Karl

Chapter 5 of Microcosmia

Microcosmia

East Africa

Chapter Five

Karl

Half a year later Vane was on the old road linking Massawa and An’erim.

He’d cast all accountability to the wind in a wild venture, a hare-brained scheme to overcome what he saw as a grave injustice. The bulk of those months were spent importing and organizing supplies in several Eritrean warehouses, juggling the Honey Foundation and Ethiopia’s Banke Internationale, and going over and over his blueprints with the engineers and technical men, all the while preparing himself psychologically for the great move to come.

So overwhelming were his doubt and shyness that, except for one brief flyover, he’d refused to actually visit, relying instead on photos, reports, and readings, while major construction went on at the site itself. But eventually everything was in order on the supplies end, and the first great convoy en route.

And now he was watching a pair of dust devils on collision course, tearing across the flat desert floor, leaving matching plumes on either side of the road. Just at the point of impact, the devils gained the road, banked hard, and shot, as a single driving force, to meet the long convoy lumbering west.

This initial run consisted of forty large trucks--flatbeds, reefers, and tractor trailers--and a fading tail of buses, vans, and pickups, all led by Isis, a battered silver Land Rover with a sawed-off roof. The Land Rover, driven by Vane, also contained his translator-guide Mudahid Asafu-Adjaye. As Mudahid had repeatedly, adamantly, and occasionally with passion pointed out, his name was pronounced Moo-DAH-heed. But no matter how many times Vane tried, it always came out Mudhead.

Like most civilized souls in East Africa, Somali-born Mudahid was a Muslim. Though he persisted in wearing the headpiece and traditional robes of his faith, a rebellious streak allowed him to refuse to face Mecca five times a day, to drink and smoke on occasion, and to eat whatever he wanted whenever he felt like it. Mudahid was at heart an independent observer of man and nature. Conscience and sentimentality were just dead weights.

As a young man he’d been a longshoreman and itinerant handyman, making his way around Saudi Arabia, the Mediterranean, and the Horn of Africa. Back then he ran guns, trafficked in opium, did anything he could to survive. And he’d worked for lords of crime, and twice had to kill a man. Eventually he lost his stomach for it, found Islam, and embarked upon life’s second half as a wandering wannabe cleric and dark dreamer.

The key to Islam is submission, a revolting thing to a man. But the flip side is that submission can be an endurance test, an attractive thing to a man. That was Mudahid’s edge. He embraced sacrifice and prayer like a man in solitary confinement with a barbell. And Islam made him strong, and kept him strong. He fasted and thirsted, he bowed and scraped with the best of them. He prayed himself dizzy and tithed himself dry, made his required pilgrimage to Mecca, was jostled and bruised in the Great Mosque corral.

Then one day during the holy month of Ramadan, in the prime of middle age and peak of health, Mudahid, too weak for discipline and too strong for suicide, for no apparent reason broke down; pigged out, drank himself silly. He expected the consequences to be overwhelming self-hatred and abysmal depression. When he came out of it feeling more a man and less a mannequin, he began to rethink himself. He’d spent way too long mechanically worshipping Muhammad, an unknown messenger, and Allah, an unseen deity. It was time to meet Mudahid, a character certainly deserving a life of his own.

Now Mudhead, at sixty-two years of age, was testing his ability to believe in anything. That waffling spirit had served as a magnet for the morbid personality of Cristian Honey Vane on the docks of Port Massawa.

Other qualities made the two men gel.

Mudhead, whose English was quite broken, was able to almost incidentally encapsulate Vane’s lonesome trains of thought, and so make simple sense of seemingly complex problems. This process could also be self-illuminating. As Mudhead explained his compromise with religion on that night of their meeting, over whiskey and burgers in a very-underground Port Massawa dive: “Mudahid Asafu-Adjaye can be Muslimman, still keep self. Can be Muslimman plus drink, smoke, fool around, gamble, even eat pork in pinch. Other Muslimman starve first. But Mudahid Asafu-Adjaye not robot. If Mudahid Asafu-Adjaye can pray five time day, Mudahid Asafu-Adjaye can sin five time day.”

Vane saluted him that night, and gave him his new nickname. And Mudhead came to accept it as his own, though such a name could be considered a great insult in the Islamic world. The familiar use of the name Cristian, however, was a hurdle too high for a man so steeped in the Koran. Vane from then on was simply “Bossman.”

