The Distributive Passions

The Tower of Babel—”Gate of God”—Site of the Confusion of Tongues. Babelites identify the Confusion of Tongues with the expulsion from Eden. The Original Tongue, it is said, was one of presentation, and not representation, a language not separable from its subjects and objects. Before the Fall–as Babelites also refer to it—the world spoke, spoke in its unfolding, and that general unfolding was the common heritage of All—a not yet divided All. The world was the universal tongue. Babel the Tower was simply a representation to fallen humanity of the original tongue, its conventional spiral form indicative, some say, of an unfurling. Moses Solly, an adherent of a minor Babelite sub-sect, believed on the contrary, that the spiral represented circling, searching—the attempts of human being to regain the Original Tongue, despite the changes wrought in them by the Fall. Eden Babelites, as this faction is known, read the Genesis account back from Babel to the Garden, if one can put it this way, seeing the Tree as prefiguring the Tower, and emphasizing the Original Tongue over questions of Knowledge. Knowledge, they say, comes later, after the Fall. But it is the quest for the conditions of knowledge—of separate being—for which human beings have been punished—and punished with separate being. For Eden Babelites like Moses Solly, human being itself is punishment and speech is the Mark of Cain. This belief has naturally bred a somewhat taciturn sect, earning them the name of “Mute Babelites” (or, less kindly, “Mule Babelites”). Moses took his beliefs seriously, and they led him out into the wilderness of the Oregon Territory, where, for some time at least, he labored at his “town” with no neighbors to tempt him to speech. Moses scorned the fringe of a fringe known as Radical Babelites, who followed the Eden Babelite dogma to a point, but regarded the Fall as fortunate and the discovery of a Second Universal Tongue a spiritual mission of the first importance. To Solly’s “Add not to the confusion of Voices,” their most articulate prophet countered: One Voice and Separate Being is Humanity COME OF AGE.

—It’s too bad you won’t be here for the official release. You’ve done so much work…

—right. And now it’s time for you to do some.

—Sure. While you go off gallivanting…

—While I fly off to the Island of Misfit Reformers and try to network for the System. Honestly, I think I would rather ride herd on the servers.

—C’mon. A week in the Wondrous Isles?

—Sun, sand, razors-harp coral, hot and cold running kooks and spooks…

—Etzlertech, seas of lemonade…

—Or Yellow Dye No. Whatever.

—What’s your problem with this? You were more excited to go to Nauvoo. Of course, Pearl was at Smith-Cabet at the time…

—

—Do you think she’s going to be there?

—Who? Pearl?

—Don’t play dumb with me, son.

—

—

—I don’t know.

—Does Priss?

—Young Priscilla, unlike some of my friends, knows how to leave sore subjects alone…most of the time, anyway.

—Admirable. You oughta marry the girl.

—Dammit, Will! Can you just lay off?

—

—

—Sorry, man. What is it? Really?

—Not much sleep. Walked up into the Reserve last night.

—To see Kaylie.

—Yeah. She was pretty bad. They brought up the stuff about Father again.

—Hmm. Tell you what. Soon as you get back from the Encuentro, we’ll see if we can’t get to the bottom of all that. There’s a guy at Krotona, Chester Wing, who’s working on language therapy for Mollies. I had meant to pass along an article on it to you. Maybe he can do something for Our Ladies, and we can get some answers about your dad in the process.

—Hmm. Worth a try, I suppose. It’s tough to see her, see them like that.

—Well, you’ll be back in a couple of weeks. I’ll try to get in touch with this Wing character in the meantime.

