Keeping Luna Read online

  Gabriel complied, making a sour face as he did so, but without gagging or heightening his current sense of nausea. Lamar motioned to him to sit, and then seated himself about a meter away. Between the two men, resting on the soft white cushion of the sofa, were a handful of books.

  “What do you see here, Gabriel? What are these?”

  Gabriel sank into the low back of the sofa and closed his eyes. “Books, Lamar. They’re books.”

  “Wrong you are, young man. Care to try again? Actually try, I mean?”

  Gabriel just sighed. He didn’t have the energy or the patience for another quiz, the outcome of which could only be failure. Lamar continued.

  “They are ideas. More to my point, they are belief systems and tools of division. Do you recall the things that I said once divided us?”

  Gabriel still sat reclined, with his head tilted back towards the ceiling and his eyes closed. “Race, religion, government, language, money, history.”

  “Good lad. Now here before us we have religion, government, and in a large sense history.”

  Gabriel opened his eyes and turned his head in order to follow along.

  “Now here we have two books that represent conflicting concepts for the governing of people and the regulation of society in general. This thin one was written by two German men in 1848 and, in short, promotes the idea of a strong central governing body and the equal distribution of wealth amongst citizens. Sounds familiar, right?

  “This thick one, which is about six hundred pages thicker than it needs to be, was written by a Russian woman who emigrated to the United States of America in her twenties, and then zealously went to work promoting the nation’s most capitalistic ideals. Mind you, this book was in no way a building block for capitalism, as these systems of trade have been around as long as man, but it did serve as a sort of definitive justification for it, in some minds.

  “To be honest, despite what you might gather from the girth of this book, she was quite lazy in her writing. Here she has essentially written two characters that continue to pop up with new names throughout the story. She uses these characters to illustrate the true virtue of laissez-faire capitalism and to weigh it against the evils of communism as she perceived them, and then subsequently reiterates these points again and again. I think she was afraid that the reader might stand a chance of not realizing the first or second or third time around just how clever she was being.”

  The contempt in Lamar’s voice accented his disdainful choice of words, and he held the paperback carefully pinched between the narrow tips of his middle finger and his thumb, as though he were worried he might contract some fatal ailment through its touch alone. He dropped it back onto the sofa and continued.

  “Now, some might argue that capitalism is actually an economic institution, and not truly a form of government. But if you let this institution interact with any system of government for long enough, be it a republic, a democracy, or an oligarchy… well, you let money into the picture and you’ll see who ends up pulling the strings.”

  Gabriel sat forward, and began to let the feast tempt him. There was so much, and so much with which he was unfamiliar, that he wasn’t quite sure where he was to begin. He motioned to a small, ornate glass bowl that was filled with tiny black globes.

  “Caviar. Beluga.” Lamar volunteered.

  Gabriel’s hand moved over and gestured towards a porcelain platter in the center of the table.

  “Oysters. Have you never eaten oysters, Gabriel?”

  “I’ve seen them on the menu from time to time, but never taken the chance with my credits.”

  “These ones are incredible. But I wouldn’t start there… not in your condition. I would recommend beginning with the smoked duck breast, or maybe some prosciutto with roasted peppers.”

  Gabriel took four or five different samples onto his plate and then sat with the plate in his lap and began to pick at it with one of the small forks that were laid out in front of him. Lamar went on.

  “I assume it is obvious to you with which one of these books we identified when we set to building the framework of this nation, but we hardly considered it the case that we were basing our government on this ‘Manifesto.’

  “There were twenty-five of us, just as there are twenty-five members in the council today, and everything was up for debate amongst us. Our chief priority was to keep always in our minds that the aim of our endeavor was sustainable, content living for all humans on this planet. Forever.

  “We made it a point to observe in an objective light every issue that came before us, recognizing the arguments borne of our own emotions and superstitions and dismissing them as such, and ignoring that voice in our heads that might have said ‘this doesn’t FEEL right.’ The General insisted that what humans had FELT to be right in the previous centuries had not worked. Our instincts were outdated by our circumstances, and worked now against us at every turn.

  “One such instinct, as I would call it, was our historical inability to face the concept of the permanence death… or rather, our ability to deny its certainty. And that is where these other books came into play.” Lamar’s hand swept over the tomes that had remained separate from the first two.

  “Humans have always feared death. Indeed, we still do today. I suppose that’s what drives us to go on living, and to try to do so prosperously. But instead of facing that reality, that you and I and every living thing will one day die, possibly painfully, possibly over a long, long time… we found it more bearable to speculate that maybe there was a life beyond this one.

  “In time, that speculation birthed a sense of certainty, and in turn the will to protect that certainty against any and all doubt. Violently. Millions of people have been killed because of the existence of these books, and today, beyond the reach of our realm, people continue to kill each other in what they perceive to be defense of these books. These ideas.”

