In a Child's Hands

                            In a Child's Hands

         Drenaldo De Remembris set his focus onto the neon green eyes of his youngest grandson.  Mikala De Ombris was the boy’s name, and a fine title it was.  Six years gone already, he thought to himself.  ‘What harsh and unfeeling speed does time steal before me.’  A line from some obscure poem he had read in his earlier years gone.  Too many decades had fallen for him to recall the whole sonnet, he was surprised enough to find himself remembering anything.  It seemed to him now that the line had been a clever trap set in his mind, programmed to voice itself when he was most vulnerable.  Even now while his thoughts drifted was time playing its wicked hand of thievery.
         He was only granted visitation from the boy once a week for sixty minutes gone; no greater and occasionally less.  But he was aloud the time alone and that did count for something.  The growing child’s weight was becoming seemingly more significant with each visit and he wondered if the cause fell on the boy's startingly increasing size, or if perhaps his eighty years far gone body was the blame.  A bit of both, Drenaldo compromised with himself.  Either way he would not last long and there were stories that needed an ear and a will.  The boy was young, no doubt, but an eager listener and a dreamer.  Drenaldo would shape the child with tales of heroics and evils and someday, perhaps twenty years come, the deeper message would hit.  Like the ingenious trap set by the poet of decades gone; it would strike his soul at the most crucial of moments.
          “What’s the story this week Papa?”  A hungry glow pulsed through the small circuits of Mikala’s iris-plants.  It reminded Drenaldo of the ancient yet ever useful Morris Code.  It was as though behind the beating bursts of brilliant green some secret message could be deciphered with enough time and effort.
         Drenaldo laughed at the thought of time and effort.  He could see the boy prime with curiosity at his Grandpa’s sudden outburst.  “Tonight is something very special my little Krola!”  A huge and loving smile made only by the most innocent of youths opened across the natural tanned skin of his grandchild.  No doubt being called a Krola, a relative to whom the darkest of secrets could be trusted, fueled the contagious grin.  A rare comment to hear indeed and typically reserved for those of at least nineteen years gone. 
              The grandfather smiled back on the boy, love and pride infecting every bit of his grin.  “Hark if you can guess why?”
              Mikala placed a thoughtful finger on his lips and looked skyward.  It was hard not to be amused by the gift of naiveté.  The deep expression on the child’s face seemed so important, so inward.  After a moment of reflection he threw his hands up and sighed.
              “I give up.  Why?”
            The old man took one last moment to consider what he was about to do, to say.  Evidence was mounting that this story be told now… or never.  It would be a difficult tragedy for him to hear, and so much more terrible for him to recall, but infinitely more necessary.  He took in a breath of stale air, a byproduct of his unfortunate housing situation, then spoke in the most important tone his old body could muse up.
            “Tonight you will become learnt on why Pappy is in jail.  And why no matter what Teacher, Mister Brother and even your Mother and Father tell you, the worlds are dying and only a brave soul like yours can change the fortune of generations to come.”
            He had thought Mikala might yell or leap clean off his lap with excitement when he spoke to him.  This was the story he had wanted to hear since he was three years gone.  The green of his eyes suddenly became darkened, as though some foul storm had shaded a pasture of lush grass.  The eyes were focused.  The boy would hear his words with the intensity of one with far more years gone.  This boy, he thought, can do it.  Can finish my work. 
            Can save humanity.