1984

The Federal Corporation officially divested itself of its Conflict Life Technologies unit in 1984. In practice, this meant the transfer of equipment, staff and intellectual properties to a number of ostensibly competing firms, outside of Federal jurisdiction and beyond the reach of Territorial law. The scandal surround the Madonna Project demanded that some heads roll, in order to preserve the cultural and moral capital of the Federals’ chief contractor, and there followed a rather predictable period of enquiry, inquisition, ritual humiliation, castigation, mortification of the flesh, confession of sins, religious reeducation, and, in most cases, resanctification. A few incorrigibles spent the softest sort of prison time, two related suicides were reported, and one technician went mysteriously missing. Congressional and Cardinal Court investigations subsequently confirmed this technician, a Mongolian immigrant by the name of Wang, as the chief architect of the mental modeling project, while they claimed that the project itself was not specifically authorized by either the Federal Government or the oversight committees of the Church. In the popular media, Wang gathered around him a dizzying array of legends. He was an Uyghur separatist, or a spy for the Marxist faction of Chinese syndicalism. The Madonna Project was some kind of Trojan Horse attack on North American interests. Speculation of the wildest sort continued. Cold War-era stories of Chinese brainwashing experiments made the rounds of the tabloids, while a New York Times investigation found no record of any employee of that name in any of the heavily redacted project records it could obtain—though it did uncover the still-unexplained murder of one Chesterfield Wing, an employee of a related technology unit, in 1977. The President and Federal Pantarch both seized the opportunity to attack the Times for supposed ultra-Paineist leanings, and, in time, records were produced (quite literally produced, some sources claimed) showing Wang to be a participant in a classified technological exchange program. The Chinese Council denied the existence of the program, which meant little under the circumstances. It was generally understood that such programs existed, despite persistent denial on both sides. The President’s admission of the existence of the exchange was followed by his condemnation of it as an unauthorized, black budget affair. A few more heads rolled—mostly laterally or even uphill into cushier positions connected to the Federal Corporation’s various offshore “competitors.” The Russians made threatening noises, but the days of the Russian Union were nearly over, and nearly everyone could see it. Wang appeared periodically in the news, the subject of official intelligence reports, semi-official rumors, and tabloid Elvis-sighting style tomfoolery. He was in Dubai, reunited with elements of the old CLT. He was collaborating with rebel techs in breakaway Free Turkmenistan. He had allied himself with the Taliban, or with the ETA. Half Fu Manchu and half “Where’s Waldo?” The Technician, as he came to be called, was a particularly versatile, even whimsical threat. But the White House took every occasion to remind us that it was indeed a grave threat that had been averted (the details of which were, naturally, kept confidential for security reasons) and that the danger, both technological and moral, still “out there” somewhere.

The Madonnas themselves—and all of the various Mollies—posed a severe problem for the administration, as well as for the Corporation. The Church and its Pantarch struggled to find words to condemn the experiments involved, without resorting to those, which might have condemned its victims as well,—abomination chief among them—so common in the Fundamentalist churches, particularly in the Dixie Confederation. The Pantarchal College (Federal) was asked to rule on the question of whether or not Mollies had souls. Those worthies deferred judgment, pending Federal investigations into the nature and origins of the project. Those investigations proved largely fruitless. Crucial documents, it was said, had been lost or destroyed. Apparatus had been allowed to transfer to foreign concerns. National security concerns got their play in the ensuing debates, and were made the pretext for demands to the Territorial governments for the return of Mollies decommissioned and abandoned at the end of the FedEx excursions of ’82 and ’83. Resentment of FedEx and renewed sense of Territorial pride gave vehemence to refusals based largely on more humanitarian concerns.

The decommissioned Mollies were largely left alone, for good and for ill. “Decommissioning” seems to have been a haphazard process, and one which left those subjected to it unpredictable, restless, prone alternately to impetuous action of various sorts and to an obsessive haunting of old posts, parodic performances of duties no longer required.

