation with the paramount chief of the Djuka at his house in Dii Tabiki, 28 December 1981. Cf. _The Glossary of the Suriname Vernacular_ (Paramaribo: Volklectuur, 1961): p. 15, _dobroesten_ means \"textile type,\" p. 66.\n\n 48. Ma Apina, interview, Dii Tabiki, 29 December 1981: _Te wan Ndjuka sama o felifi sani den felifi mu kengi keele. Te a u go tapu a mu tapu a wan felifi mofu di de faawe fi en_. I thank James Park, an American linguist based in Paramaribo, for checking this translation.\n\n 49. Tony van Omeren of Paramaribo said on 1 January 1982 that _mamio_ , which he defined as \"different pieces of cloth sewn together,\" was more than a hundred years old (i.e., made before 1882) on the coast and that old mid-nineteenth-century examples were still to be found in a few Paramaribo collections. Else Henar-Hewitt of Paramaribo said that when a coastal black woman is expecting, they start to make a _mamio_. She also showed me a coastal costume of a festive type called _a meki sanni_ \"she makes the moves\" (Plate 140), worn by a special hostess whose function is to welcome people. Her costume alternates patterned cloth handkerchiefs set against vertically striped handkerchiefs, not unlike the cross-play between _dobi sten_ and _stiipi_.\n\n 50. John Vlach, _The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts_ (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978), p. 55.\n\n 51. Telephone interview, spring 1980.\n\n 52. From field notes generously shared with me by Dominic Julian Parisi. See also his excellent \"Needles and Drums: Antebellum Foundations for the Black Quilting Aesthetic\" (M.A. thesis, Yale University, May 1980).\n\n 53. _Yale Course Critique_ , 1973, p. 60.\n\n 54. Melville J. Herskovits, _Life in a Haitian Valley_ (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1971), pp. 254\u201355.\n\n 55. Informant: Ellen Walters, curator of exhibits, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, spring 1977.\n\n 56. Cf. Ruth Bass, \"The Little Man,\" in Alan Dundes (ed.), _Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore_ (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973), p. 393: \"Newspapers pasted on the walls will cause any spirit to stop and read every word on the papers before bothering you.\"\n\n 57. Gamble, _op. cit_., p. 41.\n\n 58. Cf. Sarah Brett-Smith, _Speech Made Visible: The Irregular as a System of Meaning_ , conference paper in press (August 15, 1980), p. 22: \"Bamana methods for transcribing the spoken word... cannot be clear.... [To] fulfill their purpose they must evade linguistic systematization and the socially (perhaps even politically) disruptive possibility of mass communication by introducing aberrant visual symbols which prevent immediate comprehension. Like the spoken, the transcribed word must remain indistinct and allusive; knowledge may thus rest secure in the shadowy realm of the aged or the exceptionally gifted.\"\n\n 59. Mary Douglas, _Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo_ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 95.\n\n 60. Charles S. Bird and Martha B. Kendall, \"The Mande Hero: Text and Context,\" in Ivan Karp and Charles S. Bird (eds.), _Explorations in African Systems of Thought_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 17: \"[Power]-laden parts of a hunter's kill\u2014skin, horns, teeth, claws, feather\u2014are incorporated into his... clothing. These serve to control the _nyama_ released by each kill, protecting the hunter from potential destruction; but they also empower him to perform greater deeds.