The Gate of Horn

Copyright © 2014 by Lewis E. Birdseye.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4990-8146-6

                eBook           978-1-4990-8145-9

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Rev. date: 11/20/2014

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CONTENTS

Introduction A Darkling Plain

Part One By This Distant Western Shore

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part Two The Eternal Note

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Part Three Ignorant Armies

Chapter Thirteen

Part Four The Turbid Ebb And Flow

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Part Five Confused Alarms

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Part Six Between Two Worlds

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Part Seven Clash By Night

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Part Eight Land Of Dreams

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Afterword

Dreams are hard to unravel, wayward, drifting things –

Not all we glimpse in them will come to pass…

Two gates there are for our evanescent dreams,

one is made of ivory, the other made of horn.

Those that pass through the ivory cleanly carved

are will-o’-the-wisps, their message bears no fruit.

The dreams that pass through the gates of polished horn

are fraught with truth, for the dreamer who can see them

Homer, The Odyssey, Book 19, ll 631-638

On May 28, 1993, at 11:03 local time, seismologists all over the Pacific region registered a very large disturbance near Banjawarn Station in the Great Victoria Desert of Western Australia. Observers nearby, long-distance truckers and a handful of prospectors, spoke of seeing a sudden flash in the sky and hearing or feeling the sound of a huge explosion.

In 1995 Aum Shinrikiyo became known world-wide for its terrorist act of releasing nerve gas into the Tokyo subway system, killing 12 people. Subsequent investigation of the group uncovered the interesting fact that among its vast real estate holdings was a 500,00 acre desert property in Western Australia, very near the site of the curious event of 1993, which scientists, though noting that the explosion had to have been more than 170 times more powerful than any known mining blast, had filed it away as an unexplained phenomenon. On the Aum’s property authorities found a remarkably sophisticated laboratory and evidence that on the same property cult members had been mining uranium. It was also determined at a later date that the Aum had drawn into its ranks two nuclear engineers from the former Soviet Union. At the trial of the Aum’s leader, Matsumoto Chizuo, also known as the Reverend Aashara Shokou, it was made clear that the group’s avowed purpose was to destroy the world.

AUM SHINRIKYO, English translation: The Truth of Creation; Sustainment and Destruction of the Universe.

The United States cannot fully account for more than 16,000 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium that it has shipped to 27 "friendly countries in recent decades, and it lacks any coherent policy to track down the materials, a Government Accountability Office report concluded last week. … The United States has lost track of enough fissile material to make hundreds of nuclear warhead cores.

MOTHER JONES NEWS, September 13, 2011

Just how few people could achieve the fabrication of an atomic bomb on their own is a question on which opinion divides, but there are physicists with experience in the weapons field who believe that the job could be done by one person working alone, with nuclear material stolen from private industry.

John McPhee, THE CURVE OF BINDING ENERGY

ALSO BY LEWIS E. BIRDSEYE

VASTATION

THE UNSUBDUED FOREST

IN MY BEGINNING

THE GATE OF IVORY

INTRODUCTION

A DARKLING PLAIN

As a student Araks Kirovakan had been drawn to both biology and history. From the second discipline he hoped to understand what had happened to his people through the ages and from the first to grasp why it had happened. A genetic quirk, perhaps, that made his people more aggressive, or not aggressive enough. He had been born in the little village of Vardenik, close to the shores of Lake Sevan, at the height of the cold-war, nearly thirty years after the Russo-Turkish Treaty had formally ended Armenian independence. The rich volcanic soil at the southern end of Lake Sevan had for centuries produced some of the finest grapes in Asia and the area had been noted from the time of Herodotus for its fine wines and beautiful women. Consequently it had been the site of many terrible battles over the thousands of years the local inhabitants kept careful track of, never forgetting a single massacre, remembering with a slowly seething rage every group that had ever violated their land and their people.

When the Soviets took control, to their credit, they tried, with teaching that emphasized a future they promised would be better than anything the Armenians had ever known, to eradicate forever such long-abiding hate; but they failed with that plan just as they failed to divert the people from agriculture to heavy industry. On occasion, with certain individuals, they thought they had broken the cycle of hatred, had flushed from a few young, receptive minds, all the partisan nonsense – as they put it – that had kept Armenians at each other’s throats and enemies to almost every ethnic group in Asia Minor and Europe.

These young people, Araks among them, were identified by state planners in charge of education as the future leaders of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia and were sent to Moscow, when they were ready to begin their secondary schooling, for proper training in Marxist-Leninism. It was expected that these young people would understand precisely the Soviet vision of the future, would, in fact, live it in Moscow, and carry with them back to Armenia the skills and enthusiasm to transform once and for all the divided and divisive republic into a model of Soviet efficiency, a united people working for a common purpose.

Instead, in the dank halls of the newly opened Ernesto Che Guevarra Academy, a former convent just off Arbat Street where only the most promising of the young exiles – as they were called by their teachers – from the most distant of the Soviet Union’s republics were sent, Araks learned just how much he despised, and was despised by, both the other students and his teachers. Called a Seljuk Turk and a Mongol by the upperclassmen and a filthy black by younger ones who were reacting to his dark eyes, dark hair, and olive-tinged skin, he looked for but received no sympathy from his Russian instructors who themselves had been raised to regard Armenians as at best uncouth and at worst savages for their stubborn adherence to the archaic ways of their church and their resistance to Soviet dominance.

Araks, himself a deeply religious boy, had been raised to take pride in the long-held belief that Armenia had been founded by Haik, a descendent of Noah, and that the Armenian people were special for that reason in the eyes of God. And Armenia, he knew, was also the oldest Christian state, having embraced Christ, if not his teachings, at the end of the 3rd century through the missionary work of St. Gregory the Illuminator. Even in Moscow, among the passionate atheists of the Soviet era, young Araks celebrated September 30th, the feast day of St. Gregory, earnestly praying for his people, earning by his actions insults and on occasion blows from unsympathetic classmates.