Morning in New Earth, OR. Late summer. Shadowy still in the canyon of the St. Mary’s, here, at least, where there is a canyon. Sun bright on the coast range, glinting here and there from some military cast off in the old Reserve: the half-ton on the slide, the radar array, a guy-wire string across the gorge from the Central Beacon. Far up the slope, a moving glint: a hill-climbing ATV perhaps, or a large insect-machine. For sounds, rustle and flow along the river, the drone of the mill just upstream. More traffic these days on the main drag, with the road more or less open again to the coast. A few pickup trucks and a jacked-up “backwoods cadillac” pulling a small trailer. Insect chorus, of course, with here and there the tell-tale creak of a tiny tree-feeder, assembled since the sprayers were last out, or blown in on the evening breeze. The far-off drone of a cropduster, out marking the forest edges and spraying the fields with anti-nano spray. Groggy, from much too little sleep. Errands and leave-takings have filled days to overflowing, spilling over late into last night, my last night, at least for awhile, here in New Earth. Wandering the reserve roads by moonlight, searching for  Our Lady of the Central Beacon, alert for any sign of The Bear. Kaylie, Our Lady, my friend and, let’s be honest, sometimes at least a bit more, sitting by the shelter-gate with the Madonna (Federal Expeditionary Forces, decommissioned) of the Radar Array. Very much decommissed this time, both of them, glitching hard in and out of the most formal phrases of greeting and farewell. Voices stammering, buzzing at odd intervals, sounding for all the world like the Harvester or one of the big saws up at the mill. Welcome and thanks you. Farewell. On behalf of the Fededdedederal Ex. Peditional fofarewellell. For thank for you for visit this fac. . . God blessess. May He go with you. Gabriel, I. . . Tears in the eyes of My Lady. Awkward silence. Tears. The package under my arm. Umm. From Ben Burr. Can you carry it up a ways, by the den? Keep the machines off? Nods. Unsteady. Gabriel, certainly. From the other: Your father was with us, you know. I don’t know, though this is well-worn ground. If my father was here, sometime, and they’re so notoriously bad with time, he is clearly not here now. He’s off with the circus now, I expect. It’s the old joke, not funny, though he did, I’m told, in youth do just that. Run off and join the circus. Eleven hours til my flight and my bags are packed. More baggage at the moment I just can’t take on. For Benjamin. Handing over the package. Yes. Silent, awkward embraces, though the silence seems to help. I see a bit more Kaylie in Our Lady of the Central Beacon, a little less of the broken clockwork girl. May he go with you. . . ? She tries. I’m already out on the suspension bridge. It comes across faint, plaintive, difficult to hear, and impossible to decode. I’ll be home soon. In the moment, as on reflection, I’m just talking, because I can. Because my voice doesn’t break into cicadas and heavy machinery. For better or worse, my voice doesn’t break at all. I’m not sure it speaks well of me.  

MEMORIES

1986: Meredith is ten years old, and they’re headed for the lakeshore. Yvette is on an errand to Gilead, where Gil Spooner is once again at war with the state waterways people. Days alone with Merry are a multiply-guilty pleasure, and a rare one. Today, he wishes she would chatter, as she so often does. He could use some of that generally infectious cheer. But she seems to have absorbed his mood today, more or less pensive in the passenger seat of the old Dart, watching the flooded fields roll by. The sun is coming out again, and the outlook is for a fine, bright week. “I hear that Yvette bought you a new bathing suit.” “Mmm. Yeah.” Meredith seems a bit unsold. “Why do they call it a bikini, Papa? Isn’t that a funny word?” “Hmm.” Oh, God. He grips the wheel a little tighter, slows. He can feel the Thing happening. Something passes just outside the range of memory. His mental map reveals another of those blank spaces. Here be monsters. He unclenches a bit, eases back up to the legal limit. “You know, sweetie. I don’t recall. We’ll have to wiki that when we get home, eh?” Half a nod. “Was it the Thing, Papa?” Clench. Release. “Heh.” That’s my girl. “Sweetie, you’re not supposed to know about the Thing. But, yeah. It’s OK now. I’m OK.”

2005: Some days, like today, Morningstar Solly just feels done. He’s always been one to pick his battles—sometimes, he will admit in an honest moment—with a seemingly callous disregard for the effect of those choices on others. Lately, though, even the most carefully picked battles seem to be decidedly uphill affairs. All of his decisions—the family he left behind, the new one he started here, the formation of the Alliance and the Pluriversity—all have seemed to him points on a line which he has seen stretching out in front of him, however dimly at times, for more than forty years now.

