Two weeks had passed since the Fiduciary Address, a day on which Hampus Bell had not set out to burn his son to death, nor had there been any rehearsal of the promise to all of the world’s most important people that he would cannibalize Farisa. A spirit had moved him at the time. But it had paid off.
The Patriarch wasn’t sure precisely how the number called “the stock market” was computed, but it represented how much money he had, and it had been on a relentless upward run in the Address’s wake. On August 10, ’91, when it crossed forty, the Z-2s had thrown a party to celebrate his becoming a trillionaire. The designation’s allure had worn off by ’94—as a trillionaire, he still had the same embarrassing biological needs he’d had before—and, in any case, the stock market had been stagnant in the low fifties for quite some time. There was still wealth in the world for the taking, but the easy pickings were gone and the acquisition process was now getting more tedious, more bloody, and—worst of all—more inefficient every year.
The Address, at least, had solved the stock market problem. The number reached eighty before Rychard’s remains had fully cooled in the landfill.
To a twice-trillionaire, the world indeed wore different clothing. Colors had become fresh. A jubilance rode the early-autumn air. Food tasted like food again. The September 18 headline of the Moyenne Dispatch–Press read: “Osha, Hampus!”
Among the Z-2s, Hampus Bell joked-but-it-wasn’t-a-joke that if he’d known he could make half a trillion grot by killing his son, he would have had more children.
Of course, he knew the Company’s newfound buoyancy could not be attributed solely to Rychard’s immolation—it had helped, but was only one spectacle—so much as the ambitious promise. Nothing riles the masses like a witch hunt, and the world’s prize sorceress was Farisa herself. The stock market had turned favorable, but would only remain in such a state if he actually found her. Otherwise, all the good will he’d borrowed in making the promise would become a sort of morale-killing debt.
It unnerved him to think of how many aspects were outside his control. What if Farisa had fallen into a crevasse, never to be seen by the living world again? What if she had been raped to death by orcs in Switch Cave? What if she had perished, milky-eyed and insensate, of heatstroke in the Ashes? Such an outcome would shatter is faith in a just universe by making him look like an idiot.
He finished his morning coffee. He had taken a habit of investing twenty minutes, before the workday began, in silent meditation. Cloudless September mornings like this one were to be savored, not hurried. He wished he had learned that earlier; what good was it to be born so high, if one did not use the luxury of being able to enjoy one’s life? He put his sable slippers on and walked out on the spacious balcony of his five-story city mansion, bought by his father for his deceased older brother, that overlooked a six-hundred-acre meadow, once a park, acquired in the same purchase and rendered so perfectly empty that a property’s owner could look at it two times in succession and be sure to see the same thing. Nothing would change unless a bird flew through; his staff had not found a good way to prevent that.
The high breeze chilled his hands. His toes curled in the sleek fur. His gaze turned south. Somewhere under the same sun, Farisa and her band of doomed fools were marching to certain death in the Ivory Ashes. He would have to acquire them before the heat did them in. How long would it take? Could a person even survive nine-flag heat? Moyenne’s summers were bad enough—his shirts sprouted armpit stains and his thighs chafed at a touch over four.
Boredom often interrupted his meditation sessions. He rolled his tongue. He rocked in his chair. He picked at the scab on his ghost-white heel. It had been there for months because he couldn’t break the habit. After dislodging the blood crust, he rolled the heel-scab between his fingers, forming a round pellet, which he looked at with a certain reverence before standing up and flicking it off the balcony.
He looked at the sky. “Farisa, Farisa. Where are you, Farisa?”
Pann Grackenheit, his best (and, sadly, deceased) underling, had entrusted the search to the “Wet Man,” a bounty hunter named Kanos Evergarde, but the Patriarch didn’t share Pann’s faith in the man’s abilities. Bounty hunters proved their rocks by catching common criminals; Farisa, he was sure, would prove herself an uncommon beast. The Wet Man had been unable to climb his way up the Company hierarchy, so on what basis could one find him sufficient to capture a prize mage? She had probably burned his face off and left him for dead by now.
The Patriarch, funny enough, had never felt any desire to cannibalize the woman—it had never crossed his mind until he had found himself, in the heat of the moment, uttering that promise on stage. He wondered, when the time came, if he would be able to follow through. He’d read that human meat tasted like veal, which he had always considered to be an overrated food source. Babies weren’t meat; they were needy vegetables.
In fact, he had always found the notion of cannibalism disgusting. Cyril Bell had taught him that plunder of Teroshi tribal lands was largely considered acceptable by Ettasi people on account of their belief that cannibalism—as practiced by one tribe of less than fifty, as a funerary honor to sages—was widespread on the continent. By consuming human flesh in front of his trusted subordinates, was he declaring such savagery... good? The logistics of butchering, eating, and disposing of a human body were horrid, but he had no doubt that the act would send the stock market over one hundred—possibly, over two hundred. For a trillion grot, who wouldn’t eat a human corpse?
“How this year has changed me,” he muttered to himself.
At the beginning of ’94, he had been planning his retirement. Far worse, it would have been accepted. The attitude at the Company had long been that everything would run just fine without any of its upper management, and this was of course true, but no one was supposed to ever know, or even think, of the fact. Things had not gotten so bad that anyone would have said it, but people had not been as quick to defend his indispensability as they had been for his father or grandfather, and that made him sad. September 4 had changed all that—even in the Company's most unexciting divisions, like Overland Logistics and the Interest Calculation Bureau, men were now showing up at dawn, whistling while they worked, and staying until two in the morning, because the Patriarch’s cannibalistic promise meant that the Global Company had aspirations again. It made him giddy to see his workers so driven. Employees of all ranks asked him what they could do, personally, to help find Farisa. He could hardly contain his glee on Junior Career Day, the next week, when a twelve-year-old City Day student asked what subjects she ought to study if she wanted to become a witch hunter.
Before the Address, Hampus Bell had been spending his time resolving petty conflicts among geriatric bureaucrats who managed people who managed people who managed people who managed people whom no one knew what the frapp they did. He had been a Chief Patriarch for years, and he’d had “Seraph of All Human Capital” in his title for that long, but only on that stage had he truly become that force. Setting his son ablaze on that crucifix had changed the world. When employees shouted, “H’vast Hampus!” these days, they meant it. Dogs, it felt good.