Their glaring contrasts were complementary: Mudhead, black as coal, kindled Vane’s California glow. His spotless white robes were startlingly formal against his employer’s dirty T-shirt, khaki shorts, and grungy blue canvas deck shoes. His tiny round rimless glasses seemed almost a deliberate counterpoint to the American’s broad dark shades.

Mudhead’s rigid personality brought out Vane’s latent gallows humor. Vane, in rebelling against his own dumb luck, allowed Mudhead to find justification in rebelling against his own blind faith.

Vane rejected his wealth-determined status by impulsively bending whenever leadership was called for. Mudhead grimly teased Vane into being a kind of goofy B’wana, and Vane, out of his element, teased him right back by playing along.

This relationship was exclusive; the men Vane hired were illiterate blacks who spoke not a word of English. They watched coldly as the friendship of Vane and Mudhead grew, seeing openness as weakness, and closeness as a mutual death throe. They hated Vane’s guts, while secretly measuring his stamina and adaptability. So alien were they to his way of thinking that he’d have believed their icy demeanor was simply their style, had not Mudhead informed him otherwise.

There in the roofless Land Rover, Vane automatically leaned into his friend, who was once again completely under the spell of Sinatra. Vane’s ample CD collection was both blessing and curse; Western music kept the African occupied when Vane needed to be alone with his thoughts, but dragging Mudhead away from the headphones was like pulling a man out of rapid eye movement sleep. Now Mudhead shook him off and leaned away. After a few more seconds he removed the headphones and popped the cord out of the jack. He waited for the closing storm of All Or Nothing At All to fade out entirely before switching off the player. Mudhead then nodded vigorously while pointing out a double gleam preceding the approaching dust devils. Vane raised and repeatedly crossed his arms. The driver of the following truck, a flatbed stacked with rolled canvas tarps, made a complicated gesture out the window with his left arm. The convoy slowed to a halt.

“Jeeps?”

“Police,” Mudhead said shortly. “Mudahid advise Bossman handle discreet.”

The devils braked laterally to block the road, plumes of dust billowing behind them. Four cops stepped out of each jeep like men looking for a brawl. These were some of the blackest blacks Vane had ever seen; Mudhead, by comparison, was a fair-skinned specimen of East African descent. They plodded around the Land Rover, slowly and with great deliberation; like sumo wrestlers sizing opponents. All were very solidly built: barrel chests, high rears, protruding bellies. The police uniform was a spotless white headpiece, bleached polo shirt and shorts, black belt, and knee-high white athletic socks under highly polished steel-toed Army boots. Only the boots and belts did not scream white. Each belt held a holstered Luger, nightstick, mace canister, dart gun, walkie-talkie, and leather-sheathed seven-inch knife. Vane could feel their unmistakable contempt for his Aryan fairness. He and Mudhead were motioned out of the Rover.

The senior policeman, by his brass chevrons a captain, stepped directly in front of Vane. Two more from his vehicle, along with the other jeep’s occupants, began walking truck-to-truck, ordering trailers opened. The captain’s driver, a young bull of a man, stood smartly behind his superior, spine straight and hands gripped behind the back. It was a very military stance.

The captain was older than his men by twenty years, and heavier by a good fifty pounds. Planting himself as squarely as he could, he looked the sunburned American dead-on. Vane, who had removed his dark glasses prior to stepping out of the Land Rover, had difficulty with the black pools of the captain’s shades. It was like looking into the twin barrels of a shotgun. Worse, the man’s expression was that of a cruel and very personal bully. Vane instinctively lowered his eyes, looking back up cautiously when the captain turned to follow the movements of his men. Those custom-made sunglasses, which appeared quite expensive, bore a gold engraved figure running the length of each arm. The general impression was a prone griffin, but the figure’s head belonged to an animal unfamiliar to Vane. All the policemen wore sunglasses with this gold design. The captain’s shades, however, had the distinction of bearing three tiny diamonds above the winged figure’s raised tail.

“Good afternoon, officer,” Vane enunciated, minimizing the English nuances. “We’re on our way to an area called Mamuset in the Danakil. The tract was purchased by the Honey Foundation, an American entity dealing directly with Addis Ababa. We have state clearance for roads, railways, and airfields. The papers are in the glove box.”

The shotgun barrels swung back until they were aimed directly at Vane’s absurdly blue eyes. The thick lips split apart.