1963

The first Catholic in the White House was a member of the Third New Church, and his assassination was widely believed to be religious in its motivations. The shower of space debris which struck the Pacific Northwest within days of that assassination did nothing to dispel the more apocalyptic rumors in circulation. Whole-cloth fabrications abounded. Dates for comets and meterorite falls were reprinted with a fine disregard for facts, and correlations between the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations essentially fabricated. Naturally, the Northwest strikes (Willamette, St. Mary’s, Port Orford) became part of the emerging mythology. Less than twenty miles separated the two primary impact sites along the St. Mary’s River.

When the Report of the Standing Committee on Assassination implicated the Vice President in the plot and “did not disconfirm” (as a spokesman said) either the Roman Catholic or the anti-Catholic conspiracy theories, the door was opened to wholesale change. The Third New Church transformed itself into the American Church, and Congress passed in rapid succession the Act of Tolerance and the Acts of Separation and Establishment. Scrubbed free of Romish taint, and with a new, hard line against Association, the American Church began to pull from Conventional and Second-Church Catholicism, but also from the mainstream protestant sects and the semi-secular faiths. A renewal of interest in The Fundamentals formed the glue cementing together a new center-right coalition, and the Church rebuilt itself around a heterogeneous core of Christian Anti-Associationism, fundamentalism, and a secular dogma that probably owed as much to Saint-Simon and Andrew Carnegie as it did to the Gospels.

MOSES SOLLY (1848-1942): The second major prophet of Babelism, after Abednego Coppe, Solly experienced a vision on the battlefield at Gettysburg, while serving under Coppe in the 5th Granite State Volunteer Infantry. After quarreling with Coppe over the significance of his vision of Babel, Solly split off from Coppe’s sect, making an “exodus” to the Oregon Territory in 1866. Somewhat to his dismay, his settlement became something of a magnet for other religious and political heretics, including Landquist’s Exodus in 1895. In the early 1890s, Solly took in a mute Native American girl, shunned by her tribe, who he named Sarah. They were eventually married, in 1903. Sarah died in 1910, while giving birth to Moses’ first child, Naomi. Moses remarried in 1937, and died just a month before the birth of his second child, Morningstar.

SARAH SOLLY (1883-1910): First wife of Moses Solly. Mother of Naomi.

REBECCAH SOLLY (1893-1957): Born in Oregon City, OT. Second wife of Moses Solly. Mother of Morningstar.

NAOMI SOLLY (1910- ): Guardian of Morningstar Solly, after the death of his mother. Prophetess of the Fellowship of the Revelation of the Tower.

MORNINGSTAR “Sol” SOLLY (1942- ): Father of Gabriel Barchester-Solly and Meredith Desjacques-Solly. Co-founder of the Left-Libertarian Alliance for Mutual Aid (LLAMA) and pluriversity.org. Sol suffers from intermittent memory loss.

ELIZABETH BARCHESTER-SOLLY (1945- ): Heiress of the Barchester family, known for their interest in spiritualism and their innovations in the design of rifles. Founder of the Barchester Institute of San Jose, California, part of the Cibola System of Higher Learning.

GABRIEL BARCHESTER-SOLLY (1963- ): Archivist and research associate at the New Earth Institute. Editor of The Books of Moses, a CD-ROM collection of Moses Solly’s private notebooks. Delegate from the Universal Code Union (Owenite-Orthodox) to the 2005 and 2010 Intergalactic Encuentros.

MEREDITH DESJACQUES-SOLLY (1979- ): Daughter of  Morningstar Solly and Yvette Desjacques. Archivist and research associate at the Decentral Stateless Pluriversity (pluriversity.org). Has experienced lucid and prophetic dreams.