#
Just outside Headquarters, he bent over to pick up a cadmium penny. Even for a trillionaire, free money was free money. If he didn’t take it, someone else would, so what choice did he have? As he crouched, he felt an uncanny wetness on the back of his neck and, by reflex, reached back to knock the adulterant away. A nutty, creamy substance slid down his palm.
He stomped and balled his fists, causing the slurried material to spatter on his cuff. He had always hated birds. A better world would be rid of them.
“I’ll get you all, you frapping trash animals, you rats with wings!”
A man in a gray suit and blue tie emerged from Headquarters with a warm, soapy, wet towel. “I’ll attend to this, Hiero Bell. Please keep still.”
“No one else saw this, right? Please tell me no one else—”
The man, after removing his suit coat, cleaned his neck with a towel and lather. “Good as new, Patriarch.”
The Patriarch muttered to himself as he entered Headquarters. He might have to wait five minutes before a replacement coat was delivered to his office.
He looked up and addressed the birds. “After Farisa, you’re frappin’ next—all of you. I’ll rid the skies of you forever.”
Kayla smiled at him as she walked by. “Osha, Hampus!”
“Osha, Kayla!”
He was still furious about birds—the mere existence of creatures that could defecate from the air without consequence angered him—but decided the matter would not be of interest to Kayla so, as they climbed together up the stairs, they made summery small talk of a forgettable nature. She did not even ask why his coat was off, and he was pleased by this omission.
On the second floor, a bunch of Z-6s were talking about Pann Grackenheit, debating where he had gone. The official story was that he had tired of Moyenne and requested a transfer to a warmer climate, but the higher-ranking people understood something else had occurred, because they were all avoiding Room 2-15, the deceased Z-3’s office, to the point of taking the long way around it. The rest of the drones, perhaps unaware, had copied this pattern, to the point that a fairy circle could be drawn around a place where self-preserving people did not go. This was the worst part of firing people—it left a perfectly good office cursed for years. Pann’s workspace had an enviable view, but would spend the next three decades as a storage closet for janitors.
Michael Poor—there’d been no point in lying to him bout Pann’s fate; he had enough intellect and experience to know the truth—had said yesterday that Pann might have stayed loyal if promoted to Z-2. That was the tragedy of the whole thing. Hiero Bell had not chosen to hold his best subordinate at Z-3 out of dissatisfaction with the man’s work, but on the contrary, because Pann had been too good at his job—far too good to be promoted! Z-2 was the level at which people (with the odd exception of Michael Poor, promoted to that level before Hampus’s time) lost all drive. The design of Z-2 made it a dead rank, because there was no position above it but The One, and so a person there had either to risk his life or become unambitious. Cyril and Smitz had executed so many good men at the Z-2 level, it had become rational for the survivors to do as little as possible, leaving the rank full of old codgers paid far too much for the “labor” of coughing on each other.
For example, one of the Z-2s had invited Hampus Bell into a nine o’clock meeting that existed to prepare for the ten o’clock status call. Didn’t bringing a boss into the pre-meeting meeting both (a) defeat the preparatory purpose of the first meeting, since the person whose opinion was feared was invited, and (b) make the second one purposeless? Of course, Bell attended. It would have been rude not to.
As he sat in the Mahogany Chair, bored out of his mind, he realized that the dull terror of being the Patriarch was in his having to seem attentive at all times, or else people would slack. Moths had grown eyespots on their wings so they could sleep safely in the open, but humans had no such defense. He cared even less about cotton plantations and soldats’ brothels than he had about geometry proofs and angle trisections (a construction that, to this day, he had failed to figure out) as a child, and so he knew almost nothing about what the people under him were doing, but he could never let this on, or it would cost the Company—and, therefore, the world—millions of grot. He remembered being a child in the family mansion’s schoolroom on sunny afternoons, waiting for flowers to open or leaves to redden, wishing he were a starling or a jay instead of a bored boy in a cage. How had it come to be that a trillionaire, the world’s literal owner, had to spend so much time listening to self-important seneschals with no better use for their lives than to yammer on about “deliverables” and “harnessing bake-off potential” and “boiling the ocean”? What the frapp was a “deliverable,” and why would anyone want to boil the ocean?
“Stop,” the Patriarch found himself saying.
A Z-3 adjusted his necktie. “I’m sorry.” The man was tabulating the costs and benefits of selling alcohol to children. This one was actually, from a business perspective, interesting. On one hand, early consumption of addictive drugs meant there would be a greater number of reliable consumers in the future. On the other, midlife death by cirrhosis threatened to deprive the Company of workers. The costs and benefits had been computed and were so close to each other that, numerically, precision mattered. Still, math was math and math was boring and by the transitivity property of tedium that meant that math was boring.
The Z-3 said, “Is something wrong with my presentation?”
“It’s excellent.” Hampus Bell smiled. “I didn’t mean to be short with you.”
A Z-3 in the back asked, “So, should I—?”
“It is hot, and there is a lack of air movement.” Hampus Bell tugged at his shirt. The building’s ventilation was so poor, he suspected the temperature was near five flags—tropical, infernal desert heat of a kind that made him sympathize with Claes and Farisa in the Ivory Ashes. He was also, if he didn’t get airflow and something to drink, at risk of burning to death. “You know what, frapp it. Meeting canceled. None of you have done anything wrong. I just don’t think we need this meeting.”
Faces in the room turned puzzled. It had been so long since a meeting had been canceled at the Global Company. Creating new meetings was easy, and ambitious managers did precisely that all the time to establish their own necessity, but old gatherings and commitments were never discarded, there being neither incentive nor process for doing so, and severe social penalties for nonattendance.
“Very well,” said the presenter. “We’ll raise the drinking age for hard liquor to twelve. We need no budget for enforcement—we intend none—but it’ll improve our image to set some laws.”
Hampus put a hand on the Z-3’s arm. “You’re a good man.”
He left, and so did all the others.
“Kayla, get in here!”
She walked in. “Osha, Hampus!”
“What does my schedule look like?”
“You have the meeting at eleven o’clock.”
“Cancel it.”
“You have a blue-sky session at twelve fifteen.”
“What the frapping asp is a blue-sky session? Cancel it, too. I’ll be busy all day.”
“Very well. May I ask what you will be doing?”
“Something I need,” he said as he walked away.
He climbed the stairs to the third, then the fourth, then the fifth floor. He rarely went that high in the building, but there was a Z-4 in Room 5-36 he had known since boyhood. Ben, was that his name? Brian? Bob? All those B names blended together—they were basically the same beige name, for all Bell cared.