Araks spent many lonely hours in his tiny room, nursing his wounds and quietly cultivating within himself the hatred his education had been intended to eliminate. On the coldest days of the endless Russian winters, when temperatures as low as minus 35º Fahrenheit made it dangerous to walk the streets, he wept, alone in his dingy room, and resolved to learn the history of his country. If what he suspected he would learn should prove to be true, he would, he vowed to himself, visit upon those responsible for the suffering of his people the most horrendous vengeance.

At Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, where the brightest of the exiles were sent after their secondary preparation, he was encouraged to study medicine and agreed to do so only if he were permitted to pursue history as well. In his third year, when under the Soviet system of accelerated study he was permitted to begin his clinical studies, he found himself drawn to the study of the mind, and was among a small but talented group of students who fought valiantly against their instructors to overturn their slavish adherence to the teachings of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, whose book Conditioned Reflexes, written in 1926, while the Communist Revolution was still being implemented in Russia, was their veritable Bible.

It wasn’t, of course, Pavlov’s work with physiological reactions to environmental stimuli, for which in 1904 he received the Nobel Prize, they opposed. Everyone knows his work with dogs, how he had obtained secretions of the salivary glands, pancreas, and liver without disturbing the blood supply; and what the ringing of a simple bell had done to the dogs he studied. With this work they had no disagreement. Their quarrel was with the academic psychologists and psychiatrists, particularly those newly minted under the Russian Communist system, who applied Pavlov’s ideas to an area of human study they chose to call Behaviorism.

These men had become convinced that Pavlov had given them the key not only to how man acts, but to the methods necessary to make him act in whatever way they wished him to. To a large extent the excesses of the Stalin regime, the staged trials, the mass executions, the cruel exile of millions of people to Siberia, all of these bizarre phenomena, can be explained and understood in terms of Pavlovian Behaviorism, Soviet style. Given the proper stimulus, it had been argued in the highest academic circles, high enough to warrant political observation and control, people could be persuaded to do anything the Party in its infinite wisdom knew was right for them. If the stimulus involved the extermination of millions of people, people innocent of any crime, but eminently expendable, sobeit!

It was against thinking like this that Araks rebelled. But when he saw what the authorities in his school did to the more vocal of the dissenters, transferring them to engineering schools in Novo Sibersk, he kept his thoughts to himself and determined to complete his formal studies as quickly as he could. To all intents and purposes his teachers had proven their point; they had applied the proper stimulus to correct improper behavior and the behavior had immediately improved. Araks knew otherwise.

By then his studies in history had taught him all he needed to know about his country and his studies of both the brain and the mind had convinced him that he understood human actions far better than Pavlov ever could have. He applied himself diligently to his schooling, finishing his studies and his clinical rotations in less than two years. While he worked at a Herculean pace, he quietly bided his time.

The history he had learned had been a bitter lesson. Once one of the dominant kingdoms in Asia Minor, Armenia had been conquered over and over again during the long centuries, beginning with the Persians who had ruled oppressively from the 6th to the 4th century BCE. Alexander drove out the Persians in 330 BCE, but after his death the country fell to Syria. For a brief period, from 189 BCE to 67 BCE Armenia enjoyed independence, but it soon fell under the influence of Rome to which it became tributary. In the third century CE it adopted Christianity, for which act, later in that century, subjugated again by the Persians, many of its people were martyred. In 387, to avoid warfare, Persia and Rome partitioned Armenia, both parts of the country suffering oppression under rulers who considered the Armenians little more than savages. In 886 Armenia achieved autonomy once again, enjoying a kind of renaissance during which time the land, according to legend, became green, the sheep grew fat, and the arts, such as they were, mostly pottery and a delicate poetry that expressed the most ineffable feelings for freedom, flourished. By the 11th century, however, the area became once again a battlefield over which marched the brutal Seljuk Turks, the Mongols, and the Byzantines. Between 1386 and 1394 Tamerlane seized Greater Armenia and massacred much of the population. In 1405 the Ottoman Turks invaded, subjecting the people to religious persecution and senseless acts of cruelty. For the next 400 years the Turks and the Persians fought with each other over Armenia, the victims of their struggle the Armenian people and their land. Finally in 1828 Persia ceded to Russia the area that came to be called the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia.

Russia, however, had proven essentially powerless to control Armenia, which, to all intents and purposes, became during this time a Turkish satrap. Between 1894 and 1915, the Armenian people underwent their worst trial, as the Ottomans undertook the world’s first planned attempt at genocide, a scheme devised by the Sultan Abd al-Hamid II. The single worst act of genocide was committed against the Armenians in 1915 when in retaliation for aiding the Russian invasion of Turkey more than 600,000 of Araks’s people were either killed by Turkish soldiers or starved to death during their forced deportation either to Syria or Mesopotamia. The Armenians rose in revolt against the Turks in the city of Van and were finally liberated by Russian troops, who had been ordered to intervene, stories are told, only when a sufficient number of Armenians had been killed to render the country powerless when the Russians chose to reassert their claim to dominance.

It was a story to make even those most familiar with the terrible abuses to humans that is in effect the tale history tells weep with pity.

For Araks, however, it merely hardened his heart, eradicating all notions of pity or sympathy for other human beings. All of humanity, it seemed to him, had conspired together to visit suffering upon his people, and even those who had suffered were not spared his sense of revulsion. The more he read, the more he came to despise Armenians for having permitted themselves to be so victimized, for having been so culpably weak. The weak and the strong, the dichotomy which described and explained for him all human beings, were equally hateful, the strong for their willful cruelty, the weak for their willful defenselessness.