\"\n\n#### Five\n\n 1. A list of writings on _nsibidi_ and _nsibidi_ \\- related material includes: Alfred Mansfeld, _Urwald-Dokumente_ (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1908), Tafeln IV and V; Rev. J. K. MacGregor, \"Some Notes on _Nsibidi,\" Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute_ , Vol. XXXIX, (1909), pp. 209\u201319; E. Dayrell, \"Some 'Nsibidi' Signs,\" _Man_ , No. 67 (1910), pp. 112\u201314; Elphinstone Dayrell, \"Further Notes on Nsibidi Signs with Their Meanings from the Ikom District, Southern Nigeria,\" _Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute_ , Vol. XLI (1911), pp. 521\u201340; P. Amaury Talbot, _In the Shadow of the Bush_ (London: William Heinemann, 1912), Appendix G, \"Nsibidi Signs,\" pp. 447\u201361; M. D. W. Jeffreys, \"Corrections,\" _Man_ 67 (Nsibidi Writing), 1910, _Man_ , Nos. 189\u201393 (September\u2013October 1964), p. 155; Kenneth Murray, unpublished MS. fragment on \"nsibidi writing among Ehuman Clan, Enyong, Aro Division,\" Lagos, 1938; M. D. W. Jeffreys, \"Notes on Nsibidi,\" unpublished MS. compiled at Calabar c. 1925, 10 pp.; David Dalby, \"The Indigenous Scripts of West Africa and Surinam: Their Inspiration and Design,\" _African Language Studies_ , Vol. IX (1968), pp. 156\u201397; Robert Farris Thompson, \"Black Ideographic Writing: Calabar to Cuba,\" _Yale Alumni Magazine_ (November 1978), pp. 29\u201333; Kenneth Campbell, _Secrets of Nsibidi_ (unpublished MS. 1978); M.V. Spence, \"Nsibidi and Vai: A Survey of Two Indigenous West African Scripts\" (M.A. thesis, 21 May 1979).\n\n 2. P. Amaury Talbot, _op. cit_., p. 37.\n\n 3. Interview with Peter Eno, Mamfe, Cameroon, 26 May 1969.\n\n 4. Cf. Eno, _ibid_ : \"If you want to execute heavy things, dangerous matters, _nsibidi_ takes the lead.\" Cf. Jacques Derrida, _Of Grammatology_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976), pp. 101\u201340, \"the violence of the letter.\"\n\n 5. The late _ndidem_ of Big Qua Town, Nigeria, told me in January 1972 that the reason few Westerners had ever seen such signs was that they were swiftly drawn in chalk on the floor of the deceased person's house, among family members, and then quickly erased before others were allowed into the room.\n\n 6. Peter Eno, 26 May 1969.\n\n 7. Franklin W. Knight, _Slave Society in Cuba During the Nineteenth Century_ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), p. 50.\n\n 8. Daryll Forde (ed.), _Efik Traders of Old Calabar_ (London: International African Institute, 1956), p. 66, note 1 _a_.\n\n 9. Pedro Deschamps Chappeaux, \"Potencias: Secreto Entre Hombres,\" _Cuba_ VII, 72 (1968), 44.\n\n 10. Lydia Cabrera, _La Sociedad Secreta Abaku\u00e1_ (Havana: Ediciones C. R., 1959), includes four terms for Ejagham-related graphic writing in Cuba, including not only the now standard title for the writing, _anaforuana_ , but also _ereniyo_ (\"writing; symbol\"), _gand\u00f3_ (\"chalked sign\"); and _bang\u00f3_ (\"chalked sign\"). See pp. 68, 178.\n\n 11. Lydia Cabrera, _Anaforuana: Ritual y s\u00edmbolos de la iniciaci\u00f3n en la sociedad secreta Abaku\u00e1_ (Madrid: Ediciones R, 1975). I estimate there are approximately 512 discrete signs documented in this important text, a landmark study in the history of black Atlantic writing systems.\n\n 12. For a brief discussion of the Ejagham impact on the art of their neighbors, see R. F. Thompson, _African Art in Motion_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 173.\n\n 13. Cf. Philip Allison, _Cross River Monoliths_ (Lagos: Department of Antiquities, 1968), p. 17: \"Fighting was a man's normal occupation and on his success... depended his membership of certain important societies.