“Relax, Honey.” The voice was a basso profundo rumble. “This is not a traffic citation.” Vane inclined his head respectfully, gritted his teeth and kept silent. The sunglasses swerved to his left.

The captain spent much longer on Mudhead. A loathing incomprehensible to Vane arced between the two men until the air seemed charged. At last Mudhead turned away like the meeker of two strays.

The face swung back.

The captain, addressing the sky, said, “I am not interested in your papers, Honey. You may be surprised to learn that we are not overwhelmingly impressed by rich Americans here. We do not follow their exploits with delight and envy. So you will perhaps show no offense if I do not seek your autograph, or beg to be photographed in your famous presence.”

“I appreciate that, sir.”

The great black head drew back. “Is it true that all Americans are so . . . chatty? Must they comment on an officer’s every statement, as if his words, heartfelt and well-intended, were merely tidbits to pass with the Beluga and Dom Perignon? Honey, in Africa there is time without end, but not a moment to waste on the droll and mundane.” As calculated, the captain’s command of English greatly heightened his presence. The tactic must have been terribly effective on his inferiors. “Perhaps the fight for survival, which is inherent in all creatures here, precludes us from the pleasantries of easy conversation. We in Africa do not ‘run with the mouth,’ as you Americans like to say; we come directly to the point and are done with it. This deferential reticence may seem crude and primitive to you, naked as it is of dalliance and whimsicality. Our respect is for culture, for age, and for authority.

“Culture, because it is ingrained in all of us. The men and women you will encounter on this continent are steeped in ways that control every aspect of their personalities. They are not gaily-jetting free spirits.

“Age, because a man who has attained his later years obviously possesses the physical and psychological wherewithal needed to survive his full span. He knows the ways of Africa and he knows the ways of men.

“Authority, because therein a man learns his place. If he intends to stay alive in Africa he respects authority absolutely. He knows that his Beverly Hills playmates cannot help him here. He is quietly respectful. In this way he survives another day.”

The captain took a labored breath.

“Evidence of your coming, and of your willingness to tamper with systems timeless and beloved, has far preceded you. I speak not of the new paved road bridging your purchased land and An’erim, but of this great pipeline across our homeland, Awash to Mamuset. For five months now we have watched this dirty plastic headache growing like a tendril.”

He squeezed his hands together and rocked side to side, bettering his temper. “Now, Honey, I realize this must all seem an ugly dry waste to you. I understand you feel you are doing us an immeasurable favor by flooding a hellish crater of value to no one. Or maybe our wretchedness breeds myopia. Could it be that a swimming hole in the desert is sorely needed? In either case, I am certain your North American fans will get a real ‘kick’ out of it. They will surely see you as a most clever and sophisticated little Honey.”

The captain stopped rocking. “Over those five months I have been your closest ally. Believe it or not. The land at Mamuset is essentially a fraction of my precinct, so I have protected your monster from the decent indigenous people who wish it destroyed, and who despair over your blasé trashing of a landscape that has filled the eyes of long-forgotten ancestors with a kind of love that I’m sure you would find laughable, were you able to comprehend it at all.

“I did not protect this pipeline out of concern for you and your endeavors. Indeed, I have spent many nights with those decent people, sharing their fantasies of polyvinyl chloride mayhem.

“But I have protected the Eyesore. I have done so because it is my job.”

The captain turned slightly to the south, as though visualizing Mamuset’s new water source over seventy miles distant.

“I spoke with engineers at Awash only last week. They informed me that the pipeline is complete and already under operation. As your approach coincides with its completion, I must assume you are here to stay.” His sunglasses blazed as he turned back. “You may be surprised to learn that you, and all your trespasses, are my personal assignment. I know all about you, Honey; I know far more than I would have freely sought to know. I know that every detail of your operation is covered, and cleared, by a State Department lackey in Addis Ababa named Mohammed Tibor. I am also aware that Tibor runs under the reins of this powerful American organization that shares your name.

“I am further aware that your account has been won by Banke Internationale in Addis Ababa. The figure rumored would make a conglomerate of sheiks shriek with envy. I am no spy, Honey; I flounder in the endless wake of paperwork your presence generates.” He nodded. “There is great rejoicing; not only at the bank, but in our government--the enterprises of a powerful American are dug everywhere into Ethiopian soil. The red carpet hungers for his feet. There is even speculation his appearance may prove an auger toward happier relationships between his country and mine. There seems nothing to stand in his way here.”