  Gabriel was doing his best to listen while eating, although it was difficult. Each bite was new to him, and delicious beyond words. As Lamar came to this break in his monologue, Gabriel twirled some of the thin-sliced prosciutto with the tines of his fork and brought it to his mouth. His eyes closed involuntarily and he made a low humming sound.

  “Ah. There’s something magical about cured ham, isn’t there? You know, along with the basic concepts of life, duty, death, and afterlife, these books imposed through their dogma some very strange restrictions.

  “If you were a devout reader of this book, for example,” his hand came to rest on a black cover, “then you wouldn’t have allowed yourself to eat that, as pigs were seen to be unclean animals. And you if you fancied this one here, then, in addition to pork, you wouldn’t be allowed to eat the oysters, either. And this one over here condemns the consumption of beef, such as that beautiful carpaccio on your plate.

  Now this particular book…” he held up a black, hard-backed book with nothing but a white cross adorning its face. “This was more or less regarded as the book of my people. Technically, the statutes of the American government neither promoted nor disavowed the teachings of any particular religion. But the reality was something different, as it is bound to be any time that the larger share of the population, along with the majority of those in power, collectively believe in any one thing.”

  Lamar paused for a minute to fill his own plate with a half-dozen oysters, served in their half-shells, some topped lightly with lemon and some swimming in cucumber juice. For about five minutes the room was still, aside from the sounds of shellfish sliding across porcelain before being slurped from their shells and into Lamar’s mouth. Lamar set the last empty shell back onto his plate and lay the plate onto the glass tabletop.

  “Ah. I almost forgot about the drinks. Over there we have some juices, all freshly squeezed, and some champagne. Now, even if you’re not in much of a mood for alcohol, you do have to try the champagne. Who knows if you’ll ever have the chance again?” He smiled dryly, placed a small collection of meats and cheese o
nto a fresh plate, and then brought the dish back into his lap as Gabriel had done. He continued his lecture.

  “Now a belief, Gabriel… a belief held in faith alone can be a very dangerous thing. It is quite different believing a thing to be true, as opposed to knowing it empirically, or hypothesizing, or knowing that you don’t know at all. There is no space for logical argument against faith, as its foundation does not rest upon anything approaching logic in the first place. So the removal of this religious division from our new society was to be no small matter for us as a committee… and I think you are beginning to see just how ugly things had the potential to become.”

  “It sounds to me like you were all thinking your way towards genocide.”

  “Well done, Gabriel. And that was starting to look like the way the wind was blowing. Anything can be justified, if enough other things are ignored.”

  “Like ethics? Morality? Humanity?”

  “Like exactly these things. But how does one quantify morality, or the act of being humane? This plunged us into very subjective depths. Most of us were men of hard science, and were ill-equipped to provide any sort of clear answer. As, I suppose, are the most learned in the fields of social science. And we didn’t have the politician’s luxury of indecision.

  “But I’m afraid we are straying from the course I had plotted for us this afternoon, Gabriel. We will return to pick up this conversation later. As for now…” He pulled a thick stack of light green bills, bound across the middle with white paper tape, out from between the cushions on his right side, and tossed it lightly at Gabriel, careful not to land it on the plate in his lap.

  “Is this… money?” Gabriel held it up, flipped it over, studied it, and paged through one of the loose ends. “One hundred, one hundred, one hundred…”

  “That’s ten thousand American dollars. It would have been very valuable to a lot of people once. Now it’s just paper. You can tear off the band if you want.”

  Gabriel did.

  “Who’s this on here?”

  “Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States. Every denomination was printed with the picture of an historical figure, most often a president, although not in this instance. And I would wager that all of these men would have been ashamed to have their faces plastered across what ended up being the source of misery for so many.”

  “But was it not merely the source of misery for those who did not have it? If you had enough of this… paper… couldn’t you live like a king? Eat every day as we are eating now?” Gabriel continued to study one of the notes as he spoke, trying to make sense of the Masonic imagery and the Latin, and wondering how far one of these could have carried somebody in the days of Lamar’s childhood.

  “Good, good.” Lamar leaned forward over the spread and scraped some of the beluga onto a thin wheat cracker, and then popped it into his mouth, talking as he crunched through it. “You bring us into the shallow end of the arguments for and against capitalism and the use of currency in general.” He chewed for another moment and then swallowed.

  “Polarization,” Gabriel ventured. “The rich lived in paradise, and the poor in squalor.”

  “Yes! Very good. Now I’ll try to give you a rough idea of how this came to be. Now, assuming that everybody entered into a free market with equal footing, with the same amount of cash or capital, or equity, or whatever… every individual’s goal would be to increase their own holdings in the market. Some would accomplish this and flourish. Some would not. As a corollary, those that were successful would enjoy more material wealth, in the form of houses, land, cars, boats, jewelry, clothing, food…” he nodded in the direction of the table.

  “And some would struggle to maintain what little they had to start out with. At this point, there is a strong argument for validating this economic system. Each party either earns or loses, according to his or her own abilities. Makes sense, right? But wait… these same people also set to work making families for themselves, and raising children.