It was the completion of his medical studies that confirmed his belief that hatred for the human race was the appropriate feeling to have for such a despicable life form as the vain and foolish and unspeakably cruel creature who had designated himself homo sapiens sapiens, wise wise man, the joke of calling himself wise compounded into madness by repetition of the word. Curiously it was a work of literature that confirmed his feelings that his judgment was not incorrect.

During his final clinical rotation at October Revolution Sanitarium in Moscow he worked under the supervision of a young Clinician-Instructor named Vassily Vyazemsky, whose singular contribution to the students he worked with was to share with them his love of Russian literature and see to it that they carried away with them a portion of its humanizing influence. As often as not, discussion on rounds centered on the works he had recommended to his students and touched barely if at all on the complaints and illnesses of the patients at whose bedsides they stopped to discuss and analyze Prince Myshkin’s epilepsy or the sepsis that proved fatal to Bazarov. For the most part Araks skimmed the books Vassily urged upon his students, finding that about a paragraph a page equipped him with enough knowledge to keep abreast of most of the discussions. However, when he was asked by his instructor to lead the talk that was scheduled the next day on Dostoevsky’s Notes From The Underground he was forced to give his whole attention to the work, and in so doing found himself at last in possession of the final piece of the puzzle he’d spent his Moscow years trying to put together.

From his internal medicine rotation, six months of hospital work during which he was on call every other night, discovering thereby in himself the very real and so easily reached limits of human endurance, he had learned in addition all about the fragility of the human body, how quickly it sickens or breaks down, how ephemeral a thing is the heartbeat that stands between life and death. Subject to the vagaries of viruses and bacteria, to microscopic entities in some cases only marginally alive, which function in relation to humans in a fashion little different from the way certain beetles deal with dung; helpless before meteorological realities such as typhoons, droughts, floods, snow, ice; driven by the awareness of his own death into either an existential and paralyzing angst, or into a phantasmagoria of feckless illusions, baseless beliefs that death is really the path to more life, better life; so little and so poorly accommodated in this world that it might have been better, as Sophocles once said, not to have been born at all, life, Araks had come to believe was something no wise man would choose, unless the only other choice he had was life eternal. Joking once with a building inspector, from whom had been cut – Araks assisting and nearly vomiting in his surgical mask at the stench – nearly three feet of cancerous colon and whose chance for survival was practically non-existent, he had said that if the man’s job had involved evaluating the human body for livability few models, if any, would ever pass inspection. Failure, death, was programmed into every cell; it was only a matter of time before the failure became manifest.

Disgusted with life, and angered with what history had taught him, that the greater portion of man’s energy had gone through the centuries into making life even worse, Araks was particularly receptive to the bitterly misanthropic message Dostoevsky posits in his work. He was in a sense like a super-saturated solution, awaiting only the addition of one more ingredient to become himself a perfected and finished form.

The very first words he read, I am a sick man … . I am a spiteful man. No, I am not a pleasant man at all … resonated within him. Barely able to control his growing excitement at finding his own thoughts so brilliantly laid out before him, the ideas he simply hadn’t had time to formulate, which had moved miasmically through his mind, a noxious fog through which on occasion he saw flashes of what he meant, particularly after the painful death of a patient had ended what had been a pointless and painful life, he read on as if in a trance, nodding his head in agreement, muttering, yes, yes as what had been so nebulous in his own mind became as clear as sunlight.

It was as if the underground man was speaking directly to Araks, was seated in his room, his eyes boring into him, telling him what he alone, Araks, could understand. Of course, Araks nodded, if one is to live one must either be a characterless person, or if one is indeed a man of character must then have a very circumscribed imagination. In other words one must either function on a sub-human level, exist only to satisfy the needs one shares in common with muskrats and weasels, or if one chooses to function on a higher level one must do so with his eyes, so to speak, firmly shut, pretending to himself that his actions are worthwhile and have some sort of purpose. To be too acutely conscious, the underground man said, Araks finding on Dostoevsky’s page the words for his deepest thought, is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.

Yes, Araks breathed deeply, Yes.

It was what he’d always known, even as a child in Vardenik, listening to the words of his parents and grandparents, inevitably hearing the tales of ancient rapine and pillage that passed for conversation among the townsfolk. And now he had the words to say what it was that he’d known, known without being able to say it till that very moment: in both body and mind man was genuinely a sick and hateful creature. And then Araks put the book down and laughed, laughed until he became light headed, till his sides ached, till tears ran down his cheeks. Sick and hateful, yes indeed, that is what man is – and the beautiful humor of this was that man is made in God’s image.

Araks finished the story, read with bitter amusement the sordid and pathetic tale of how the consumptive little whore, Lisa, is cheated, and the next day dutifully answered all of Vassilly’s questions about the work, none of which, unsurprisingly, dealt with what Araks had taken from the story.

So that was it. The long labor of the Soviet Union to shape an enlightened Soviet man had in the case of Araks Kirovakan produced one so consumed by hate and revulsion for the human race that, by the time the system was prepared to certify him an unqualified success, a graduate, diploma in hand, of their finest schools, he had vowed that he would never allow himself to believe that anything he or his colleagues might do would or could ever change mankind.

He was, however, a healthy young man with all the appetites of robust youth and indulging them to their fullest was one way, he found, to keep his bitterness in check. His fondness for women, for good food and vintage wines, amused him as did his ability to bully people with his knowledge and growing power. His bitter cynicism yielded to a caustic sardonicism, and when he laughed it was never the product of humor or happiness. Hearing the cruel sound coming from him on occasion always made him think of the curious little plant the Greeks believed grew only in certain marshy areas of Sardinia which when ingested was supposed to produce convulsive laughter resulting invariably in death. Giving humans the word sardonic, the plant gave Araks as well confirmation that any form of satisfaction with the world made it clear how much one who experienced such a thing deserved death.

