Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 Rescue Taj Taheer
Prisc Chandola
I remember the steamy tropics, the leaches, and the chance mine that blew up the German ship and freed Bogart and Hepburn without killing them, opening a halcyon era. I named my favorite toy boat The African Queen.
After human life on Earth was annihilated by bombs and ensuing radiation, the lights in the room went on, startling us back to reality. I blinked and stretched. I had just seen the end of time. Now we had a deferment, but for how long?
The elevator got stuck on the twenty-seventh floor, and my mother became hysterical. She was always emotionally right if off-target in just about every other way. Two of the men in our group pried open the door and gate and gave us each a hoist. After we climbed out, we took an adjacent elevator down, Martha giddy and trembling.
I remember Jill as Audrey Hepburn in the movie, curled on the living room sofa, blowing smoke in the air, conscious of each self-conscious motion she made. Part of me would be talking to her, and part of me would be looking at the remarkable girl: her face, her eyes, the curve of her breasts, her lips, her clothes, her pocketbook, her smooth legs, her fancy gestures, her womanly movements.
An identical black monolith has been found buried fifteen meters below the surface of the crater Tycho, a strong magnetic anomaly having disclosed its position to an orbiting satellite. Excavated at night, on exposure to the first rays of sun the object shoots a burst of radio waves at Jupiter (at the Saturnian moon Iapetus in the novel). Except for that single discharge, the four-million-year-old parallelepiped remains inert.
Even though millions of years lie between the initial message to mankind and the arrival of the craft, it is a mere second in the meta-chronology of planets. The astronaut is buffeted through a vortex of storms and colors, flung like a feather in a hurricane until he is crushed and the fragments of his ship and body enter (on the level of a bug) the Jovian vastness.
Space and time interchange. He sees progressively aging versions of himself dressed formally and eating meals until he enters an eighteenth-century room and encounters himself again, this time as an old man lying in bed. He becomes the man. The monolith now sits at the foot of the bed. As he reaches for it, he is transformed into a foetus-like creature enclosed in a diaphanous orb. Instantaneously he is returned to Earth orbit: the child of Gaia and the Jovian system floats in a bubble above the blue planet, gazing down at it. Earth and Jupiter have bred.
Extinguished at one level, the astronaut is resurrected at another, for he lives his whole life backward and forward in the density of Jovian seconds. The meaning of his identity and our species is wrung out of his cells and psyche and fused with the archetypal wisdom of Jupiter. A new being with fused Jovian and terrestrial intelligence is hatched from his former hologram. This is Jupiter not only as guardian of the Solar System but willing magus to Earth.
If we could descend onto the gas giant (and survive), Arthur Clarke might have been saying at the end of his Space Odyssey, we would pass through a continuous undulant rainbow in which turbulent zones would come into view, surfaces shimmer, each to be swept away into deeper and deeper eddies until time and space were turned into something else entirely: a room, a memory, a chrysalis. . . .
David and Lisa from the book by Theodore Isaac Rubin, screenplay by Eleanor Perry, directed by Frank Perry, starring Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin in their first roles (1962). After seeing it, I composed imaginary letters to Janet Margolin, but I was really writing the fictional Lisa.
This is our main hope: we got here once upon a time; we made sense of it. Whatever hand we are dealt next, even no hand, we will make the best of, because the only promise is that we will continue to be what we are.
This is the main thing I would tell that sweet little hovering moth, so inconsequential and anonymous, if I could get on its tight frequency and transmit through its simple nervous system to its consciousness. I would also tell that spider who stopped briefly on my leg before continuing its path up and down fabric. I would like us to celebrate this condition together and be friends.
We get in most trouble when we think that we are supposed to have an explicit mission and know what it is. We struggle to stay on course. We put ourselves on timetables. We seek solace against our mortality and seeming plight.
The sole clue of creation is that it exists and we do too. There is nothing more central and hopeful than that. Be what you are with integrity and grace. Accept that you are as tiny and insignificant as a moth. It may seem a curse and a burden at times, but it is also a gift, to get to view and experience all this in some manner. You could never explain it otherwise. It is just too weird and complicated. In fact, you could never, and that would be the real tragedy.