“Brandon,” said the Patriarch as he closed the Z-4’s door.
“Hiero Bell! It is an excellent surprise to see you.”
“I need something from you, but you must keep it an absolute secret.”
“Of course.” Bill nodded. “What do you need?”
“I’d like you to close off one of the city’s parks—choose one close by, and it doesn’t matter which one, so long as it’s not one of the ones named after my father.”
“I’ll send a detail to close off Riverside. It’ll be done in twenty minutes.”
“That’s perfect.” Hampus put a hand on the back of Bill’s chair. “It’s a sunny day, and I’d like to go to the park. I need you to find me a kite.”
“A kite, a kite.” The Z-4 paused. “Of course, a kite...”
“Is something wrong?”
“To be honest, Hiero Bell, I’m unfamiliar with the lingo. I stopped using in my twenties. A kite is... what amount?”
The Patriarch folded his arms. “An actual kite, Brent. I want to go fly a kite.”
#
A few days later, Hampus Bell entered work anxious and out of breath. He stormed into Kayla’s office and asked, “Do you know how to take dictation?”
“What’s tation?”
“I realized that with Hiero Grackenheit gone...” He shook his head. “Dogs, sometimes I regret retiring that man.”
“It had to be done,” Kayla said.
“It did, but I wish I had waited for him to write the ’95 Company budget before doing it. I tried reading through his notes, but the smell of death is everywhere in that office.”
“I have this year’s budget.” Kayla opened a drawer of her desk. “Two copies, in fact. One for you, and one for me.”
“We’ll work from that, then. Do you know how to use a typewriter?”
Kayla nodded. “There’s one on the third floor.”
“Great. Let’s go up there.” They went upstairs, the Patriarch with a spring in his step. He couldn’t explain how any of this worked, but Kayla’s presence rejuvenated him. He had grown with age to think of money as a chore, an ugly detail of life that even those who had it could not really get away from, but these days, something had changed to make money feel like power and sex again. That was the surest sign of love, wasn’t it? He had not felt for a long time such a crispness in life’s details. The roll of thousand-grot bills he carried around as a lucky charm now felt like an object that mattered again. Colors brightened whenever Kayla entered a room. How had he ever let them get so dull?
The beautiful young woman inserted a blank page into the typewriter. “I’m ready, batoh.”
“You checked that the page isn’t upside down?”
“It’s blank."
“Of course, of course.” Hampus read the title of Pann’s document: “Annual Budget for the Global Company, Ettasi Division, Year 9994.”
Kayla made a pouty face. “It’s a lot of numbers.”
“We’re alone. You don’t have to pretend to be stupid.”
“I thought you liked that.” Kayla looked at the paper. “In any case, it looks like the G-Fund’s fifty-three—no, fifty-four-point-one percent of the whole budget this year. That seem right?”
“Fifty-something, it's supposed to be. It works.”
“It looks like Pann divided it four ways: Politics, Munitions, Personnel, and Miscellaneous.”
Hampus scratched his chin. “I’d like to increase Politics. We do mostly bribery these days. It’s boring. I’d like to get us back into witch-hunting. What’s the current number?”
“Sixteen.”
“Just sixteen million, for the entire Politics Department?”
“Sixteen billion.”
“Double it.”
Kayla spoke as she typed. “Politics. Three-two-colon-zero-zero-zero. Return.”
“What’s Personnel?”
“A hundred twenty billion.”
“Ouch,” Hampus said. “Gut punch. I hate paying for workers. Let’s see...”
“Winter is coming.”
Hampus growled. “There’s always a winter coming. Why do people keep saying that, as if it were something profound, as opposed to a perennial truth of living in a seasonal climate?”
“What I mean is that an Alma Winter is coming. You’ve seen the weird sunsets, right? We’re going to have a lousy harvest.”
Hampus scratched his nose. “So?”
Kayla smirked. “People will be desperate, so we can cut their wages. Let’s lop off twenty percent. That’d be ninety-six.”
“Great insight. Make it ninety. Actually, I’m feeling generous. Let’s do ninety-one and a half.”
“Personnel. Nine-one-colon-five-zero-zero. Return.”
“You know.” Hampus Bell shifted his weight. “I don’t fully get it. This is the Global Company. Why do we pay people to work here? They should be paying us for the opportunity.”
“The young are spoiled indeed.”
“They sure are. What’s next?”
“Munitions.”
“Bullets?”
Kayla nodded.
“This is how I have to spend my fleeting existence? Deciding how many frappin’ bullets to buy? Is this what Pann did?” He made fists. “Frapp!”
“I can handle—”
“Why can’t we just buy all of them? We can afford it.”
Kayla put a hand on his forearm. “There’s more interesting stuff in the budget too—artillery, landmines, and chlorine. Oh, and someone in Research figured out that we can use cyanide pesticides for the chambers, which will make them twelve percent cheaper to run.”
Hampus kicked the desk. “This is so boring! Why is it so much work?”
Kayla’s lips parted. “I thought you loved work.”
“No, Kayla. I love going to work. I love this place. I love telling people what to do. This numbers nonsense? I’d rather give it to Michael Poor.”
“You’re doing great. You’ve been working hard for almost five m—a long time. Let’s take a break.”
“Right. A break. Good idea, Kayla.” Hampus looked at his watch, which remained stuck at two thirty, although it was about eight in the morning. Since firing Pann, he’d made so many tiny mistakes, including dismissing the man who wound the Patriarch’s watch for him. “A break we shall take. We make for a break.”
Kayla opened a drawer, finding a flask of liquor. “Want some?”
“You know I don’t drink.” Hampus watched the closed door’s lower threshold for signs of foot traffic.
“You could stand to start.”
“I should give you the G-Fund.”
“Me?”
“If you can run the G-Fund half as well as Pann did, we’ll be fine. The rest of the Company basically runs itself. My father would have said it runs too well.”
Kayla’s eyebrows lifted. “How could the Company run too well?”
“Grandpa used to explain it like this. You might think, as a leader, that you’ll inspire confidence if your organization runs well. If people are getting paid on time, your underlings are happy, and your soldiers go into battle with guns that work, then you’re good at your job and deserve to keep it. Right? You’d think so. The problem is: those are the times when it’s fun to be in charge, so every half-wit envies your position. Your authority is always being challenged. On the other hand, during a crisis, everyone’s miserable and no one wants to be stuck with the beans, so the thousand charlatans back off.”