                                                           ***

         “Tonight, ladies and gentlemen of the peaceful world, the Grail of humanity will be revealed.”  The man on the holo spoke with an eloquence and surety that was almost religious.  And why not, thought Drenaldo, or Denny to his college acquaintances.  Science was today's religion.  He supposed that made his parents, the man being broadcast on more displays than he could begin to imagine and the woman standing so stone-faced beside him, saints.  That there names would forever hold a place of reverence in history he had no doubt.
         The powerful speech continued and Denny, who had heard the reading several dozen times as the practice audience, spoke in unison with his father.  “The answer to our resource distresses.  You have all heard, I'm certain, of project EDEN.  A top secret, class-A, high-level clearance research assignment whose name, despite out best efforts, became an everyday conversation piece.”
         Denny paused with his father to allow the expected laughter to subside.  “Today we are proud to announce the full and complete success of that project.”  Again the father and son paused, this time for a tremulous applause.  The ambiance amplifier in the viewing room translated the cheers of the million man audience into a small quake that nearly shook his wine off its table rest. 
         The erupting settled and the pair continued.  “Eden.  A mythical place of endless food and water.  For humans as a mere consuming beasts it was all that would ever be needed to survive.  But not enough for man as a sentient being.  Knowledge and advancement, entertainment and social interaction.  And, of course, food and water.”  Several small chuckles.  ”This is what drives the thinking beast.  A race of endless potential but for one missing element.  Recourses.  Wood, oil, hydrogen.  Man has passed through many phases of energy consumption, none of which were limitless. 
         “We have seen in our past forests disappear, enormous caverns of subterranean oil emptied, and let us never forget the unexpected and horrific toxic hazards that came with pulling hydrogen atoms from water.  It seemed, for a time, that we were destined to jump from one depletable resource to the next.  My fellow human beings, that time has come to an end.  Allow me to present EDEN.”
         His mother made her way to the speaking podium, holding in her hands an object that looked to Denny like an expensive child's toy.  Three rings, each progressively smaller than the last, flipped and and spiraled around a small gray substance  caught in an endless struggle to form a sphere.  An inexplicable glow was cast from the putty like material, casting an unearthly light onto his mother's stern face, the ring's shadows passed across her expression in lazy waves.  It always surprised Denny how small the EDEN was.  So much power, so much hope. All in an item smalled than a toaster.
         His mother began her half of the speech.  He had no idea what she may say.  Emily De Remembris was forever the silent type, even amongst family.  If they was not discussing nano-engineering or gravitational magnetic pulley vibrations then they were not discussing as a family at all.  Her words stung him sharply.  “This is EDEN.  She is the proud daughter of many years of labor between Carlon and myself and it gives me tremendous joy to share her with you today.  This is a product of not only hard work, but of love and care.”  Denny was filled with a mix of hate, jealousy and a childlike longing.  It was always difficult to hear her speak about EDEN.  Love and care were terms reserved for the thing, they never had a place between mother and son, not in his lifetime. 
         The next ten minutes of her ranting were filled with unabashed technical jargon about gravity, propulsion, fusion, diffusion and a hundred other terms Denny couldn't understand, let alone pronounce.  Literature students seldom found themselves discussing hyperbola neutron field waves under a constant pressure of polar repulsion.  He was always proud of his scientific ignorance. To live in his home for nineteen years gone and walk away with a scientific vocabulary as deep as the daily sports page was quite the accomplishment in his eyes.
         When his mother finally ended her cooing over the inanimate object his father returned to the stage.  Instantly Denny's agitation settled.  Not because his cold mother had returned to the holo's background, but because the real test was at hand.  EDEN, his unofficial sister, would either perform her  job or find herself and twenty years of painstaking work as useful as an ice maker in the belly of a volcano. 
         When his father spoke again Denny did not follow, though he knew he could have.  Despite his own personnel misgivings toward the project which had stolen his parents' presence in his youth, the importance of EDEN was undeniable.  This device could truly change the world for the better.  The thought sent a spark of pride through Denny.  The world would never know (and probably never care) about his own sacrafice.  But Drenaldo would remember always.
         “It is my honor to present the first practical test of EDEN.  In a moment i will reroute all power in the New York area to EDEN.  There will be a brief blackout, but do not panic.  If all goes accordingly your homes should return to full power in just five seconds.  The garden gates have gone, taken by an ancient Lord.  With this device I re-open Eden forever more“          
         Denny did not notice the lights extinuish around him, or the holo display melt into the newly arrived darkness.  All his thoughts were bent on his father's final two cryptic lines.  Lines he had written for his mother and father when he was only ten years gone.  He had thought they were deaf to his writings.  Certainly they seemed not to care.  And yet here, before a countless number of listeners, his lines were heard.  If the test ran succesfully those two lines would become as legendary as Neil Armstrong's first lunar transmission.
         Lights returned, the holo display shimmered then launched the crowd upward like a forest sprouting at impossible speeds.  The test was announced successful and then Denny saw something he had never witnessed in all his nineteen years gone; his mother and father were caught in a deep embrace, kissing as passionately as newlyweds and crying tears of exuberant joy.               
                                                           ***