In the autumn of their fifth year and for many thereafter, male and female emperor penguins of Antarctica depart the food-teeming waters beneath the ice, plop onto the indelible snow- bank, rise on their saurian hinds, and then shuffle in a column seventy miles to their inland breeding grounds. Clambering up and down hills of snow, sometimes tobogganing along the hardpack, they trek unflaggingly toward the tribal ceremony. When the survivors reach the ancestral site, their reunion looks like a Woodstock Festival on a glacier. Bumping and screeching, the birds greet raucously and search and compete for mates. When two of them are satisfied with each other, they stand in place, nuzzling and fondling, using their bellies, beaks, and vestigial wings to court. Then they breed monogamously. But they do not immediately return to the ocean after the romancing, for this is where the next generation will be born.
After the chick is born, the male penguin will embrace its fuzzy bundle in his coat against a climate that could freeze a whelp solid in minutes. Maintaining his posture with a birdling in the place of the former egg, though excruciatingly hungry and apparently very cold, vibrating and voicing the great riddle and grief of existence, he will protect the baby until his mate returns, much like those Kiowa warriors whose single role on the battlefield was to pick a position and hold it, weaponless (or with a bow and single un-aimed arrow), against all assaults and intrusions, to cast an aura of ferocity that might render them immune from injury or kill, thereby changing the nature and meaning of the battle, striking if not fear, then recognition, into the hearts of the opponents.
The males do not have to support their asanas forever, for the females, with a banquet of semi-digested fish and krill and jellyfish in their maws, will faithfully honor the species pact and, at great danger and travail to themselves, make the long journey back to nourish the near-starving flock. Only then are the males free to reenter the sea and eat.
These are birds, but they cannot fly. Their lovely black, white, and yellow coloring, upright postures, and proximate scale give them the appearance of chubby uniformed humanoids, primates like us. But they are not even close to human. Their calm black slits of eyes show no humanity or mammalian empathy but do suggest some version of love, some cosmic variant of philanthropy and wisdom and benevolence, regalia of a proud but unfamiliar race that seems to belong on another world entirely. They are more closely related to snakes and hawks than to us, but they execute the full semblance of a primitive human village there on the glacier, stand as a lost tribe of shaman bodhisattvas, transformed by bird costumes into flightless apostles who hunt in the coldest waters of this world.
We kid ourselves both that the birds are mindless automatons and we are educated seers, zookeepers, and biologists. Instinct is greater than all of our tribal wisdom and education because it is not instinct at all. We see a perfect reflection of selfless, unconditional love in these walking birds because the thing they are teaching is not a sentiment or metaphor or any- thing we think of these days as love or quarter. They are teaching fact, and if we forfeit them as teachers, we will lose fact itself and, shortly thereafter, the thread of love.
Some of these species they suppress in thinly disguised genocides. Many they alter in vulgar ways that make the plants less nutritious and ecologically vital but more commercially exploitable. Though claiming via public relations to enhance the agricultural potential of the Earth and feed the masses, they are actually salesmen and racketeers, infiltrating the infra- structure of organisms with bacterial and other foreign agents, switching the chromosomes of plants with not only other plants but animals, solely to make glitzy products and fool the public. Yes, a lawyer with a briefcase can steal more money than a hundred men with guns. Ally that lawyer with self-enamored, contemptuous scientists, and you have the perfect formula for a multitrillion-dollar hoax.
Monsanto Company, which manufactures a pesticide called Roundup, also clones Roundup-ready rapeseed (canola) which can be sprayed with virtually unlimited Roundup and survive the attack. That is, insects can be nuked without killing the plants, and who cares about the health of the land or the consumer? The company first makes big money on the pesticide and then even more money from the seed that has to be bought to make use of the pesticide.
What idiot bureaucrat would allow the patenting of life in the first place? What perverse twisting of the meaning of democracy and property rights would lead executives and judiciaries to place the value of short-term personal profit over the long-term value of food and life itself? What fools in robes would rule in favor of corporations over farmers in cases of GMO invasion?
Many disputes in our embattled era have two sides to them, and some things may be mysteries, their verdicts hanging in the balance. But the application of biotech to agriculture and animal husbandry, the invention of botanical and zoological patents and genomic hoarding, the attempt to build new costs and windfall profits into the ancient ceremony of farming, and the defense of this boondoggle by corporations and law firms on retainer are pathology, pure and simple. Not law, not cleverness, not good science, not a misunderstood attempt to end hunger on Earth, not even real business, but stupidity, then greed, then madness and malignancy.
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