Kayla tilted her head. “I understand his logic. I think I agree.”
“Pann had his faults, but he was no simpleton.”
Kayla set the typewriter aside. “He was a sharp one, but his sharpness pointed against you. When I first met him, I could smell... evil.”
“I know.” Hampus rubbed a fist in his palm like a bearing in a socket. “I know that he was working against me, but he was doing it ineffectively and he had no charisma, so was he ever a real threat? Or did we kill him over nothing?”
She put a hand on his wrist to reassure him. “It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that we find Farisa.”
“Right. You’re right, Kayla. It’s just that—”
“I’ll handle the numbers nonsense. You go find her.”
“Where is she, though? She could be anywhere the sun shines, as well as a bunch of places where it doesn’t. It’s like trying to spot a sparrow through forty thousand feet of sky.”
“You may have said it.”
“What?”
“I think you know what you need to do.”
#
Of Moyenne’s two newspapers, the Dispatch–Press (or “Dispatch”) had long been considered the more liberal one, while the Sentinel–Telegraph–Daily (“the Telegraph”) catered to the conservative suburbs and the Eastern Horn. Of course, both outlets really took orders from the Department of Politics. It was always best to arrange that reformist and traditionalist voices agree to keep to small discrepancies from a shared message. When there was no real dissension, everybody won.
Hampus Bell arrived five minutes late to Room 2-27, where he had his telespeak appointment with Jojin Meinteil, editor-in-chief at the Dispatch. He didn’t understand why newsmen were so averse to meeting in person. Howard Taylor at the Telegraph, whom he’d known since yacht school, had always been the same about it. They always said it would damage their credibility to be seen in public with those they covered, as if anyone would be fooled by the press’s claims that it did not work for the people with the money and access. The Company, for similar reasons, had been asked to limit its official stake in newspaper profits to 49 percent. Of course, they were more intricately connected than that—when it came to on-time payment of supplemental wages for reporters who covered it correctly, the Global Company was intensely scrupulous.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The Patriarch found the telespeak's wires inscrutable. “How the frapp do people use this thing without strangling themselves?”
Kayla found the mouthpiece. “This is the part you talk into.”
“You know how to work the numbery bits?”
Kayla smiled. “Of course. You said it’s the Dispatch, right?” Kayla adjusted some knobs and switches. The static in Bell’s earpiece quieted. Jojin’s voice came through.
“Good afternoon, Hiero Bell.”
“Good afternoon, Jojin.”
“Dearest Patriarch, what is the subject of this call?”
“I’m calling to say that I am mostly satisfied with the coverage you’ve given the Fiduciary Address.”
“It was a most excellent speech, Hiero Bell. I wish I had been invited to see it in person.”
“I believe you did not hear me. I said I am mostly satisfied with the coverage.”
“What is the nature of your complaint?”
“On page A-3, the word ‘kill’ is used in reference to Rychard’s death.”
“Are you denying that you killed him?”
“I am not.” The Patriarch rolled the wrist of the hand holding the telespeak’s mouthpiece. “My issue is with the word. It’s ugly. There are times when it is justified to take another’s life, but the word kill has dark connotations—even a whiff of illegality. Never forget, Mr. Meinteil, that I am the Law.”
“You are right, Hiero Bell.” The editor made an inaudible request to an assistant. “I’ll ensure the writer never works again. Would you like a retraction?”
“If you could.”
“I will fulfill your request, but I would be remiss if I failed to point out that a retraction can increase the attention given to an event.”
“That’s no issue. I want people to know what happened. I just don’t like the K word.”
“How’s this? ‘Yesterday, in reference to Hampus Bell’s legal and justified termination of his son, Rychard S. Bell, an erroneous word was printed. We are committed to the highest standard of integrity at the Dispatch–Press and have ended the article’s author’s employment, without severance pay.’ ”
The Patriarch chuckled. “Beautiful. A work of art.”
“I’m always glad to be of service, Hiero Bell. Now, could I ask you a question?”
“Please do.”
“Have you made any progress finding Farisa?”
“Shoes on a stick, Jojin. Shoes on a frappin’ stick.” Hampus paused. “As absurd as it sounds, I believe she’s on the Mountain Road. I don’t know what to do. There’s no way I’m sending another steamship to roast in the ten-flag heat. I’m actually considering... is this off the record?”
Hampus Bell heard static. The call disconnected.
“Frapp!”
Even the Global Company hadn’t figured out a way to keep a telespeak in operation for more than a few minutes.
Kayla tilted her head. “It’s actually for the better.”
He knew she was right. Though he and Jojin had been buddies since age four, it would still be imprudent to share his design, still inchoate, with a journalist.
“What were you about to tell him?”
“Just...” Hampus looked outside. “I don’t know. I had an idea, but I lost my train of thought.” Hawks soared over the city, casting shadows on even the tallest buildings. How high could they go, if they wanted? Five hundred feet? Two thousand? A full mile above the ground? As high as the Mountain Road? Higher?
#
On an unseasonably cool afternoon toward the end of September, Hampus Bell and Kayla were walking along the riverfront. Men with machine guns formed a protective bubble, allowing them to enjoy the air free of impoverished people and their stench—also toward this end, the whole park had been disinfected that morning.
Kayla adjusted her pony tail and said, in a matter-of-fact tone, “Pann’s spy, the Wet Man, is dead.”
“Why do you think that?”
“When important people die, I feel things.”
The Patriarch put his hands in his pockets. “I’m told those are called emotions. I used to get them too, even into my thirties, if you’ll believe that, but never tell a soul. They’re annoying.”
“No. I felt him entering the other world. Neither he, nor the place, seems to be happy about it.” Kayla’s gaze followed a heron’s path over the river. “A disturbance in the b—I just know.”
Hampus straightened his jacket collar. This was the first time he had needed sleeves for a walk outside. Hummingbirds had flown south already. Black ducks would be gone by the end of October, and the honey-colored warblers would migrate shortly thereafter. Who knew where they went?
He said, “Your predictions do have an uncanny track record of being right.”
“My opinion is that, to get Farisa, you will need more than one bounty hunter. You’ll need a whole crew.”
Hampus wanted to change the subject. “How old were you when you lost your virginity?”
“Fifteen, to a Company man.”
“At least Z-6, I hope.”