         Maldine sent a few extra pounds of pressure into his grip.  Just enough to let his little American-loving sister know he was serious.  Just enough to turn the kid's silent breathing into a hissing wheeze.
         “Wanna try this again?”  The older brother lifted his sibling several  inches from the ground so that her untied shoelaces could only tickle the soil floor.  Maldine could see his sister's eyes, nearly hidden by draping bark-brown hair, glowing red around the edges.  One of the blood-primed eyes was bordered by a black and purple ring he had given her in an earlier confrontation. 
         A soft and broken whimper scratched from her throat. 
         “I'm sorry.” were the words she was fighting to speak.  Sorry for not killing the boy.  Sorry for not putting the ugly gun into his mouth and pulling the feather light trigger, mixing his brains with the piss-yellow sand.  Maldine could see she didn't mean  it, not entirely.  But he could also find in those petrified circles of blue a desperate fear.  And fear, in Maldine al Shankra's view of the world, was a very good thing.  She would not want to kill the young American tourist, but he knew if he placed the gun in her hands again and sent her that same firey look he was branding her with now, she would commit the act.  She would blow the top half of his pale head across their tiny living room like a mucous filled sneeze.  And that was good enough for him.
         He released his grip as quickly as he had set it on her.  Her thin yet developed body crumbled onto the floor where she tended to her throat and coughed as though his presence had somehow entered her lungs and she desperately need to expel it from her body.  Something in the back of Maldin'es mind sparked at the sight of his suffering sister, sending a warm urge to the base of his spine where it pulsed urgently. 
         Daksha, he would often notice after punishing her, was a very beautiful girl.  At seventeen she was fully developed with thick thighs and firm breasts that emerged from her shirt collar like ripened fruit.  Her skin was an even bronze that gave off its own radiance and Maldine found himself mesmerized by the little shadowed canyon where her stomach parted with her thigh before receding into her low fitting skirt, the type the whore's of Egypt would often wear.  She was no whore, Maldine kept any man with at least a teaspoon of testosterone away from her, but the attire made it easier for the two to travel between country borders.  No one gave two shits where some slut and her pussy dealer were going. 
         One thick finger met with her cheek in what he had intended to be a sensual caress.  The sticky feeling of tears awoke him from his unexpected trance and the older brother, furious for his sudden change of character, grabbed her lower jaw harshly and turned her head so it met his own.
         “Cross me again, my lovely sister, and I will sell you off to the more longing men in the militia.  I have kept you from wedding since you were seven.  Thats ten years worth of wanting men I've had to fight off you.  Even killed a man that had tried to bed with you once.”  (Daksha could not soon forget the face of her deceased lover).  “You owe me your body and mind and I demand no hesitation when I call for either.”
         He watched her head bob obediently at his words and then smiled a frighteningly handsome grin at her.  Very good my lovely sister.  Know your place and you will be fine.
         Maldine sent his arms wide, beckoning for an embrace.  Daksha pulled herself from the ground and entered his arms, all coughing had subsided.  He set his arms around her, savoring the feeling of her chest against his gut.  Almost unconsciously his hands traveled to her butt where he gripped firmly.  He could feel a fresh set of tears on his chest when he groped her, but she did not resist.  Only stood and let him have his grab.  After a brief moment he pulled her away by the shoulders, unholstered a gun from his belt, and placed it into her hands.
         You know what I want you to do.  He didn't speak the words but the cold fire in his eyes said it all.  Daksha knew what all his cold looks meant and how those thirsty eyes would be fed no matter how hard she resisted.  It was up to her, however, what the meal should be.  Either the quaking innocents blood who was still fastened to the column before them; or her naked and defenseless flesh. 
         Tears made the boy, who could not be older than twelve, a messy distortion of colors.  Only his hazel eyes seemed to stand out in the blurred haze.  They looked so sad, so afraid.  So small.  The eyes of a child.
         For a moment she dropped her hand to her side and for a moment those frightened eyes burst with hope and relief.  She felt for certain she could let the child go, take the punishment.  Better her then this innocent youth. 
         A hand reached around her back and gripped one of her full breasts.  Before she knew what had happened an explosion of sound ran through the air.  Her hand was raised and she found the hazel eyes in the haze had disappeared.  The invading hand pulled away from her sore chest.
         For the second time since the bystander had arrived Daksha forced the words, “I'm sorry” through choking sobs.