Gabriel Solly leads a quiet life in the tiny community of New Earth, Oregon Territories (Universal Code Union, Owenite-Orthodox), laboring in the Archives of the New Earth Institute, marking time through the last of his council-service years. His mother, Elizabeth Barchester-Solly, of the rifle family, would like him to assume the role, his by hereditary right, of directing intelligence and prophet of the Radical Babelite sect. The church elders would probably prefer that he disappear, much as his father did shortly after Gabe’s birth. His grandfather, the original Prophet, has bequeathed to him a legacy that might well spell the end of Radical Babelism.

Gabe is a child of Socialist America, a true Territorial, educated in a full tour of the Cibola System. But the clock may be ticking on the Territories. The New Federalists seem to be gaining ground in the East, and there are indications that when next the Federal Expeditionary Command turns its attention to the territorial republics they may have something more than the usual “flower wars” in mind.

With his forty-fifth birthday staring him in the face, Gabe knows it’s high time he did something with his life, beyond puttering in the archive and constructing elaborate collages in his studio/study. Or maybe it’s past time. Some years back, the love of Gabe’s life left him to be the female messiah and spokes-model of the revived Saint-Simonian cult, and his current “girlfriend” is quite literally damaged goods—roughly decommissioned military materiel, in the form of a “minor military Madonna,” the cybernetic product of an experiment the Federals would dearly love to forget. She roams the abandoned military reserve that stretches from New Earth west nearly to the ocean. So does the “Man-Bear of the Saint Mary’s,” (if the tabloids can be trusted,) and everyone knows the woods are teeming with insect-machines. Things have arguably always been strange in New Earth, but the strangeness seems to be growing—all over the world, really.

Enter the Council of Councils (Universal Code Union, Owenite-Orthodox), who call on Gabe to attend an “Intergalactic Encounter” in the Marianas, where, in accordance with Fourierist prophecy, the ocean is turning into something very much like lemonade, and the first stirrings of the Era of Harmony seem to be repairing environmental damage that decades of anti-radiation remediation has hardly dented. Ill-prepared and armed with the most uncertain of mandates, Gabe flies off to give Radical Babelism and the Universal Code Communities a voice in what promises to be something of a replay of the Babelites favorite story.

Landing at Enewetak atoll, Gabe arrives in time to witness in person what most of us watched on tv—the terrorist attacks, the U. N. intervention, the Battle of the Lagoons—and those events send him off on a new journey, in the islands of the Free Fourierists and on the floating platforms of the Pyrate Archipelago, and there he begins his initiation in the mysteries of the Distributive Passions.

I.

Damaged frames from the film “Universal History”

Dreamers

The images come unbidden, and mostly in dreams. The Absent Father, standing in attendance to Our Lady of the Shelter, making love to Our Lady of the Radar Array. Prophecies of or for La Femme, always to the tune of some Thomas Dolby song: “Radio Silence,” “Europa and the Pirate Twins,” “One of Our Submarines.” Windpower, switch off the mind and let the heart decide, what you were meant to be. If only it was that easy. He cobbles them together in the wee hours of the night, and in those hours, Gabe feels the Solly blood, strongly.

* * *

Meredith has always dreamed, as long as she can remember, dreams of strange places and strangely familiar people. There is one man in her dreams, more often than any of the others. Sometimes young, and sometimes older, though not so old as her father, who is not so very old, but is certainly no longer young. Meredith herself is no longer very young, though sometimes she feels like a newborn, faced with a world in which she has travelled so little, aside from her nightly excursions in dream, but which she feels pushing at her more and more. With the pushing comes a vague anxiety for the man in her dreams. This is strange, she thinks, as the man seldom does anything in her dreams. He sits and reads old books, some of which she thinks she recognizes, or works away at some fine business with tweezers, craft knives, photographs and scraps. She has walked with him in some sandy forest, and along some very rocky beach. Always he is alone, palpably so—except for the night where some dark and looming shape, a bear perhaps, paced along behind him as he walked a narrow, rutted mountain road, all unaware. Meredith feels she is, in some sense, his guardian angel, but never has she felt so impotent to guard than in the course of that long dream-journey.

Meredith always dreams, sometimes prophecies of world events and conflict, and these dreams at times come true.