“Z-5.” She kicked a pebble down the paved footpath. “I wouldn’t consider less. How old were you?”
“Let’s not get into that.”
“Sixteen? Eighteen?”
Hampus quickened his pace. “I’m not telling you.”
“Was Lysita your first? Oh, you sweet—”
“I was fourteen.”
Kayla walked in front of Hampus and blocked his path. “You’re embarrassed by that?”
“It’s not the age I was. It’s—Never mind.”
“What?”
“You’ll understand someday.” He was not embarrassed by his sexual precociousness. That had been so long ago, he barely remembered it. Instead, his source of shame was that his life’s longest dry spell had not been those first fourteen years, but a much longer interval. He and Lysita had not coupled since Loran, and after her death his desire had been low, and then...
“I understand a lot, you know.”
“Let’s sit down.” They sat together on a bench whose red paint had mostly chipped off. “There were twenty-eight women before Lysita. That’s not such a high number on the Horn, of course. It felt like enough to me, though. Twenty-eight was enough to sample the different skin colors, the different languages, the ages I considered decent from my vantage point. I never had to pay for it either. My name did everything I needed. I could walk up to any girl in any bar, anywhere in the world, make some stupid comment about current events or the weather, and have her ask me to bed within five minutes.”
“Oh?”
“Then I met Lysita. I was faithful to her the whole time, for all the good that did. Since her passing, it’s been as dry as the Ivory frapping Ashes.”
“Then you met me.”
Hampus nodded.
“Nothing about you feels out of practice.” Kayla smiled. “You learned it back quick, batoh.”
“I suppose one doesn’t forget.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’ve got a roiling headache.”
Kayla flagged one of their bodyguards and asked for water.
He chose not to tell Kayla that, after breaking a two-decade dry spell sixteen hours ago, he had found himself disappointed, not in her performance (which had been noisomely excellent) but in his own psychological potency. Age had not taken his physical ability, but a thought nagged him during what ought to have been the height of ecstasy: It is supposed to feel like... something else. Like money? Not quite; he knew what money felt like. Power? No, something else. To be human was a misfortune. Rabbits and weasels had sex all the time, and didn’t need a Global Company’s assurance that there would be money for their offspring. She-rabbits did not care if they were mating with penniless loser he-rabbits—they did it anyway. Baboons and bats and jacks-of-ass could get right down to life’s essence without a grot in the bank. Cats did it, rats did it. Dogs did it, hogs did it. Even eagles did it. Swans did it. Phalaropes did it. No rooster's confidence, nor a drake’s, was impaired by a lack of economic fortune, as they had the open sky, a great blue space nobody owned. Humans, once they left school for the real world, were the exception; they had to own things before they could fuck, and the work involved in owning things seared the soul, rich or poor. Sex with Kayla had shown great technical merit, but had still been disappointing because he had failed to achieve that sense of animalistic freedom. It is supposed to feel like... flying.
#
Hampus Bell saw the strangest thing on the way to work on the otherwise dull morning of September 29. Michael Poor’s carriage had no horses. The Z-2’s driver seemed to be able to steer it with a silly-looking handwheel. Were those silly contraptions back in fashion? Cyril Bell’d had a steam car made for himself, three decades ago, but the thing had required too much fiddling to be useful.
As Hiero Poor exited the vehicle, Hampus lowered a nonexistent monocle. “Quaint tackle you’ve got, my friend.”
Hiero Poor chuckled. “My boys in Science built it for me.”
“You really think those things are going to come back? I don’t see what’s wrong with horses.” He looked around before saying, “Why spare the road a horse’s mess, when it’s not people like us who have to clean them up?”
Michael Poor patted the front of his carriage. “Nothing wrong with horses. This thing’s faster, is all. It’ll do fifty on a decent road.”
Hampus led the way to Headquarters. “Fifty yards a minute?”
“Miles per hour.”
“You’re plonkering me. Our trains barely do that.”
“I am serious. One of these days, I’ll take you for a ride.”
“Please do.” The Patriarch held open the door of Headquarters as they went into the lobby. “You know more science than I do. My grandfather, as he got on in age, used to prattle on about absurdities like... please don’t laugh at me... bird cars.”
“Bird cars?”
“Flying devuckles.” Hampus’s hand swerved and dove like a swift.
Michael Poor opened the door to the second floor. “Flying machines? Nothing in science rules them out.”
“Are you serious?”
“I am. I know a thing or two.”
“What’s the short beef?”
“What’s the what?”
“The summary,” Hampus growled. “I’ve found myself repeating phrases of the young. Osha this, sha-sha that. I’ve spent so much time around Kayla, I've even had cravings for seafood.”
“Seafood? What’s wrong with—”
“I always thought it was trash for poor people until I met Kayla. Is she bleeding into me?”
“Bleeding into you?” Hiero Poor stifled a chuckle. “No, that’s not how it’s done. Your stuff is supposed to go into her, not the other way.”
Hampus groaned. “I know that. It’s an expression. It’s just strange that I hire a Crab Bucket girl and, a few months later, I’m eating fish instead of pork.”
“To cut back on red meat isn’t the worst thing at our stage of life, Hiero Bell.”
“What the frapp does that mean?” If his belly was visible, the Patriarch was going to have a word about this with his tailor.
“Never mind,” Hiero Poor said as they reached the second floor. “You asked about flight. Do you know what a dirigible is?”
“Pann would have.”
“Airship. We had a few in your grandfather’s time, but we never used them. Bombing a city from a five-hundred-foot balloon, you’re just asking to be shot down, and there goes the investment. It’s so much easier to just pay saboteurs on the inside. Why do you ask?”
“Our efforts to find Farisa have all met failure. An airship might be our best option.”
“I’ll see if we can refurbish one.”
“Yes. Please do.”
#
Hampus Bell, in all his thinking about horseless carriages and dirigibles, began to develop a vision of the future. He had thought he might put a child inside Kayla; that would give him cause, distant as it were, to care about a world that would go on even when he passed, a concept he otherwise loathed to ponder. The future could be improved; so much of the present had been poorly made. Alas, he was coming to realize that he would not live long enough to see the world cleaned. There was just too much dirt right now.