\"\n\n 14. Malcolm Ruel, _Leopard and Leaders: Constitutional Policies Among a Cross River People_ (London: Tavistock Publications, 1969), p. 182. During the fifty years up to 1904 there had been no major warfare between tribes but rather a series of skirmishes between single villages, according to Mansfeld, who administered Ejagham territory in what is now western Cameroon.\n\n 15. For a recent, brief study of the fatting-house institution among the Ejagham's western neighbors, the Ibibio, see Jill Salmons, \"Fat Is Beautiful,\" _Art Links (The Commonwealth Arts Review)_ , September 1981, pp. 23\u201325.\n\n 16. T. J. Hutchinson, _Impressions of Western Africa_ (London, 1858), p. 160.\n\n 17. Interview with Mme. Grace Davis, Calabar, December 1978.\n\n 18. Rev. Hugh Goldie, _Dictionary of the Efik Language_ (Ridgewood: Gregg Press, reprint edition, 1964), p. 279.\n\n 19. Interview: Mme. Grace Davis, Calabar, December 1978.\n\n 20. Talbot, _op. cit_., p. 152 (illustration).\n\n 21. See Ruel, _op. cit_., for data on a cognate women's society, Ndem, among the Banyang; p. 204: \"its primary purpose [was] giving status to women... men seeking community status sought to marry these 'leaders among women.' It was not a matter of chance that both in Tali and Besongabang when I inquired about _Ndem_ , I was sent to the senior wife of the village leader.\"\n\n 22. Cf. Mansfeld, _op. cit_., p. 71: \" _Die ganze Mode soll in strenger Anlehnung an dass historische Vorbild: die erste Mboandemdame, die inalten Zeiten vom Himmel heruntergestiegen kam, verfertigt sein_.\"\n\n 23. I thank the chief and elders of Onun village for the privilege of studying a fine _echi okpere_ , kept in the local Ngbe hall, 27 December 1975. I thank Peter Eno of Mamfe for related data from Ekwe areas.\n\n 24. Informants: Ngbe elders, Oban, August 1978.\n\n 25. Cabrera, _La Sociedad Secreta Abaku\u00e1_ , p. 148.\n\n 26. _Ibid_.\n\n 27. The fact that _Akuaramina_ is an Efik term is given in Cabrera, _La Sociedad Secreta Abaku\u00e1_ , p. 151. I am much indebted to Pierre Verger for his unpublished detail of the _Akuaramina_ mask (Plate 145).\n\n 28. Or, as Ruel, _op.cit_., p. 184, describes it, \"a cult organization by which young men... were organized and ritually strengthened for fighting.\"\n\n 29. Edwin Ardener, \"Documentary and Linguistic Evidence for the Rise of the Trading Polities between Rio del Rey and Cameroons, 1500\u20131650,\" in I. M. Lewis (ed.), _History and Social Anthropology_ (London: Tavistock, 1968), p. 126.\n\n 30. An elder at Oban, for example, told me that Efut Ngbe still carried prestige, and he pointed to songs sung in Efut in Oban Ngbe liturgy as an indication of that fact (August 1978).\n\n 31. A. J. H. Lathan, _Old Calabar: 1600\u20131891_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 36.\n\n 32. Cabrera _La Sociedad Secreta Abaku\u00e1_ , p. 88.\n\n 33. _Ibid_., pp. 79, 83\u201384. My translation occasionally modifies, elides, or adds to the renderings of Cabrera's informants with glosses provided by the late King of the Efut at his residence in Calabar in December 1975, e.g., where Afro-Cubans give the creolized term Efokondo, I restore it to Efut, _Efut Ekond\u00f3_ , and suggest its actual location in Efut country.\n\n 34. _Ibid_., p. 87: pez del r\u00edo; pez del mar; _Tanze Uyo_ (lit, Lord Fish of the Voice); _Elori lori; Tanze Kefenbere_ ; Tanze es Ekue (lit., Lord Fish is a leopard); Tanze es Ekue...; _Fuerza...; por quien suspiraban los Adivinos...; oyos amarillos (arema)_.\n\n 35. _Ibid_., pp. 92\u201395.