About The Sum of All Things:
Excerpt:
VITA
The sun cut the bed sheets in two halves, one golden, one light blue. Through the open window, Vita could hear the early morning traffic, shouts, a woman’s laughter, the sound of a radio, the reassuring litany of daily life. For how long? she thought. For how long before all this is corrupted and gone, a washed-out memory, people will think it’s from old films and not from their own lives? Sitting up in the bed, she combed her short hair with her fingers. She had dyed it a boring brown to remain under the radar. Or the radars, plural. She had changed her looks right before arriving here, three weeks ago—an eternity you could say if you looked at her former life; an instant, a mere second if you looked at the bigger, cosmic picture. Time was the essence of her action—a paradox as she had both plenty of and yet not enough.
The sunrays caressed her naked body, feeling the muscles, appreciating the curves. She shook her head vigorously, chasing away the last inky drops of sleep that marred her consciousness. Her hand felt the empty space beside her, then the warmth of her pillow—her own warmth. How long since she had loved? Longer than she had been loved, in any case. Poor Thomas, Terrence, Paul, Vladimir and Hassan. She had loved Thomas. He had been the only one. She had loved him and they had killed him. The other guys, no, they had all survived—maybe because she hadn’t loved them. Love was lethal: it was the essence of death, not of life. The rarest and most dangerous poison. And if, by chance, you survived, you remained crippled forever.
She stood up and got dressed quickly. Jeans, t-shirt, leather jacket. The bare essentials. The hotel room was sparsely furnished, but comfortable—a table, two chairs, a cupboard (painted blue), the bed and nothing else. The smell of beeswax and dust floated around her, prickling her nose. She glanced at the blue sky framed by the window as a painting of impossible beauty and thought about the invisible machine in the sky, the Subliminal Empire’s technological eye, watching this planet while it was slowly destroying it.
HOKKI
The plane landed with a screech and a brutal sway, throwing all passengers both forward and sideways. Samarqandi Airlines were famous for their deadly crashes and Hokki muttered a silent prayer to an unknown God, which proved incredibly efficient as they stopped, unharmed, a few seconds later. Nobody clapped though, as they would have in the West. Instead the passengers turned to each other, smiled and shook hands. Hokki did the same with a wrinkled old lady wearing a traditional embroidered blue cotton gown and a flat cloth hat of the same color. She raised her hand above her head, saying something he didn’t understand. He then realized she was gesturing that he was very tall, which was true. He was a big man by Western standards, a giant of legends here. He nodded and they laughed together, the tiny woman hiding her mouth with her hand, he making the “ho-ho-hos” of a giant. Grabbing his bag to get off the plane, he told himself the adventure had just begun and that he had almost been killed from the start.
THOMAS
Thomas immediately recognized the short round man who walked into his shop, stumbling over the doormat.
“Commissioner-General Shakr Bassam!” he said from behind his counter, smiling. “Are you coming to my shop to arrest me or to buy a book?”
“Commissioner-General First Class,” the policeman corrected him as he made his way between the colorful shelves. “And don’t you joke about being arrested. It pains me. Can we go talk in your office?”
“Sure,” Thomas said, leading the way between the shelves.
The policeman’s somber look was a strange thing to behold with such a usually jovial man.
They both settled in the worn-out red designer leather armchairs decorating his tiny backroom office. He had bought the pair for a few bills at the flea market. The vendor had assured him they came from the Viborg City embassy when it was shut down during the Southeast Chinese world war—the war in which Thomas had directly participated with his hacker group by bringing down a Western Alliance military satellite, forcing him into exile in this city. He was now a political refugee, protected by New Samarqand through his friend Ali, who was the head cop of the city-state and who had helped him buy this bookstore and set up his new identity. Thomas considered the chairs as indirect spoils of war, enjoying their solid comfort with a zest of satisfying revenge.
“So?” Thomas said as Ali made sure he wasn’t sitting on the tail of his jacket.
“I have sad and worrying news, my friend. The king is very, very ill,” the policeman said, almost whispering.
Thomas nodded, waiting for his friend and protector to continue.
“I am worried about the rumors I am getting. Bad times ahead, I’m afraid.” the policeman added gloomily.