Moyenne would have been better if designed by a child. It had come together over centuries where once had been a major river’s prime fishing spot, and so much of its space had never been put to intelligent, official use. For example, one could look out one’s window on a fall afternoon like this one and see people hawking squashes, beets, and apples. Children played stupid games where no one got hurt. People treated the streets like a public space where they were free to walk dogs, ride bicycles, and watch slugs mate. This occurred less than fifty yards from the world’s esteemed temple of Work! Had these people not learned that outdoor activity was what second homes were for? Sure, some did not possess supernumerary domiciles, but such people had no business wasting time at leisure.
On a chalkboard in his office before the morning meeting, he designed the city of the future. The wasteful spaces between houses could be replaced with rails where coal-fired trains would whip people to work and back at thirty miles per hour. There would be no stray dogs—if seasoned properly, they could be sold as beef—nor greengrocers nor public emotional displays. Too much work had to get done, and the world had too little space. A city, the Patriarch understood, required fine tuning, like a clock or an engine, and had no room in its chassis for needless gears.
This project would have the added benefit of creating jobs. Once these trains were built, he would have to expand his rail police to ensure no one went anywhere without a good reason to go. There would need to be camps for people who disobeyed the rules of the new type of city, and this meant hiring camp guards. Jobs like this gave use for nasty people who might otherwise turn counterproductive.
He could one day build the perfect society, an excellently efficient market in which Work was not constrained to one’s hours in an office, but held entire dominion of physical space. What if one could look out, from a twelfth-story balcony, over a vast and geometrically perfect array of coal-fired vehicles—they would be trains first, but individualized contraptions could be minted later—transporting the people to the places where they happily rendered unto society what was due? It would be a gorgeous sight indeed.
Hampus Bell presented his drawings on September 30 to his closest confidants.
A Z-3 scratched his nose. “Thank you, Hiero Bell. These are lovely proposals, and I will make sure they see implementation.”
“I am not finished.” The Patriarch forced a laugh. “Those are only my plans for downtown.” He circled a rectangle on the corner of his hand-drawn map. “This land is just forest, the kind of place where kids go to collect owl pellets. We’re going to put our New Headquarters here, and we’ll cut it from polished limestone. Unlike this dump, it’ll gleam in the sun—forever.”
A different Z-3 spoke up. “With all due respect, this building was also white limestone when Cyril built it. The dull color comes from the smog.”
Hampus Bell pointed to the door.
“I’m sorry, but I thought you should know—”
Hampus Bell bent and straightened his finger to emphasize the pointing.
The Z-3 slinked out. Once he was gone, Hampus Bell continued. “It is absolutely insulting that he blamed smoke produced by our factories for this building’s wretched color. On the other hand, he is not wrong, and I have in fact thought about this. To prevent such discoloration of our New Headquarters, we shall have the edifice washed top to bottom every morning. It’ll have elevators too. It’ll need them, because it’s going to be twenty-one stories tall.”
A Z-2 asked, “Why twenty-one?”
“Farisa’s on his mind,” said a Z-3. “She turns twenty-one tomorrow.”
“Pure coincidence,” Hampus said. “I would like to show you a picture of Headquarters I have had drawn.” He pointed at a Z-4 he’d invited into the meeting for this purpose. “You. Show them.”
The Z-4 laid a large sheet of paper over the Patriarch’s blackwood desk. The other executives looked at it until one of the Z-3s with too many consonants in his name snickered.
“What’s funny?”
“With those two domes flanking the bottom, it looks like a... Forgive me, Hiero Bell. I am sure you did not intend this, but—”
“I did. The Global Company must be bold. Penetrative. The spire gives us three hundred and eighty feet, making it the tallest inhabited building in the Known World, second only to the Great Pyramid.”
“Why settle for second?” asked a Z-2.
“Out.”
The Z-2 smiled as he stood up and walked toward the door.
“No.” Hampus realized by the Z-2’s squirmy gait that he had hoped to be expelled from the meeting because he had needed an excuse to go to the bathroom. “I changed my mind. Stay. That comment, however, just cost you forty thousand out of your next paycheck.”
A different Z-2, so old his dentures sported mold in three colors, asked, “Will it have indoor cooling? The past summer has been a bad one.”
“It’s physically impossible,” Hampus said. “You can’t take the ice block in the elevator, because it’ll get everything wet. You would need a special staircase, and it’s just not feasible.”
Michael Poor scribbled on a scrap of paper and passed it to Hampus Bell. Even still, a building of that size requires ventilation. You’ll need fans.
The Patriarch nodded, giving silent thanks for the note. “One other thing. When construction’s finished, we’ll hold a big gala. We can’t open a building like this without publicity. We’ll need fans.”
#
On October 1, a Z-5 wished the Patriarch, “Happy Farisa’s Birthday.” Under his breath, Bell told the kid to go frapp himself. The only reason he didn’t fire him is that Z-5s and lower all looked alike to him, so he wouldn’t know which one to nick.
Still, the warm and sunny afternoon was as good a time as any for the Patriarch to indulge one of his guiltiest pleasures, which was to leave Headquarters unannounced and see how far he could get before anyone noticed who he was. It would be horrible to be born a commoner and have to work like one, but playing peasant for a few minutes, knowing one could quit any time, was often enjoyable.
He made it six blocks and no one spotted him, so he reached the newsstand where he spotted, on the top shelf, the morning edition of the Moyenne Sentinel–Telegraph–Daily. Its headline extolling the Global Company’s recent performance: “The Sha-Sha Economy.”
“Sir, no freeding.”
“What the frapping frapp is ‘freeding’?”
“You have to pay for it before you—”
Hampus lifted his hat and smiled.
“Oh,” said the stallkeeper. “Shouldn’t you have... people?”
Hampus put a finger to his lips, then walked on. He sat on a bench to read. It was always good to check the Press Department’s work.
The Company had placed in the centerfold an advertisement whose title line read: In 9995, You Will Own The World—With Us. A dot-printed photograph showed a dark-skinned girl dressed in fashionable “island” (Lorani) garb including a saria. She held a garish, oversized globe overhead, and—this made clear she wasn’t actually Lorani, though the makeup artists had done their work so well one couldn’t tell—had kicked up her bare foot, sole and undertoes visible.
The advertisement had been perfectly done. Its letters were perfectly kerned and the girl’s facial expression had been rehearsed to the dot; the picture had probably required twenty takes. One did feel excitement, as if one were opening a well-wrapped gift, at the prospect of owning a world with her in it. The piece had probably cost ten thousand grot—ten thousand of his grot—to produce. This was the worst thing about actually owning the world—its rewards were his, but so were its costs. It was exhausting to be the man whose potatoes and corn a billion people ate every night at dinner.