\n\n 36. Ejagham art cryptically refers to a miracle of fusion, the blending of the lordly energy of the leopard within the body of the fish. Talbot's drawings show denizens of the deep, crocodiles, with bodies marked with the checkered symbol of leopard presence, and, as we shall see, the Glasgow Art Museum includes in its study collection a brass tray upon which is clearly represented a leopard-fish. Among the Eastern Ejagham Father Druken of the Mamfe area collected (1969) a myth of a stolen fish. When the fish was restored, order resumed within the world (the very existence of which had been threatened).\n\n 37. Ekwe Ejagham informants recited terse, simple myths of Ngbe origin, most of which coincided with the essential structure of the material published by Cabrera, e.g., \"Our people say woman discovered Ekpe, but could not keep secret... men took over\" (Otu village, Cameroon, June 1969).\n\n 38. See Thompson, \"Black Ideographic Writing.\"\n\n 39. _Ibid_.\n\n 40. Informant: the late Ndidem of Big Qua Town, Nigeria, January 1972.\n\n 41. Pedro Deschamps Chappeaux, _op. cit_., pp. 45\u201346.\n\n 42. Cabrera, _Anaforuana_ , p. 51. In Cuba there is the highest rank, with the title _ntere\u00f1ob\u00f3n_ , and then a generalized rank with the title _ob\u00f3n_. This elides seven or more grades in Nigerian and Cameroonian Ngbe societies.\n\n 43. Informant: Julito Collazo, Hamden, Connecticut, January 1970. Cf. also Cabrera, _Anaforuana_ , p. 183.\n\n 44. Cabrera, _Anaforuana_ , p. 497.\n\n 45. Julito Collazo, interview, January 1970.\n\n 46. Cabrera _Anforuana_ , pp. 496\u201397.\n\n 47. Cabrera, _La Sociedad Secreta Abaku\u00e1_ , p. 40.\n\n 48. D. Jos\u00e9 Trujillo y Monagas, _Los Criminales De Cuba_ (Barcelona: Establecimiento Tipogr\u00e1fico de Fidel Giro, 1882), p. 366.\n\n 49. Cabrera, _La Sociedad Secreta Abaku\u00e1_ , p. 68, 178.\n\n 50. Ruel, _Leopards and Leaders_ , p. 245.\n\n 51. Cabrera, _La Sociedad Secreta Abaku\u00e1: Ese son ereniyo de mu\u00e9 que mat\u00e1; son Sik\u00e1n y pesc\u00e1_.\n\n 52. Cabrera, _El Monte_ , p. 215. See also her _Sociedad Secreta Abaku\u00e1_ , p. 178: \"The graphic signs create and dominate; whatever is not signed has no reality.\"\n\n 53. Cabrera, _Anaforuana_ , pp. 158\u201377.\n\n 54. _Ibid_., p. 181.\n\n 55. Cabrera, _La Sociedad Secreta_ , p. 164.\n\n 56. Cabrera, _Anaforuana_ , p. 187.\n\n 57. Informant: William Tayui, a native of the Obang area, western Cameroon, summer 1969.\n\n 58. Roger Bastide, _African Religions in the New World_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 115.\n\n 59. Cabrera, _La Sociedad Secreta Abaku\u00e1_ , p. 257.\n\n 60. _Ibid_., p. 266.\n\n 61. Juan Luis Mart\u00edn, _Vocabularios de \u00d1\u00e1\u00f1igo y Lucum\u00ed_ (Havana: Editorial Atalaya, 1946); Pedro Deschamps Chappeaux, \"El Lenguaje Abaku\u00e1,\" _Etnolog\u00eda y Folklore_ , 4 (July\u2013December 1967), pp. 39\u201347.\n\n 62. Israel Castellanos, \"El Diablito \u00d1\u00e1\u00f1igo,\" _Archivos del Folklore Cubano_ III, 4 (1928), 27\u201337.\n\n 63. _Ibid_., p. 37.\n\n 64. Cabrera, _Anaforuana_ , p. 440. Further glossed by Lydia Cabrera in conversation with the author, winter 1981.\n\n# **A BOUT THE AUTHOR**\n\nROBERT FARRIS THOMPSON was born on December 30, 1932, in El Paso, Texas. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the Yale Graduate School, having attended Yale College as an undergraduate. He is currently professor of African and Afro-American history of art at Yale University, where he is also Master of Timothy Dwight College. Professor Thompson has been a Ford Foundation fellow and has mounted major exhibitions of African art at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. His previous books, classics in their field, are _Black Gods and Kings_ and _African Art in Motion_.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}