He hammered his fist on his palm. “Every aspect of his operation is legal and one hundred percent aboveboard. As a man of law I see this and am pleased. But as a son of Ityop’iya I see this and am haunted by nightmares of losing myself.

“In these nightmares I become a crazed black beast seeking the throat of anything rich, blond, and foreign. These are very troubling dreams, Honey; they will not allow me a moment’s sleep.” The captain dismissed him with a turn of the head. “Fortunately, there is bicarbonate of soda.” He glared at Mudhead, praying the African would speak. A minute later he strolled off, head held high and hands behind his back.

Vane’s whole body caved. “Thank goodness he went straight to the point.”

Mudhead spoke out of the side of his mouth. “Bossman be glad. Captain like.”

“It’s that stinking rich, devil-may-care charm. So what now, Sacagawea? It sure doesn’t look like he likes you.”

Mudhead shrugged. “Mudahid Asafu-Adjaye know too much.”

“You’ve got something on him?”

“Not thing he sure. Bossman see fancy sunglass, little gold lion on arm?”

“Sure. Nice shades.”

“Shade not nice shade. Man wear shade belong Armaan. Armaan strongman. Do what want, take what want. Anything go down Ethiopia, Armaan get piece.”

“Oh, cut it out, Mudhead. They’re cops; cops in the desert. Just wearing a uniform doesn’t make a man a Nazi. If the government of Ethiopia was as corrupt as you think, they’d just cut our throats, take our stuff, and be done with us.”

“Bossman,” Mudhead said solemnly, “in Africa throat sometime cut little bit at time.”

They stood in the sun for the better part of an hour. At last the captain strolled back to Isis with a hide-lined clipboard in his big hand.

“An interesting manifest. My men have thoroughly inspected your cargo, and I find myself much perplexed. Frozen whole foods in the refrigerated trailers. On two of the flatbeds are what appear to be several hundred canvas tents or the like, tightly rolled and stacked along with pallet upon pallet of some kind of…” he underlined the description with a forefinger as he read, “…‘hollow square steel bars with regularly spaced holes drilled on all sides.’ Additionally, we have uncovered, in one forty-eight foot trailer, a pair of speaker cabinets, each at least a dozen feet high, and a maze of sophisticated sound equipment crammed between very powerful amplifiers and generators.”

He looked back up. “You are perhaps planning a concert for the Danakil, Honey? Afar-aid? And are we invited to the party?”

Vane ground his teeth. The captain glanced at Mudhead, who appeared absorbed in a ruminative study of the sun.

“Excellent. We will bring our own beer. Now, I have not mentioned the school buses full of students from the universities in Gondar and Addis Ababa, nor the vans stocked with nurses and doctors. The former are typical fresh-faced liberals excited to be members of your entourage, the latter respectable professionals with credentials from institutions in at least four countries. There are also to be noted a tanker truck porting a thousand gallons of gasoline, and a truck hauling a propane tank the size of a small submarine. Running almost as an afterthought is the train of pickup trucks loaded with bags of cement.

“Again, everything is aboveboard.”

The captain backpedaled six feet and stood with his legs wide and his hands clasped casually behind his back, one corner of the clipboard showing at his hip. His great belly preceded him, the muscles of his heavy legs bunching and relaxing as he effortlessly raised and lowered himself with his toes. Despite the massiveness of his midsection and rear, there was nothing fat about the man, at least not in the sense Vane had known back home. The captain was like a huge blind bullfrog using its senses to target gnats.

They stood in the equatorial sun forever. Mudhead appeared unaffected, but Vane’s eyelids were drooping. His shoulders sagged, his back screamed for a break. He was sure he’d faint any second.

The captain clicked his heels sharply. “Your cargo is in order, sir. I hope our humble country will not be too great a disappointment.” His men strode to their jeeps, staring back with open hostility. The captain came up nose-to-nose. Sweat was pouring off Vane’s face.

“Enjoy your stay, Honey. You may photograph, but not touch, the lepers. Avoid those afflicted with elephantiasis, typhus, AIDS, and either the pneumonic or bubonic form of African plague. Carrion birds are not for hunting. They perform a very important function in our ecosystem. Kindly confine yourself to bird watching.” He half-turned, stopped, and turned back, this time standing nose-to-nose with Mudhead while addressing Vane.