Would this advertisement, he asked himself, entice a twenty-year-old applicant today? Did the picture make the viewer feel like, if he were to join the Global Company, he would be bedding exotic women regularly? Was the typeface fashionable, or stodgy? What about the semiotics? It was good to make the “island girl” barefoot, as the clogs Lorani women actually wore were not sexy at all, but did the mismatch of cultures in her wardrobe—her headdress was Teroshi—have the effect of making her so exotic she became unapproachable? Would it have been better to pay for a color printing so as to bring out the appetizing caramel color of her skin? Or would it have been better to use a lighter-skinned model, so Easthorn boys might subconsciously think “marriage material” despite the ridiculousness of the whole entreaty? Could the slogan have been given more punch? Something more like: Own the World, With Us! (Applications Open Until October 10). Or, how about: Own the World! With Us! No; staccato was desperate. Even he, a paunchy old man, could see that.
He heard a rustle behind him. His handlers, having discovered the Patriarch on this park bench, had noiselessly and efficiently evicted the public. He looked at his watch. Hampus Bell had been outside for seven minutes, and one could still get sunburn in October, so he decided it was time to fold up his newspaper and return to Headquarters.
Once inside and on the second floor, he pulled one of his Z-4s aside. “I’d like to send a telegraph to the Telegraph.”
“Send a telegraph to... itself?”
“Send a telegram, I mean, to the Sentinel–Telegraph–Daily. I need Howard Taylor on the telespeak at four o’clock.”
“I’ll arrange it, Hiero.”
“Good.”
At the appointed time, Hampus Bell went to the telespeak room, although he had at first mixed up the ear and mouth pieces, leading to Mr. Taylor’s disembodied voice asking the Patriarch’s chin, “What is the matter of discussion?”
“Your coverage.”
“Is it not to your liking?”
“No.” The Patriarch laughed. “Your work, like that of our mutual friend at the Dispatch, is exquisite. I only wanted to make a minor correction.”
“Does it pertain to your son? The name we have on file is—”
“Nothing about Rychard. Boy’s been dead to me for twenty years.”
“He’s dead to a lot of people these days.” Howard Taylor chuckled. He paused. “As in, since he’s actually dead.”
“Good one.”
“I wrote it myself.”
“As for the correction, it’s about today’s headline.” Hampus looked at the morning edition of the paper. “The Sha-Sha Economy.”
“Island-girl slang,” said Mr. Taylor.
“I’ve set foot on a number of islands, and I’ve never encountered those words. ‘Osha,’ ‘sha-sha,’ ‘batoh.’ I suspect they were invented not on tropical islands at all, but here, by rich girls with severe daddy issues.”
Mr. Taylor laughed. “You should be glad you’re not one of my staff writers. To say ‘rich girls with severe daddy issues’ is like saying ‘free gift’ or ‘fiction novel.’ It is a repetitious redundancy and I would assign you a demerit if you let such a one see print.”
“Palpablo, Mr. Taylor. In any case, we agree that these ‘island’ words are, in fact, white as guano. I call not about matters of style, though. There is an objective error in that headline.”
“Is that so?”
“You referred to ours as a sha-sha economy, but it is osha that means hello.” Hampus folded up the newspaper loudly enough for the man on the other side to hear it. “Sha-sha, on the other hand, is used for goodbye.”
#
October 3 did not deviate from early autumn’s theme of mild, sunny days that made Hampus Bell wish he could be other than at work. The world was so much bigger than Headquarters, which surely looked as insignificant as an anthill from the vantage point of the upper blue sky.
He had considered canceling all his meetings, but there was one he considered worthy. At eleven o’clock, Michael Poor shared reports, fresh from Engineering, on the feasibility of crafting a dirigible.
The meeting was full of technical details, from sizes of bolts to altitude sickness to temperature tolerances measured in tenths of flags. Hiero Poor sure knew how to take the fun out of flying. The Z-2, after an hour-long presentation, extinguished his cigarette in a ceramic ashtray.
“In conclusion, we could have an airship that is safe to fly in as little as two years.”
“We don’t frappin’ have two years.” The Patriarch remembered something Kayla had said; his assistant had mentioned a dream in which Farisa had found a way around the Ivory Ashes and entered a new South even the Company didn’t know about. He had no idea where Kayla got her knowledge, but the woman was almost never wrong. “What about two weeks?”
“You must understand that our number of functioning airships, for decades, has been zero.”
“I do understand that, Hiero Poor.”
“Let me bring in a man from Engineering. He’ll give you a better sense of the details.”
“Please do.”
Michael Poor left the office and returned with a Z-4. The man was probably half Wyovian, but his light skin and predominance of Ettasi facial features made his high rank almost justifiable. Had his ears been a quarter of an inch higher, he would have actually looked the part of a second-tier general, and been promotable to Z-3.
He said, “We have done everything we can with Cyril’s steam engines. Almost all of our machines are missing pieces that could not be rebuilt unless we were to refit our entire supply chains—this would take months—but for one exception.”
Hampus leaned forward. “An exception?”
“In Research South—”
“That’s only ten miles away.”
“—I have uncovered a prototype that nearly works. The steam engine itself is in perfect condition. We think it could do forty knots airspeed. There’s some work to be done, already underway, on the hull, and it appears to be missing only one component, but unfortunately it is a critically important one. I don’t know this word in Ettasi—”
“Gasbag,” said Michael Poor.
“That’ll be easy,” said the Patriarch. “This building is full of gasbags. How many do you need?”
“Unfortunately, he means he needs an actual bag of gas. Show him your drawings.”
The Z-4 did. There were too many lines and numbers for the Patriarch to make sense of it all, but Hiero Poor explained that the giant oval on top had to be a balloon filled with a “lifting gas” lighter than air, such as hydrogen.
The Patriarch crossed his arms. “Is hydrogen hard to get?”
“Not at all. Electrolysis of water will do the trick. In fact, human flatus is twenty percent hydrogen.”
Hampus Bell could hardly contain his glee. “So all you need is a giant bag of... digestive gas? Permission granted, then.” The Patriarch clapped his hands. “I would have built ten of these things if I knew it required so little.”
“The gas,” said the Z-4, “is not the problem. We need a container. We can’t use a burlap sack. The balloon’s going to be several hundred feet long, and it has to be airtight. Considering the duration and demands of the flight, we would have to use...” He looked at Michael Poor, seeming to hope someone of higher rank would rescue him from this role in the conversation.