Thomas knew that if Ali Shakr Bassam said he was worried about the situation, then things were indeed really bad, as the policeman was prone to understatements. They both stared pensively at the poster of the goddess Nut decorating the opposing wall. She was the symbol of their secret congregation, the Egregorians, keepers and protectors of culture. Founded in 1934, just after the first Nazi public book-burnings, by a group of Jewish and non-Jewish writers, artists, psychoanalysts, politicians and intellectuals, the Egregorian Society was dedicated to fight intolerance in all its cultural forms. An égrégore was the spiritual and carnal manifestation of the common desire of a community, becoming an extremely powerful negative entity. It was, in short, a political monster. For them, Nazism was an égrégore, announced by the cultural wave of antisemitism that had preceded it. The same was true for Stalinism and any totalitarian movement that suddenly seized power through a revolution, be it political or religious. In their eyes, the only way you could efficiently fight and ultimately destroy such monsters was by using the same weapon against them: to build a cultural positively charged invisible “Golem,” ultimately stronger than the negatively charged spiritual monster.
The Egregorian Society had moved to New Istanbul in 1936, and after the war had one chapter on every continent and main city-states, each with a secret library, containing manuscripts and publications of authors censored in their own countries. Commissioner-General First Class Ali Shakr Bassam was the head of the Egregorian Society Section in New Samarqand and Thomas was its librarian and archivist.
“I can make some tea,” Thomas offered, but Shakr Bassam placed his hand on the young man’s forearm before he could move.
“No time,” he said. “I am only here to tell you of the situation and to organize a meeting as soon as possible. I had a quick talk over the phone with our fellow members. They agree that the times are dire. Something bad is going to happen. I know it. We all know it. Who knows what will happen with the twins when the king is dead? What will they do? Is there going to be a civil war when one of them is chosen to be king or queen?”
The twins were the ailing king Ujal’s children, Princess Farah and Prince Hamad. If New Samarqand was a relatively functioning democracy, with various parties and a rather precarious freedom of speech, it was also a monarchy.
Allied with the Chinese Confederation, it was considered one of the “evil powers” by the Western Alliance, and had therefore suffered many years from a strict economic blockade. The timid political reforms undertaken by king Ujal in the past three years had gradually thawed the city-state’s relations with the Western Alliance, but it was still under hard scrutiny, and the question of who was going to be his successor was considered a crucial test.
“What do you want me to do?” Thomas asked.
“I need you to do some . . . um, research for me. You know, check the usual suspects’ emails and such. And some embassies too.”
Thomas nodded. He was not only the Egregorians’ librarian and archivist, he was also their best hacker.
“Sure,” he said.
The policeman got up and turned around before leaving the small room, like a chubby Inspector Columbo.
“One last thing,” he said. “Before all the rest, check this person out. It might be important.”
He handed Thomas a small piece of paper.
“Hokki Makkonen,” the librarian read out loud. “Who’s that?”
“Exactly what I want to know,” the Commissioner said, before disappearing among the unsorted piles of books.
KASSANDRA
Naila walked into the little study and frowned at the gray cloud of smoke surrounding her companion and official employer, the world-famous poet Kassandra Alexopoulos, who was sitting at her desk, typing on her laptop, smoking her pipe, and dressed in her bathrobe.
“Phew!” Naila said. “You could have at least opened the window, Kassie!”
“I am working,” Kassandra quipped.
“You can work, take a pause and smoke in the garden. Here, I brought you a glass of tea. And you should get dressed. We’re going to be late.”
Kassandra sighed and picked up the hot glass from its saucer, holding it by the rim.
“I don’t want to go,” she said.
Naila rolled her eyes. “You’re like an impossible child sometimes,” she scolded her partner. “It’s important. People are counting on you.”
“It’s a just a poetry festival. Nobody cares about poetry anymore.”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk! Don’t be a diva.”
“But I am a diva,” Kassandra smirked.
“So be a diva in front of your audience. It’s much more gratifying.”
Kassandra put down her glass and stretched her arms with a long sigh.
“Yes, you are right.”
She turned off her laptop and got up.
“I will get dressed and sing my poems to the world,” she said dramatically, then burst into a laughter, joined by Naila.
“Who said poetry should be a serious thing, anyway?” she asked no one in particular, and disappeared into her bedroom.
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