Appointed on his graduation regional sub-director of the people’s mental health for the Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region, a position that had for several years remained open for lack of a willing candidate – the area so often a battle ground, its people consumed with ethnic hatreds – Araks had despaired initially at the prospect of removing himself from Moscow, which he’d grown accustomed to, particularly to all the little luxuries his advanced student-status had afforded him: a single bedroom apartment of his own, unlimited shopping privileges at the Sanitarium, and especially the seemingly endless supply of young Russian girls, blond and pliant, who found his brooding dark looks irresistible.

In Stepanakert, the regional capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, he soon, however, came to regard the move as the greatest joke that ever could have been played on him. He was back among the people he’d been raised with, in a position to help them, the people whose pain he’d shared as a child, and the only feeling he had for them now was profound disgust. The Armenians living in the area and the native Azeris were constantly at each other’s throats, heaping vile vituperations on each other in their separate newspapers, openly vilifying each on their separate radio stations, at night shooting each other in dark alleys or unlit city streets or on mountain trails or whenever the drink that was epidemic in its proportions snapped the barely intact bonds of restraint that held their communities together and whole families would slaughter other families no different from them except for the dialect they spoke or the god they bowed to. It was madness, the perfect place for a physician trained to be expert in the field of mental health.

Initially Araks inspected the various facilities that housed the mentally deranged, often observing to himself humorlessly that he saw little difference between the patients and those who were conducting the tour for him. He had begun his inspection in the Armenian district, assuming that among people whose language he understood best he would learn the most about medical practices in the area. A high percentage of the patients, either on impossibly high doses of thorazine or in restraints, were, he noted, Azeris; but he paid that fact little attention until he came to a sanitarium in the Azeri district and found that most of the designated high-risk patients in that facility, on Thorazine or in restraints, were Armenians.

A few carefully worded questions made it apparent to him that the pattern of admission he’d detected was not random. Simply put, it was mad to be Armenian in an Azeri-dominated area, and equally mad to be Azeri in an area controlled by Armenians. But there was an even more sinister side to what he observed. More likely than not the incarcerated Azeri – there was, he noted, little difference between the prisons and the mental hospitals – had been a political or cultural activist who had pushed beyond the considerably proscribed bounds permitted by the restraints both of law and custom. And the same was just as likely to be true for the hospitalized Armenian.

In Russia, of course, the practice of hospitalizing dissidents for mental disorders was commonplace, the most notorious case being that of the Nobel laureate Andre Sakarhov, who had languished for endless months, drugged into semi-consciousness, in a mental ward in the city of Gorky, for his opposition to the Soviet build-up of nuclear weapons. In the hinterlands of the Soviet Union Araks had expected harsher treatment for those who for whatever reason were viewed with disfavor by local officials. A discrete bullet in the back of the head is what he had imagined the penalty would be or an isolation cell in a maximum security prison where the offender would remain for the rest of his days. Certainly not the comparatively humane method he perceived to be in effect, a method it took him hardly any time at all to determine he could and decidedly would take control of.

At first Araks worked exclusively with Armenians, targeting with their assistance troublesome Azeris and finding reason when they were brought to him for evaluation, after committing some minor infraction against the law, keeping a cow too closely tethered to his house, or permitting pig manure to wash into a local stream, to have them remanded to the local sanitarium for treatment. The diagnosis was always the same, serious, bordering on criminal, anti-social behavior, and the method of treatment was just as invariable: thorazine and/or restraints. For such service to the Armenian community Araks deemed it only proper that he should receive some sort of compensation, a bounty as it were, paid in secret from the properties of the hospitalized victim the local authorities considered it only just and proper to seize and confiscate. He took great pains to keep his role as secret as possible, making sure that the orders he himself had drafted, which directed into treatment those whose actions were both in opposition to the best interests of the state and clearly beyond the control of the perpetrator, did not bear his name and were always carried out by officials who only in the most round-about fashion could be linked to him.

Soon, employing a higher degree of secrecy to keep his actions undetected, he began to offer the same services to the Azeri community.

There were, however, only a limited amount of people who could be dealt with in such a fashion, and it wasn’t long before the funds Araks had grown accustomed to spending so freely on the intoxicants – women, gambling, and drink – that distracted him sufficiently from his deeper thoughts to keep him reasonably content with life began to diminish considerably. It was then that Araks made a fateful decision.

By then, in the early 80’s, Araks had been promoted to the position of Regional Deputy Director of the People’s Mental Health and had been relocated to the city of Baku on the shores of the Caspian Sea. Once a leading industrial and cultural center, until World War II the Soviet Union’s major petroleum producer, Baku still maintained a significant place in the economic activity of the USSR, with booming refineries and ship-building facilities that were kept busy every day of the year. But its critical importance had diminished significantly, becoming through the years less and less a Russian city, more and more a quiet backwater reflecting in its people the confused and turbulent history that had shaped it. As the capital of Azerbaijan its population was more Azeri than anything else, but even so Azeris made up only 46% of the city’s population. The rest were Armenians, Turkomans, Uzbecks, Kazaks, and a small scattering of Russian engineers and technocrats who, in their Euro-centered innocence, liked to think that they understood and ran the city.