Hampus scratched his ear. “Use what?”
The Z-4 said, “Bovine intestine, freshly butchered.”
“It is the only option,” Michael Poor agreed.
The Patriarch chuckled. This was too good to be true. “Is that all? You’re telling me you can give me an airship, and all it’s going to take is a bunch of cow guts?”
“Eighty thousand,” said Z-2 Poor.
“Eighty thousand grot?” Bell smiled. “I guess I’ll have to skip lunch a couple days.”
“Eighty thousand head of cattle to build this thing, and if we do suffer an Alma Winter, the food shortages will be—”
“Beef o’clock!” Hampus Bell looked at his watch. “Beef o’clock here, beef o’clock there, beef o’clock in the shadow of your grandmother’s hair. On my word, you shall have all the cows you need.”
“It is not so simple.” Michael Poor looked aside. “If word gets out that we intend to buy eighty thousand head, ranchers will raise their prices.”
“We set the price. What else are our guns for?”
Poor said, “Even your father treated farmers within thirty miles of the city with a certain deference.”
“Why? To preserve our image? If we get Farisa, our image is whatever we want it to be.”
“We’ll circle back on the cows. If we work around the clock, I think we can have an airship ready in two months.”
“Weeks,” said the Patriarch. “I want it in two weeks.”
#
Michael Poor had not expected to meet the deadline, but two weeks had passed and, shortly after sunrise on October 17, the Z-2 watched as the airship, buffeted by wind, jerked about in the distance, stretching its tether and clearly buoyant. The gondola, tiny compared to the balloon, disappeared behind when it rolled.
It had been impossible to conceal this launch; not only were a hundred of the most important people here, but so were thousands of rabble who had come to the fences to watch.
“I can’t believe we did it,” said a Z-4.
Hiero Poor nodded. “It’ll be nice to get a full night’s sleep.”
When he looked at the gray sky, visual fuzz accumulated and his eyes lost focus—the crystalline powders from the Department of Chemistry had kept him going on minimal sleep for a fortnight, but it would be good to rest his head on a real pillow again.
The Z-4 said, “What odds do you give it?”
Poor pointed. “The Boss is right there.”
“He’s in happy land with Kayla. You could insult his mother and he wouldn’t care.”
“Panniculus Grackenheit was one of the most careful men I know,” said Hiero Poor. “Take note of the word ‘was.’”
The brisk wind howled. Half a mile away, the gas balloon bounced against its tethers.
The Patriarch, who had been unusually jubilant this morning as he made small talk with the others, climbed to the dias and stood behind the podium. Cheers ose.
Able now to whisper unheard, Poor said, “I give it a good chance of making it to Portal. Seventy, eighty percent. We checked everything, and we know the winds. Beyond that, I’m no betting man.”
It was the polite thing to say; surely, it would be better to be in a balloon ten thousand feet over the Ivory Ashes than on the ground in that intolerable heat, but that was about as confident as the Z-2 could get. In the off chance that Kayla’s bizarre suspicion of Farisa’s group having found a “New South” were correct, the ease or difficulty of finding them relied on dozens of variables. War was never about certainty—only advantage.
“I’ll say this much,” Poor added. “I’d bet on the crew of that ship over a damn bounty hunter.”
Z-2 Poor quieted when he saw Hampus Bell placed his hands on the podium. Kayla stood beside him and smiled.
The younger Z-6s and Z-5s shouted: “Speech! Speech! Speech!”
The Patriarch cleared his throat and waited for the noise to die. “Great people of the Great Global Company.” Though the Patriarch rarely drank, he held with delicate fingers a flute-shaped glass of champagne that had been poured for this occasion. “From time immemorial, man has dreamt of flight. To the birds and the bats and the bees, it comes effortless—a gift from nature, with nought expected in return. Dragons, if they ever existed, surely enjoyed it too. Why, then, have we so long allowed the sky to hold us as strangers? Human courage has given us dominion over the seas, the jungles, and the wastes, but the air above our heads has remained out of our reach. Today, that changes.
“What boy hasn’t flapped his arms unto exhaustion, wishing they could be used as wings? What girl has never dreamt of riding a magic carpet to the horizon of the world? Is it not our manifest destiny that the blue vapors above us, as much as everything else, should belong to our kind?
“On this morning of mist and moss, as the leaves yellow before a winter’s slumber, we stand here together to witness history. On this hallowed Seventeenth of October, 9994, at—” He looked at his wrist blankly. The person tasked with winding his watch had forgotten to do so—again.
One of the Z-4’s yelled, “Seven fifty!”
“At half past seven in the morning, we witness the fulfillment of mankind’s oldest dream. We shall soar like birds! In precisely half an hour, fifteen of the world’s greatest and bravest men, will—”
A Z-4’s wife pointed. Someone else whispered, “Yes, I see it too.”
Michael Poor raised his opera glasses. The airship, due to its broad profile in high wind and the shoddy job done of mooring it to the dock, had been jerking about all morning and the men aboard had evidently tired of this motion. They had released themselves ahead of schedule.
The Patriarch continued. “—go boldly into the unknown. They’ll soar over Switch Cave. They’ll fly over the Ivory Ashes. They’ll reach the Antipodes, if that’s what it takes to find Farisa. There is nothing the Great Global Company cannot do or have.”
The crowd shouted, “The Great Global Company!”
The Z-4 whispered, “I wonder if he still plans to cannibalize her.” Michael Poor kicked him in the shin; the young needed to use more caution. “Well, I’m planning a vacation, and I wouldn’t want to miss—”
“What excitement! What excellence of human industry!” The Patriarch waved his arms. “Life has scantily given me cause for jealousy, but I hold a celestial frigate’s worth of envy for these men who, in merely twenty-seven minutes, shall shed their earthbound fetters and—”
Kayla whispered in his ear. He turned around.
“Oh. It appears they’ve left. Speech over, then.”
Hampus Bell walked off the stage and the crowd dispersed.
Michael Poor, however, lingered. He had invested so much time in this project, he wanted to be as sure as one could be of its success. He smiled as the dirigible gained altitude and sailed south, visible on the horizon, though smaller each minute, until the curvature of the world blocked his view. The miracle of flight had been achieved. Winds and fate being favorable, these men would find Farisa, if she was still alive by then, within a month or two. All things truly were possible with the Global Company.