“Also, Honey, I would be derelict were I not to warn you about your crew. As you are new here, your ignorance is excusable.” He sprayed saliva in Mudhead’s face with each exhalation. Mudhead did not move.

“The men driving your trucks are exclusively Shankili. This is very singular. Yet I cannot hold you responsible for your hiring practices. I am sure that to you all Africans look the same.

“All Africans are not the same.

“A continent this immense produces a tremendous variety of types, all with enduring allegiances. A newcomer’s indigenous confidant would be fully aware of these differences. He would make sure his employer hired only reputable drivers.

“As this is not the case, I would find it entirely forgivable were his employer to take drastic measures.”

The captain turned. He took his time walking back to the jeep. When he was comfortably aboard, his driver threw it in first, then floored it while playing with the clutch. The second jeep followed suit. Pounds of dust blew over the American and his guide. The double-plume tore off into the desert.

“Shankili?” Vane coughed.

Mudhead’s expression was hurt. “Shankiliman drive good anyman else. Bossman ask Mudahid find many driver. Each man tell friend. Friend tell friend. All show on dock, Bossman hire.” He dusted himself down. “Bossman not be impress by police. Captain scared, or never mention Shankiliman.” Mudhead thought about it a minute, seeking an apt comparison. “Africa tribe, caste, class, equal America neighborhood, religion, race. Ethnic group. Man over time learn neighbor way; become neighbor. Neighbor have enemy, that enemy now enemy man number one. Everyman have allegiance.”

“Gangs,” Vane muttered.

Mudhead raised an eyebrow. “Muslimman no gangman. Holy brotherhood. But captain try say Africa root run deep. Prick modernman, wake savageman. Allman same only democracy. In Africa Lubjaraman smell Wambetsuman. Wambetsuman feel Oromoman. All look same Westernman. But all same, all different.”

“Thanks for clarifying.”

They climbed into Isis. “No problem, Bossman. No worry Africa mosaic. Westernman think too much. Try pet lion. Lion bite Westernman nose off. Westernman wonder how he offend lion.” Mudhead shook his head gravely. “Africaman see lion, give lion space. Lion respect man, man respect lion. This what captain try say Bossman: respect authority, captain not bite nose off. Save captain trouble. So here be respectful Africaman, not disrespectful Western richboyman. Then everyman have space. Plenty space Ethiopia.”

“True,” Vane sighed as they bumped along. “Plenty of space.”

In certain places the old road was so potted even the Land Rover had trouble. At impasses the volunteers made shade while the doctors huddled. Drivers rolled out the Caterpillar and other earth moving equipment. During these breaks Mudhead would clamp on the headphones and blow his mind with psychedelic rock while Vane took long walks with his notebook and binoculars. The drought’s signature was everywhere. Acacia and mimosa were in shock, their fronds and spines blanched and desiccated. Dik-diks peered out of the scrub, much leaner and less energetic than expected.

Once they were back in gear Vane would take a bushel’s worth of snapshots with his Nikon, his wanderlust still blinding him to the miserable state of his surroundings. But an ugly silence grew outside the convoy’s persistent rumble. Along the Kobar’s rim, small villages lined the road like beggars; they were merely thatched ghost towns. Inhabited sites became rarer, tribesmen increasingly lethargic, crops nonexistent. Soon human remains showed amidst the bones of cattle and sheep. The air, suffocating the desert like a great blanket, grew perceptibly hotter as they approached the Depression.

Vane dozed off and on, the great master plan burning on the back of his eyelids. In his imagination he looked down at Mamuset as though at a snapshot, raptly revisiting his one long glimpse from a rented Cessna.

Prior to that flyover he’d been following the conduit’s progress along its tortuous seventy miles-plus course, taking notes and making rough drawings in charcoal. The pipeline below was of PVC tubing with a six foot bore, cemented in lengths varying from eighteen to thirty-two feet. The whole affair rested in a seemingly endless, constantly zigzagging ditch, supported by cross-struts positioned every twelve feet, and protected from sun and blowing sand by a series of tent-like canvas sheaths. The canvas, so as not to scream the rich American‘s presence, was dyed in tones of the great Ethiopian desert. In places frequented by herders, the Honey Foundation had provided equally inconspicuous prefabricated bridges capable of supporting both nomad and stock.