Araks, of course, had no such illusions. The city, he knew, like the region, was ungovernable, appearing to run smoothly for the time being only because the most basic needs of most of the people were being met and the greed of the most powerful was being satisfied through systematic corruption that was both brilliant and characteristically, appropriately, Byzantine. Consequently Araks found pleasure in the streets of Baku, figuratively chewing the leaves of the toxic Sardinian plant, as he waited patiently for the inevitable bloodbath to come. The city, he understood, was stuck in a stasis of inanition, with neither the poor nor the wealthy able to understand the precariousness of their existence. It would come, though, there would be death once again stalking the streets of the ancient city.

He particualry enjoyed walking during the early hours of evening through the narrow and winding streets of the Old City, gazing at the walls of the 13th century fortress of Bad-Kube, thinking about the different ethnic groups that had laid siege to it and defended it, the same groups switching places with absurd regularity through the centuries. It was a monument to the madness history had taught him to expect when it came to human interactions.

His walks led him invariably to the 17th century palace of the Khans of Baky, oppressively cruel rulers who were in turn vassals to the even more cruel and oppressive Shahs of Persia. Thus it is, was, and always will be, thought Araks on those walks: ignorance born of poverty begetting hatred, the offspring of which is always the all-consuming conflict that inexorably produces death and destruction and of course poverty. And so the spiral continues, its mindless spin whirling people into the madness from which there is no escape. These were the thoughts that occupied his mind as he knelt in the dark quiet of the mosque of Synk-Kala, a place of peace and meditation for most people, where his steps led him before he began his walk back to his apartment in a Soviet-built building which resembled more than anything else a military barracks, but which boasted both air conditioning and forced-air heating – though both systems rarely worked in the appropriate season.

Synk-Kala was one of the oldest mosques in the region, having been built in the 11th century, and one of the tales told about it was that it had been constructed on the site of an earlier Christian church, which in turn had been created, using some of the same masonry, out of a Greek temple dedicated to Apollo. That temple had been built on the remains of a shrine to the Persian god Mithras, and before that people had come to that same spot to worship at the endlessly burning flame from a naturally occurring gas vent that had ignited in some fashion long before the mind of man could explain it. Sacred forever, a place of Spirits, of gods, it had also been, Araks the student of history knew, a battlefield for nearly as long, as various peoples had fought for the right to sanctify the location in the name of their particular deity.

Had anyone been close enough to Araks on those evenings when he appeared in the mosque, they would have heard, not the monotonous chanting of prayers, but the almost silent laughter of someone who understands fully that nothing is funnier than unhappiness, particularly the unhappiness humans visit upon each other with such ferocious delight.

His work and his diversions kept Araks occupied much of the time, but there were moments when he became acutely aware that the field of study that interested him most was a process and not a product. History was not a done deal, as some historians, like Arnold Toynbee, had naively assumed in the early years of the twentieth century. Though it may in fact repeat itself endlessly, performing but minor variations on essential themes, brutality its most dominant one, repetition is movement nevertheless and in Baku Araks became aware of movement that both repelled and fascinated him.

With what appeared to be detached amusement, Araks watched as Iran, the country which had played such a bloody role in the history of Armenia, began slowly to come apart.

He had followed with considerable interest the slow rise to power of Ruhollah Khomeini and had noted with approval how the man’s deeply-held religious beliefs had, like an acid, eaten away at the infrastructure which supported the Shah’s government. The faith Khomeini was willing to die, and kill, for was of no interest to Araks, of course. He had been weaned away from Christianity in the halls of Che Guevarra Academy and had come to despise all forms of religion, seeing them collectively as the primary source of the kind of divisive hatred and misunderstanding that produce the most unspeakable atrocities. In profound disagreement with Marx, who saw religion as an opiate, which drugs people into mindless acceptance of capitalistic domination, the metaphor which served his vision of religion was that of a detonator, an agent that acted upon man, tearing aside his inhibitions, blowing control and regulation to smithereens, unleashing and augmenting his considerable talent for calculated destructiveness.

What pleased him about Khomeini was the man’s ability to confound the government’s attempts to quiet him and his uncanny knack for avoiding the long arm of the Savak, the Shah’s secret police.

Even after the Ayatollah had been exiled to Iraq in 1964, Khomeini had managed to draw increasingly larger numbers of people to his cause, which he had by then defined as the restructuring of Iran as an Islamic theocracy. Selective assassinations, protests, strikes, civil unrest and disobedience were the methods Khomeini urged upon his followers, and even when Saddam Hussein forced him to leave Iraq for Paris in February of 1978 he continued directing his Shiitte adherents to pressure the Shah until his fall was made inevitable. That fall occurred less than a year later, in January of 1979, when Shah Pahlavi was forced to flee from Iran and sought asylum in the United States.

The struggle that followed disappointed Araks: it was far too brief, lasting less than a month, and insufficiently bloody to satisfy one who had been raised to wish upon Persians nothing but the most intolerable suffering. His hopes were revived when the Sunnis rose in opposition to the Ayatollah, threatening to embroil Iran in a religious war which had the potential to rival Europe’s own Thirty Years War for madness and death, and he prayed that the two factions of Islam would do to Iran what the conflict between Catholics and Protestants had done to Germany in the early years of the 17th century, leaving it a blood-soaked ruin.

Certainly the proper ingredients were present for a bloody war: two branches of the same religion divided intractably by a minor point of history or doctrine. Sunni Muslims, the traditional or orthodox branch of Islam who constitute the greatest number of the followers of Muhammad, differ from Shiittes in that they accept the Sunna, or traditions, of Muhammad and approve the historic order of Muhammad’s first four successors.

The Shiittes, on the other hand, believe that Muhammad’s caliph, his proper successor, was Ali, his son-in-law. They also believe that the divine line of descent from Muhammad will culminate in the twelfth Imam, who will appear on the Last Day as the Mahdi, the restorer of the faith. The Mahdi will then establish universal Islam, the wish as well of the Sunnis.