  “The successful man, the rich man, his children will go to the best schools. After school, they will enter a job market full of their father’s connections, with a competitive level of education, their mouths filled with all the right words, and their hands filled with the capital needed to invest in their own ventures. The children of the poor man, well, they won’t. Not such an even start this time, and some might argue unfair. This divide would perpetuate itself over generations, steadily widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

  “This model could also apply to the businesses that these men started. The most successful businesses will continue to implement their resources to expand, to increase revenues and their share of the market, most often at the cost of the smaller businesses.

  “Keep in mind, things would not always work out in this manner, either on the individual level or on the corporate level. Sometimes a party of more humble origin would manage to break through to higher levels of success, while occasionally one who had been born into privilege would only squander his opportunities. And once more, these anomalies would give credence to the belief that both success and failure had hinged solely upon the merits of the individual or the business. So there was still some room for some argument here.

  “But as I said, this was the shallow end of the debate over the use of money. When we went deeper, when we considered the effect that this system of living had on the planet as a whole… on our environment, in the form of pollution and the depletion of our natural resources, and on the welfare of the entire species of man… little could be said to support the manner in which we had been conducting ourselves.

  “It was a problem of identifying one’s goals. We were taught to strive for something abstract, something make-believe. Something that only existed because we invented it, and something we only needed because that’s what we had told ourselves. We didn’t yearn for shelter, heat, food, or medical care. We yearned for this silly green paper, which we had been assured would procure for us all of these necessities of life.

  “So when we made efforts to develop, to manufacture, to progress, we worked not towards developing and supplying the best medical care and technology, or manufacturing machines and houses that would function efficiently over the course of time; we worked towards developing these things and then withholding them from the public, to increase their value in terms of money.

  “We worked towards building things that would soon need replacing, and technology that would soon need upgrading, because these replacements and upgrades would generate even more revenues.

  “We worked towards big sales from cheap materials. Big profits from low expenditures.

  “And to handle the various problems that arose as a result of our use of currency, large portions of our workforce were engaged in a sort of labor, the product of which was purely intangible. Marketing. Advertising. Market research. Accounting. Auditing. Stock trading. Legal aid.

  “There were millions of people working a long, long list of jobs that didn’t yield anything you could touch.

  “In terms of the actual production of goods, decisions were not made based on the potential hazards or benefits to mankind or to this planet, but based on how much profit could be made. On how much money was on the line.

  “Non-biodegradable, non-recyclable plastics were everywhere, and only a very small percentage of those that could be recycled actually were.

  “Oil was loosed into the oceans as the result of hasty hands and eager eyes, and the drinking water inland was ruined completely in some areas due to careless strip-mining and the dumping of hazardous chemicals.

  “Mass producers of food would add ingredients to their products that they knew to be harmful, because they had found a way for it to be profitable to do so. To increase product shelf-life. To decrease cost.

  “They farmed salmon in giants tanks, and fed them things like canola oil and chicken feces and God-knows-what, and administered tons of antibiotics to combat the diseases that spread a
mongst these fish that were packed too closely together. Of course the resulting meat was so grey that it needed to be dyed to actually look like salmon again.

  “Don’t get me started on chicken.

  “And hard science, too, was bent towards the aim of increased profits in the food industry. They toyed with the genetic makeup of fruits and vegetables and the livestock we ate. They made new crops that yielded more. They made animals that grew bigger in a shorter amount of time. A lot of these things, especially genetically modified corn and corn byproducts, which were put into nearly everything, proved to be highly carcinogenic.”

  Lamar watched as Gabriel, who hadn’t taken a single bite in several minutes, laid his small fork onto his plate.

  “Perhaps I should leave this particular topic until we are done eating,” Lamar suggested.

  Gabriel couldn’t fathom living in the world Lamar was describing, and he was sure that he had a thousand questions, although he was hard-pressed to come up with a single one at just that moment. So he picked his fork back up, loaded a few more bites onto his plate and waited for Lamar to continue.

  Lamar stood up and shook his legs back and forth, one by one. He rolled his head in a few small circles and then held his arms up in front of him while twisting his upper torso left and right and left again.

  He looked down at Gabriel.

  “At my age, you gotta keep moving. Otherwise, you might stop moving altogether,” he smiled.

  After rolling his shoulders forwards and backwards a few times, he walked around the table to where the drinks were stationed and grabbed the bottle of champagne by its neck. Returning to his seat, he told Gabriel to empty his orange juice, one way or another. Gabriel tilted it back and swallowed the last few sips, and then returned the glass to the table, between Lamar and himself.

  Lamar splashed some champagne into Gabriel’s glass, waited for the bubbles to recede, and then poured a little more. Then he filled his own glass and reclined a bit with its stem in hand. “Cheers.” They both drank and were silent for a time. Gabriel didn’t need to compliment the drink. He knew Lamar could see the enjoyment on his face.