There in the bucking Rover, Vane’s mental snapshot gradually took on depth and perspective, becoming an expanding relief map, a revolving fish-eye chart viewed from all sides, and finally a topographical model partitioned by grid lines extending well beyond his visual periphery. He looked down on a huge, partly-bisected crater, its floor as absolutely flat as the desert without, scrunched in the heart of a dead, nearly featureless plain. The ridge making up the crater’s rim, smoothed over the ages by heavy seasonal rains, was at present barely a hundred feet at its highest point, less than forty at the lowest. Those life-giving rains were no-shows for several years now; the Mamuset crater was dry as a kiln in Hell. But when the region was active it would annually fill into a startlingly anomalous lake. One section of the rim facing the Red Sea had eroded in several places, allowing the site to drain, like everything else in the area, to the east. During his flyover Vane had observed his excavators aggressively rebuilding that section with cement and steel.

North and west of Mamuset are the broad highlands of Ethiopia. Brutal desert stretches to the south, ancient volcanic peaks and the fifty mile-wide swath of Eritrea, backed by the Red Sea, to the north and east. Southeast is a glistening, 2,000-square mile bed of salt, Lake Assale, in places over three miles thick. Farther south runs a dirty blue worm known as the River Awash. The whole wretched area north of that worm is the Danakil Desert, home of the Great Danakil Depression. In this place all waterways die; rolling water simply surrenders to earth and sun, never reaching the Sea. Daytime temperatures can reach 145 degrees.

Vane caught himself drifting. He refocused on the crater. His memory took a shy peek inside . . . there were thousands of scrawny black people in there, staring up fearfully at his buzzing little Cessna! Jesus. Were they hiding from him, or were they waiting for him? And who the hell was he to come sneaking overhead, anyway? He relaxed as he saw all that heavy equipment, mere toys from his altitude, efficiently creating the project’s foundation. He was their savior, the great white miracle worker. Vane wanted to be sick. And again he saw the intermittent stream of planes, camels, and small trucks bringing survival supplies and medicine. Not enough, not nearly enough.

Now Vane’s skin crawled with the closing miles. With the pipeline operational and the project actually under way, he was finally out of distractions and forced to face reality: at some strange forgotten point, almost half a year ago, he had determined, for some strange forgotten reason, to take a healthy sample of a foreign population and experiment with its destiny as though the conscientious, spiritual, plans-and-dreams members were mere laboratory rats.

It had looked good on paper. All the parts came together smoothly to form a seamless, entirely workable plan. The imagined participants would duly follow instructions without question while Vane, the invisible benign overseer, boldly forged ahead in complete disregard of the human element.

But now he was sweating. Young Christian had been raised to believe that it was his obligation to dream big, and that, so long as he remained true to this inherent commitment, he could go out with a bang or a fizzle, and bring the rest of the planet right along with him. Yet, because of that very upbringing, he couldn’t genuinely care. To Cristian Honey Vane, people were just bugs; flitting here, crawling there. To his great credit, he didn’t see himself as anything greater. He was simply another bug, doomed to be crushed and recycled. The difference was in his schooling. He could crawl along with the best of them, while another aspect of his consciousness looked on indifferently, noting patterns and postures. In this sense he was very unbuglike.

Somewhere along the line Vane had, by some fuzzy extension of that distant schooling, begun to envision his bugs as permanent tenants on a large level field, and seen himself as a similarly situated insect. And he had begun visualizing this imaginary field as though from a cloud.

The field was partitioned as an enormous grid, from the cloud appearing as a mesh screen. Vane’s imagination could zoom on the Grid, telescopic and wide, allowing him to check fine points or study overall. And so his utopia was constructed from on high, in advance of his presence.

Vane’s coign of vantage was about thirty degrees off the horizontal plane, looking almost dead east. From this vantage point the Mamuset experiment lay before him as an expanded chessboard. That imagined chessboard appeared to stretch without end, its most distant squares showing tinier and tinier still, until they faded to black in the low rim’s hazy embrace. (It was easiest to systematize such a vast projected community using the typical chessboard arrangement of alternating light and dark squares, rather than visualizing all squares an identical shade).

The Mamuset community would have five thousand Squares in all.

A block of a hundred Squares comprised a Sector. These fifty communal Sectors of one hundred Squares apiece would take up the eastern half of the crater, as defined by the partly-bisecting hilly ridge. An equivalent tract to the west would be given over to cultivated Fields. Mamuset, the community, would therefore be a single site divided into five thousand equal sub-sites. Those sub-site Squares would each be fifty feet by fifty feet, or twenty-five hundred square feet. Vane had to step back, figuratively, to comfortably imagine Sectors. But at each corner of each Sector he visualized a blank Square.