That such a small point of difference, the immediate successor to Muhammad, should divide a people to the point where they are willing to kill each other because of it was for Araks merely another instance of the insanity that people create for themselves to justify their thirst for rapine and pillage.

The Sunnis struggled as best they could, but rampant arrests and executions took much of the force out of their fight and no help, as they had hoped, other than verbal encouragement, came from the nearby Arab countries, all of them followers of the Sunni sect. Before his hopes were entirely dashed, however, Iranian militants seized 52 hostages from the American embassy in Teheran, demanding for their release the return of the Shah, who was being treated in the United States for the cancer which would soon claim his life.

When the U.S. refused to negotiate with Khomeini, Araks looked forward to a brief and brutal war between America and Iran, during which he imagined it likely that Iran would be bombed back into the stone age, a prospect which pleased him so much he bought a full magnum of Peiper Heidseck and drank it one evening toasting success to the American flyers.

Day after day Araks waited for news that the bombing had commenced, laying out before him on his desk each evening a map of Iran that he had marked with bright red X’s, each X the site of a major city, Teheran and Basra, Esfahan, Mashad, Tabriz, Rasht, Hamadan, Abadan, Shiraz, and Ahvaz, where he imagined the US. bombs would strike, shredding Iranian bodies, killing and maiming children and women. He found the prospect more thrilling than the usual amorous pursuits that occupied most of his evenings, and for a week or two he forswore the company of women to sit in front of his television set and wait for the news of the attacks, his map spread out in anticipation on the table next to his chair.

When it became apparent that the U.S. planned to do nothing but negotiate, he was seized by a black and furious depression. For more than a week he remained behind the locked door of his apartment, drinking heavily, cursing the timidity of the American president, Jimmy Carter, for not raining death from the sky down on the Iranians. But a proper student of history, particularly of the kind of psychopathological-history he enjoyed, is not likely to suffer long the absence of warfare. Curious and promising events had been brewing to the east of Iran for some time, and he redirected his attention to Afghanistan, soon finding a diversion that more than made up for his disappointment.

Always an integral part of what Kipling had called The Great Game Afghanistan, Araks knew, has traditionally been seen by the Russians as the key to the East, the Khyber Pass the royal road to India and the rest of the Orient. Intending to lock Afghanistan more securely into its sphere of influence, Soviet planners had designed a coup in 1978 that had brought Nur Mohammed Taraki to power and which had established the People’s Democratic Party. This was the first event which Araks considered most promising. Instantly out of favor with the powerful Muslim clergy, Taraki was toppled less than a year later in another coup led by Hafizullah Amin, promising event number two for Araks.

Russia responded by amassing troops at the Afghan border; and, when Amin refused to relinquish power, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, only days after Araks had given up in despair the hope that Carter would act forcefully and attack Iran. The Russians installed Babrak Karmal as Prime Minister, but so unpopular was his government with the clergy and the people it controlled that no member of his government was safe outside the heavily defended capital city of Kabul. Araks knew what this meant. There would be war, a Jihad against the invaders led by the most ferocious of the world’s warrior classes, the enraged Afghani mujahidin. And war there was, bloody, cruel, with both sides taking no prisoners, torture so common a practice that wounded men on both sides begged their comrades to kill them rather than allow them to fall into the hands of the enemy.

The Russians quickly established air superiority, but control of the mountainous and essentially roadless ground proved to be impossible for Conventionally-trained, and supported, troops. The war soon became a hopeless stalemate.

Araks was fully enjoying reading daily accounts of the bloody fighting, tallying up the body counts, following various campaigns he knew were doomed to failure but which were touted in the press as the actions that would bring the rebels, as the Afghan fighters were called in the Soviet-controlled newspapers, either to the bargaining table or to their knees.

Over a glass of vodka in the evening or sometimes in the arms of a Circassian girl – he believed the tales about the legendary beauty of the women of Circassia, even though the few women in Baku who claimed Circassian descent were all rather badly shop-worn prostitutes whose beauty, if indeed they’d ever had any, had long since faded – he would laugh loudly at the folly of the Russians and the Afghans, embroiled in a conflict neither had the means to win and which neither had the wit to bring to an end.

And then his cup of joy positively bubbled over. Amid shrill and conflicting claims over ownership rights to the Shatt al Arab, a waterway that empties into the Persian Gulf and which traditionally has been the boundary between Iran and Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s troops invaded Iran. War to the east of him, war to the south of him, Araks was a happy man. It was possible, he suspected, for the whole region, including ultimately all the oil-producing Arab states to become embroiled in either one or even both of the conflicts, a situation the energy-starved West would never tolerate. The Western Powers would have to intervene then, their presses puffing platitudes about the need to protect democracy, about defenseless women and children, blowing in the wind whatever lies would effectively disguise the real motives for intervention: the oil that fueled the machines of industry, that permitted the commerce that allowed a handful of powerful men to control the fate of the world. There would then be full-blown war, a global one that might, in all probability would, see the use of nuclear weapons. Araks had read the dire warnings of scientists like Carl Sagan who predicted a life-ending nuclear winter in the event that an exchange of atomic weapons occurred. The world, in his judgment, deserved no less a fate.

The weeks that followed the Iraqi invasion were among the happiest of Araks’ life as he waited for the West to make its first move. While friends of his quaked in fear, anticipating the end of the world, scanning the sky for the B-52’s that would be flying overhead from either Greece or Turkey to drop their deadly load of bombs on Teheran or Baghdad, Araks wrote long entries in a handsomely bound journal he had purchased and planned, as the Sun disappeared behind clouds of radio-active dust and temperatures plummeted, to store carefully in a lead-lined, carbon-steel strong box.