* * *

Half a world away, Margaret, the Holy Wife, the one they call La Femme, checks her roots, and decides that tomorrow she will see her personal stylist. “Time to touch up the uniform,” she thinks. Once upon a time, the female aspect of the Messiah was expected to be dark of hair, eye, complexion, a bit swarthy even. Then came the revelation that God himself was one of those gentlemen who preferred blondes. Slightly before her time, that advance in the dogma, and, she suspected, most likely an innovation of Enfantin—the False Enfantin, she reminded herself—himself. She had her own reasons for preferring the imposture, her own reasons for continuing to fill a role which—she could finally, after all these years, be completely honest with herself—left her not only cold—as did her “husband,” the False Enfantin—but, increasingly, a bit nauseous.

So. A touch-up on the bleach job. The usual rounds, and the increasingly usual excuses to Him, as she took her lunch with an important group of potential patrons—matrons, she supposed, to be precise, rich old women sufficiently susceptible to His veneer of charm and her well-tuned routine to donate to the cause.

“The lost cause,” she thinks.

THE DISTRIBUTIVE PASSIONS:
A TALE OF THE LAST DAYS OF THE FIRST HARMONIAN REVOLUTION

Ascending Wing

A child saw a blue butterfly resting on a blade of grass; the butterfly was benumbed by the north wind. The child picked the blade of grass, and the living flower at the end of it, still benumbed, could not fly away. The child returned, holding up its chance prize. A sunbeam touched the wing of the butterfly, and suddenly, revived and gay, the living blossom flew away towards the light. We all, seekers and workers—we are like the butterfly: our strength is made only of a ray of light; nay, only of the hope of a ray of light. We must, therefore, know how to hope; hope is the force which bears us upward and forward. But it is an illusion! How do we know that? Must we not move a step, for fear that some day the earth will disappear from under our feet? It is not sufficient to look far into the future, or into the past; we must look into ourselves. We must note there the vital forces which demand to be spent; and we must act.

Marc Guyau, A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction

Editor’s Note
X+1, Era of Harmony

The Axis passed, it is perhaps natural that many of us turn our attention to the past, not merely from nostalgia, but from some sense that the road up to the crest may provide so signposts for the road down. This is a false logic, unquestionably. We would not expect one side of a mountain to too closely resemble the other. One can make too much of Symmetry and Analogy. In the Old Creation, the land was in places sharply divided by ranges of mountains, rising as high above the plains and deserts on either side as the crest of Harmony has risen above the eras of Civilization and Barbarism. These barrier ranges were responsible, together with the more extreme weather patterns of those earlier eras, for extreme divisions in weather and climate, extreme alternations in heat and cold, moisture and aridity. Air masses which passed over deserts without giving the slightest relief might, on crossing the mountains, deliver torrents. The first freezing winds of winter, pushing across the range, might become the last scorching breath of summer, fanning wildfires. We expect no such sudden transitions, but it may yet be that the dry breath of the past may let loose a gentle rain on our future.

We feel that we face a temperate decline. All the more reason that our Butterfly gravitates the intemperate, heroic eras of the past, the desert behind us. Thus the vogue for the deep past—the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries—the time of the First Harmonian Revolution, from the first discovery of the new science of society to the high tide of Soviet state associationism, and on through the reign of the Free and the era of the False Crown. Even so primitive an age has its heroines and heros, not least those who first put to the practical test the system discovered and the doctrine elaborated by Fourier, only to find it impracticable in so primitive a form. History and Harmony have validated their faith, two allied forces moving together towards that consommation which we still experience in nearly full measure. But the same doctrine tells us that a separation is in the works. History must move on, but Harmony will gradually be left behind.

Even with ages to contemplate this pivotal disconnection, we find ourselves ill prepared to face it—not that those of us alive to day will face it to any great degree in our lifetimes. But it is strange, unprecedented, to feel so blind in some regards, we who have attained sight in every degree, for whom the arrays of radical atoms and aromas present no mystery. It is as if we stood on the mountaintop, but with a view only at the terrain behind, and, worse yet, with the promise of worsening vision as we descend.