These were Utility Squares. There would be four per Sector, one at each Sector corner. Each would serve a quarter of the Sector, or a total of twenty-four Squares. The quarter-Sectors would be known as Quadrants, or Quads. And, since each Sector would have a Utility Square at each corner, the common corner of four Sectors would be a grouping of four Utility Squares: Utility Quads, or UQs. Mamuset would contain fifty UQs, or two hundred Utility Squares, in all.

Utility Squares were to be storage areas. Each Utility Square would house the twenty-four sets of implements for its Sector’s Quad, along with water reserves, fodder, fertilizer, seeds, etc. Strings of solar panels situated on arbors above Utility Squares would charge banks of batteries for Street lamps. Streets were the ten-foot-wide, crisscrossing ways separating Squares. Mamuset would require no fences; each Square would have a Street on every side.

The success of this entire concept relied on a crucial, untested notion: If a man’s neighbors were to copy his competent efforts step-for-step, then a number of equivalent copies of his project would be produced. Additionally, if these neighbors’ efforts were, in turn, copied by their neighbors, a multitude of surrounding copies, mirroring the best efforts of the original, would be produced. The ripple effect would, in theory, eventually produce a community of copies that were functionally and aesthetically as stable or unstable as the prototype; Mamuset was to be the sum of thousands of independent attempts to mimic a single effort. Practically speaking, if ground zero was the ideal, the standard would be a diminishing return relative to that prototype, with the outskirts harboring those copies of highest imperfection.

In time the rough edges would be smoothed. The Ideal would spread ever outward, until the plain was absolutely level, not only spatially but qualitatively. Cristian Vane’s completed project would be a perfect multicellular organism, cooperative, disinterested, functional; an organism evolved in real time on the example of a prototypical Square.

And Vane would be the architect of that prototypical Square.

He knew he could do it, because he’d spent weeks creating and recreating one on a godforsaken field in Arizona, under the watchful eyes of six hired engineers, a trio of Arizona State professors, and a Texan fitness trainer-nutritionist. Those engineers and professors, using Vane’s raw ideas, had hammered out a step-by-step plan, and educated him on everything from structural dynamics to pH systems and micronutrients. They designed a basic domicile for the intense conditions of Danakil, and referred Vane to Army specialists who gave him the skinny on survival techniques in arid extremes. And he’d boned up on physical and emotional tolerances, studied nutrition and personal irrigation, learned basic first aid procedures and cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

The radical differences in adaptive constitution were striking; despite their gaunt and moribund appearance, these desert people were far hardier than he. The big leap for the indigenous population would be learning to settle down. They were born to wander. Vane saw it as his challenge to entice them to settle, and as his mission to save them from themselves.

He had a mind-boggling fortune at his disposal, and was unshakably ensconced in a philosophy of education by reiteration.

He’d been schooled by Karl, an unexceptional, but terribly persistent man. Karl’s method had been to present a new fact each new day, and incorporate that fact into an old lesson. He began with the mansion, his house, and moved on to the solar system, with every lesson including house. If teaching an adjective or noun, that adjective or noun would have to pertain, even by extension, to the mansion. It was a great house on a greater world, in the greatest universe of all. Karl, quite naturally, exploited the carousel library. He advanced systematically, grandiloquently describing how all things revolved around the mansion, until, one typically awkward day, he stumbled upon Copernicus.

Humility did not come to the former fullback without a fight. There, in that candy-striped carousel under the broad live oak, he impressed upon little Christian that, although all men are but motes in the insufferable scheme of things, certain individuals are bound, by propitious circumstance, to take a larger role than that assigned to the common man. These predestined individuals have a duty to repay this gift by working beyond their selves. It is they who map the universe. It is they who make the world turn, while the bugs run over it, ignorant of its greatness.

Unfortunately this was not Aristotle tutoring young Alexander; in this case the sculptor was unworthy of his clay. Defining the universe became the toughest job of Karl’s life. He proceeded, understandably, from the clear and present to the humbling bounds of perception, only to find that, like all men of average intelligence, he was utterly incapable of grasping the concept of infinity, a word introduced by Socrates and blown to pieces by Webster. Yet his damnable persistence kept him at it. It became central to his cause that his little pupil, destined for greatness, fully understand that single, paramount concept. The boy had to be infused with the all-encompassing cognizance that would elevate him, psychologically, above mere bugs.