He liked to imagine that the journal would be found a thousand or more years hence by descendants of those who had survived the nuclear holocaust by hiding, like moles, in burrows they had dug deep beneath the poisoned earth. They would learn from what Araks was writing about the incurable madness that afflicted mankind, how it drove men to kill and destroy. They would learn all about man’s duplicitous nature, how he loved to sing the joy of love, the virtue of creation, while at the same time secretly indulging his passion for every perversion of morality and decency the wit of man has been able to devise. It would make for fine reading, Araks chuckled to himself, the new Bible for the new age. Araks, his words at any rate, would be the new Adam, the progenitor of that radiation-blasted race, anemic, leukemic, shrunken and wizened, with but a single eye perhaps, cleft lips and palates, pitiful refuse, the final rag and tag ends of history. They would read his words and weep, that such men as he had once ruled the earth.

As Iraqi troops moved into Western Iran, capturing the port city of Khorramshahr, and moving swiftly towards the oil-rich region of Khuzistan, Araks was convinced that it was only a matter of time, days perhaps, before the West would strike. But Iranian resistance proved strong and the Iraqis were forced to retreat, giving up the land they’d fought with such ferocity to occupy. From that point on the conflict became, like that between the Russians and Afghanis to the south, one of attrition, each side pushing and yielding in a kind of spastic, pointless dance that served no other function than to soak the parched land with blood.

It was then – with his money running out and the life of ease he had purchased for himself in Baku with it about to come to an end, aware as well that history was merely playing once again one of its nasty little jokes: the world was not coming to an end and the conflicts which had seemed so promising would do little more than merely kill and maim thousands of human beings, displace hundreds of thousands more and cause untold suffering, in other words would enact nothing more than the oldest story known to man – then, and only then, was it that Araks decided that if whatever force drives itself through human lives made it possible for him to do so that he would take history into his own hands.

PART ONE

BY THIS DISTANT WESTERN SHORE

CHAPTER ONE

Everyone agreed that the choice of Nickolas Edwards to become the first director of the Manning Foundation was a brilliant one. Fourteen months as chairman of the English department at Emory University, plus stewardship of the Modern Language Association for close to a year, had given him the necessary administrative skills to manage an organization that in its brief existence had emerged as the unquestioned watchdog and benefactor of the academic world. The Manning foundation rewarded excellence in scholarship with generous grants, endowing chairs in those universities and colleges that genuinely promoted excellence in teaching, lauding in its monthly publication, Argus, valuable research and dedicated teachers, and castigating mercilessly those schools and scholars whose dedication to excellence was the least bit questionable. It had mysteriously sprung full grown from some unknown source nearly a year before, demonstrating its power only moments after its request for non-profit status had been granted by both the federal government and the state of Oregon where it was based. In that first official act it had given five million dollars to the English department at Emory, to endow the first Manning Chair and to set up an annual prize to reward distinguished scholarship. It seemed especially appropriate, then, having been appointed the first Manning scholar, that Nickolas Edwards become the Foundation’s first publicly named director.

Of course, a fact known only to a small handful of trusted friends, Nickolas was indeed the Manning Foundation, its founder, its chief executive officer, its treasurer, its policy advisor; in short, the whole shebang. Like Argus, the hundred-eyed hound Hera had left to guard Io from the rapacious predations of her husband Zeus, and after which the foundation’s journal had been named, Nickolas had assumed, assisted by monies in excess of twelve billion dollars, the task of academic monitor, jealously guarding the sacred groves of Hecadamus from those who wished to seduce its inhabitants and lead them into error. Only after directing the foundation in secret since its inception had he felt it safe to accept the offer, proffered by himself, of course, though only seven other people knew this fact, to head it officially. On the national news, the evening the acceptance had been made public, Nickolas had appeared sufficiently humble and meek to satisfy everyone that the Manning Foundation was in capable hands, as if only shy and retiring people had any business overseeing the academic world. In any case, Nickolas had played the role perfectly, expressing mild surprise that he had been chosen and promising to do all in his power to maintain the high standards of the foundation. The only sign of the power he did in fact possess was the ease with which he had leased the Lear jet that very evening to fly him directly from Atlanta to Eugene, his acceptance speech having been made only moments after his resignation from Emory, regretfully tendered and accepted with equal regret, had become official.

In Eugene he’d been met by his wife, Sylvia, driving a brand new Chevy Suburban which bore the logo of the Manning Foundation, an eagle soaring high over buildings which were unmistakably the identifying symbols of Nickolas’s alma mater, Sterling Memorial Library and the marble cube of the Beinecke, and together they had driven over the coastal range to their new home by the waters of Tsiltcoos Lake in Florence, a small coastal community that the foundation had chosen for its home.

Sylvia and Nickolas had exchanged pleasantries at the airport, but as the Suburban had turned from Greenhill Road onto highway 126, the route over the mountains to the coast, they had fallen into a comfortable silence, each of them reviewing the events of the last few days. As they passed Fern Hill Reservoir, the water of the lake shimmering like burnished silver under the almost numinous light of the late harvest moon, Nickolas began to speak.

The charade is finally over. I had no idea when I started the foundation how difficult it would be to remain anonymous. What a relief to have all that secrecy behind us.

Not all of it by any means, Nickolas, Sylvia corrected him. You still can’t divulge the source of the Manning’s funds, nor can you ever tell the real story behind Mark Manning’s death. An awful lot of people still want to know why the foundation honors the memory of a homosexual who killed himself because his love affair was going badly.

Before Nickolas could protest, Sylvia continued. I know, of course, that Mark was as straight as you are, and how and why he was killed; but no matter how many times you explain as much of his death as you can people are still going to remember those lurid headlines that appeared in the Atlanta paper, describing how Mark was wearing a dress when he was found. Your story, that Mark was killed by an admirer of his and then clothed in the dress to satisfy some sick urge of the killer’s, just doesn’t have the nasty appeal of the story everyone first read. And by the time the papers printed the story you practically wrote for them, Manning’s death was old news and few people had the wit or were willing to make the effort to connect the two stories.