So we look back, hoping to in some manner illuminate the future. And we find that, in that direction as well, much is obscure, particularly as we reach so far back. What follows then is no true historical parcours, but rather a Papillon flitting through history, a series of incidents, with, at the centers of its ascending and descending wings, some rather more substantial narratives of a time, like our own, characterized by decline, but, unlike ours, uncharacterized by anything like gentleness.

“February 5th was DOGS’ DOOMSDAY, or general dog killing; when all citizens of the canine brood were to be shot. Many were those that fell on that day.— But from whatever cause it was that they bore a peculiar fondness for this place, as we killed off the old, new ones seemed to come in, out of the country; so that we could scarce get rid of the society of this species.” Paul Brown, Twelve Months in New Harmony

The dogs kept coming, as did the colonists, none caring, apparently, that New Harmony was itself in the grip of a killing distemper. On the third day of the dog-slaughter, we struggled from bed more or less with the sun. Not a one of us hurried, bone-weary and quarter-crazed as we were–until we smelled the coffee. “Coffee! There’s coffee!” There had been no coffee anywhere since sometime early in the day before, even, some claimed, at the tables of No. 5. There was never much outside the big house and the tavern. But coffee had been promised. “Coffee in the morning” was the word, but we had all of us had at least our fill of such. This time, though, Old Bob spoke true, and big pots of the stuff boiled at the edge of the bonfires. The wind, which had blown the smell of the pyre into our Republican encampment all night, blew that welcome, quickening aroma at our ragged phalanx.

Scalding hot, bitter and cut with grain, cooked up on a charnel fire, we gulped it heedlessly as we cleaned weapons, sharpened scythes. Old Bob himself came down to general this last stage of the campaign, risking tongue and taste buds with the rest as he quizzed the ranks and laid his plans. Officers of all quarters and communities made their reports, and the old man gave out his orders with a fine disregard for which of his troops were, or were not, members of the association, which were, under other circumstances, allies or antagonists. Brown he bossed like the rist, and like the rest our de facto chief accepted command resignedly. Some clutch of strays remained in our quarter, and then there was the feral pack to be dealt with. Despite the work of the past two day, this latter seemed to be growing. The Germans in their log cabins, kept up all night by their baying, now claimed that it was a wolf that led the pack. Owen nodded at this intelligence and, paused, warming his hands at the fire and then his face with his hands. “We save the guns, then. For now, it’s scythes and spades. You know your chores. To it!” And tossing back the dregs of his coffee, he turned as if to start immediately back to No. 5.

It was then that the mongrel half-crawled from the tall grass, wounded and whimpering. The little black cur had been one of the tavern dogs, living on scraps and kindness, not so different, it now seems to me, from many of us who lived at the margins of New Harmony and the proprietors’ pleasure.

It was not a sight to put our work, that ahead or that accomplished, in any too kind a light. We had seemed for a moment–coffee in hand and an end apparently in sight–more fully a community that an any time that I could remember. But it was an exhausted, savage community, caught in a moment of rest–savage in all the ways that Brown had spoken of in his Gray Light. Forgetful, cruel to animals, unfeeling, united around our chief. “Well,” said Old Bob, “I guess I must ‘to it.’”

The bare facts of the next moments are these:

A gun was raised.
Someone cried, “No!”
A boy began to sob.

Robert Owen, inspiration and primary proprietor of the community of New Harmony, turned, took two long strides, grasped a newly sharpened axe.

Paul Brown, communist and philosopher, the usual intensity of his gaze now deepened into something baleful, tightened his grip on a scythe-handle.

And each of the rest of us, awakening, or so it seemed to me, to some new, unfolding state of affairs, stirred and shifted, picked up, or put down, tools, or weapons.

Something stirred. The cur whimpered. The boy moved.

In the distance, a howl–wolf? dog?–from the direction of the German encampment.