Of course Karl’s pursuit of infinity was hopeless. His normal, healthy brain, designed by nature to deal with the physical world via the senses, automatically revolted at abstractions.

But the man was persistent.

He began haunting book stores and municipal libraries, demanding to see space maps. When the stupid people lost patience with his awkward verbiage, Karl resorted to gestures and expressions to convey his meaning, but received nothing profounder than children’s pictorial charts of constellations. Still he went back for more, coming away with material that was evermore sophisticated. These new tomes only confused him further. Karl eventually came to the conclusion that, wherever it was, Infinity was a place nobody was in any kind of hurry to get to any time soon. By now his poor, persistent brain was beginning to smolder.

When inevitably he recognized he could scratch an abstraction no further, his attention did a complete about-face and hurtled toward home where it belonged. Karl trudged back to the carousel library for the last time, stomping on bugs all the way.

His new pursuit led him to the zodiac, and thence to the celestial sphere. Nights he would wonder aloud, staring upward lost in thought, muttering crabbily while the boy watched him dreamily, sleepy eyes falling. Karl was flustered by the idea of people and animals making up the constellations. In the first place, he found such descriptions absurd: those stellar patterns could have been anything, they could have been nothing. In the second place, they were curiously inactive for beings. He finally concluded, rightly, that they were just a lot of dumb stars encumbered by the perpetual silliness of human imagination.

The celestial sphere was a concept more comforting than the Copernican system, for simple Karl’s soul was yearning for the geocentric. He’d come to realize that no inns await the spacewalker. Azimuthal maps were even closer to his heart. But curvature frustrated him in ways he couldn’t understand. The very mathematical, very martial, very flat structure of a football field had been branded on his subconscious. That reliable grid-iron had been the sole focus of his youthful ideals and discipline. Thinking hadn’t been so important then. The coach took care of all that nonsense. What had been important was persistence.

When Karl first seriously studied a world wall map he had an experience akin to a spiritual revelation. The lines of longitude and latitude were like a pair of gridirons, one overlaid perpendicular to the other. From this vantage it was easy to dispense with the confounding nuisance of true spatial dynamics, and visualize the grid as proceeding in four directions to that funny place called Infinity. Furthermore, he reckoned that any depiction of a grid could be understood to be simply a fraction of a larger grid. This concept could even be illustrated by including a little arrowhead at the terminus of each longitudinal and latitudinal line, thereby depicting continuity. Excitedly, he drew these arrow-tipped grid lines over and over in the dirt with a stick while little Christian watched on hands and knees. Karl had done it. He had mapped the universe.

More important, he’d begun to extrapolate inversely, making his grid, sans arrowheads, representative of an ever smaller area. Finally the grid became, by diminution, no longer perceivable as a grid at all. Karl shared his frustration with Christian, incidentally encouraging the boy to ponder the imponderable. He ranted and raved over paradoxes for weeks in his futilely persistent way. Christian, wanting to please, stayed out of his way and timidly approached Euclid for perspective.

Karl fried his brain trying to visualize a grid smaller than small, then smallest of all. At last he tromped up to Christian triumphantly, tears in his eyes. He jabbed the stick in the ground and plucked it free, revealing a single point. Karl had done it again. He had defined finitude.

From then on, Christian’s place in the universe was the centermost square of any grid. But the cosmos did not revolve around him. It went beyond him, in four directions. Those points were the principle points of the compass. Karl demonstrated how the mansion, as a physical extension of the boy, could also be placed in the central square. He used a bright red hotel off a Monopoly board to represent the mansion. And during that same demonstration he took a jar full of beetles and attempted to place one in each surrounding square. Some of the bugs froze in place, others scampered off in all directions.

Enraged by this revolt, Karl stamped savagely, smashing the insects and obliterating his grid. Christian took this very hard, carnage being a far more powerful lesson than math.

For the next demonstration, Karl first suffocated the beetles. These good bugs stayed put. But Christian cried again, and himself destroyed the latest grid in the dirt, running, for some reason, to the ready arms of Karl’s nemesis Megan.

And so the tutor learned from his pupil. Karl watched the boy from the live oak’s shade, knowing he was unequal to his task. But he knew one thing else.

He would persist.