I’m used to that by now, Nickolas interjected. I don’t even bother to explain about Mark any more. He was a good friend and without him our adventure would never have occurred and god knows what the world would be like now with men like the Hallfords and Tommy Lee pulling the strings of power. And we certainly never would have ended up having the kind of money that’s now at our disposal. Naming the foundation after him was the least I could do to show my gratitude. I just wish he were still here. I’d let him run his own damned foundation!

This was said with a wistful smile, which Sylvia couldn’t see but sensed. Though completely secure in her feelings for Nickolas, and not in the least concerned about the depth of his love for her, she knew that a portion of his feelings belonged permanently to those he had befriended. It was something she genuinely liked about Nickolas, his complete and unquestioned loyalty to his friends. That she was first among equals, something she joked to him about whenever his work kept him away from her, made her feel very special.

Sensing that the conversation was edging toward the events they’d shared fewer than 18 months ago, events which had brought them together, but which also were too horrific for them to mention comfortably, Sylvia subtly changed the subject. Both of them had been forced to kill during the course of their six-day adventure, the longest 144 hours of their lives, and neither was willing to think about what that had done to each of them and to themselves as a couple. One day, they both knew, they would have the time and the strength to deal with that matter, but this was clearly not the right time.

We got a letter today from Gaye and Lewis. Apparently they got our card telling them we were moving to Florence to run the foundation. That’s the address they sent it to.

Just before Christmas the year before, during one of the most tense moments of their adventure, Sylvia had fallen in love with Tsiltcoos Lake as she’d sat in Ed Duvarney’s cabin waiting for the computer genius, who had become their friend, to break the monetary codes that had put them in possession of their 12 billion dollar fortune. Ed had spent the last ten years of his life developing a super computer, which used a variety of sub-atomic particles to energize itself. Though he had in fact created a working prototype, the machine that had delivered the fortune to Sylvia and Gaye, its energy output barely matched the energy it took to run it. This was not a problem for a man as unconcerned about practical matters as Ed, but it was certainly a serious enough drawback to mainframe designers to keep them only marginally interested in Ed’s work.

Trying to make his machine economically feasible, he was learning to crack open ever-smaller pieces of matter, frozen energy Ed called the bosons and positrons he was working with. What he was doing in effect was essentially redefining what man had come to understand about energy, pushing the very envelope of what the English physicist Paul Dirac had called quantum electrodynamics. The selection of Tsiltcoos Lake for him had been a matter of convenience. It was close enough to a reasonably good university, the University of Oregon in Eugene, and yet far enough from it, and population centers in general, to afford him relative isolation. When he needed to he could travel to Eugene to review recent scientific literature or to converse with members of the physics department at the university who regarded him as a harmless eccentric, never realizing how thoroughly each time he visited them he had picked their brains. To have chosen the area because of its natural beauty would never have occurred to Ed as a sufficient or good reason to settle there. To Sylvia, however, the area seemed like a paradise, with miles of unspoiled and untouched white-sand beaches, pristine lakes and rivers, rich and deep fir and hemlock forests.

When the foundation had been established, it had been Sylvia, therefore, who had insisted that it be chartered in the state of Oregon, and when they had at last reached the decision together that Nickolas should administer it publicly and full time, Sylvia had flown to Oregon to purchase a home for them. About the same time Georgia Pacific had given up its lease on the largest of Tsiltcoos’s islands, evaluating its timber as too difficult to harvest. Shown the island by a local real estate agent, Sylvia hadn’t hesitated to make an offer to purchase it, which was quickly accepted. For the last several months of their tenure in Atlanta, she had flown back and forth across the country, wrapping up her research as a bio-chemist at Georgia Tech, and overseeing the construction of the ten-room English cottage that sat on a small bluff overlooking the southern end of the lake, an expanse of water, rimmed with the deep green forest only 71 or more inches of annual rainfall can produce. The house had been completed only a week before. Nickolas had yet to see it.

I’ve been thinking about Gaye and Lewis a lot over the last few weeks, Nickolas replied. I guess it has to do with finishing up at Emory and getting ready to leave Atlanta, where everything began. Each day puts us further away from what happened, but we’re not far enough away yet for me to forget our adventure in Costa Rica.

No sooner had he spoken these words than he shook his head rapidly. Did I just say ‘forget’? That madness to flood the world with cocaine, to destroy the universities, to seize control of the government, to do god knows what. No! I’m not ever going to forget that. What I mean is that we’re not far enough removed from those events for me to put them in some other part of my mind that I monitor only occasionally. In any case, I really miss Gaye and Lewis. I’m glad they’ve written.

Nickolas rubbed his right hand over his forehead absentmindedly lingering over the small, moon-shaped scar over his left eyebrow, a permanent reminder of his last encounter with the murderous Oswaldo. He inhaled deeply, holding his breath for a moment before releasing it slowly. Gaye patted his hand sympathetically.

What did they have to say? How’s Carlita? Is she learning how to use that voice synthesizer any better? From what I understand, she ought to be able to talk pretty normally with it.

Conversation about Carlita’s rehabilitation was about as close as Nickolas and Sylvia ever came to discussing what they had experienced. The brutality that had been visited upon the child – her tongue having been ripped from her mouth, and her body having been used for the most unspeakable sexual perversions – had become for both Nickolas and Sylvia a tacitly understood but unspoken symbol of what lay at the very core of their adventure and what they feared had been transferred in some insane, transmutational process, to the core of their own lives. Carlita’s recovery was