Truth Read online

on ‘truths’, but all, it turned out, just fleeting rainbow reflections from the surface tension of real narrative beneath; platitude scarves and political hats in the uninformed uniform of normality.

  Joanna’s family were army too. She fancied the life of an officer’s wife; an important officer. Her sister, Evelyn, was sustainable this, low-energy that, morally above us all. I didn’t mind; I thought it was noble, saving the planet. I slavishly scribed Evelyn’s truths into my bible. She was sharp-tongued though, as well as green.

  We sometimes slept over at her house, part of an Edwardian terrace undergoing constant rejuvenation. The inside always smelled of woodworm eradicator and varnish, vegetable curry and wool, the latter from damp garments that were constantly hung over the banister. After a while, Evelyn and that combined aggressive tang became one.

  I was popular with the women in our eco-circle and grudgingly admired by the males. Albeit not overtly, it seemed that bravery in the field still trumped the faux courage of campaigning hard for windmills or ridiculing climate change deniers. My rank even outbid the terrific thighs and moral highs of men who cycled everywhere. Though Joanna and I were not considered core, due to our relationship with Evelyn we had a free pass to anything that was going on; we were considered trustworthy.

  One evening during my officer training, that trust was tested.

  Recall: OT Corps.

  I met one of those deniers at the bar: Sid, a newbie like me with no field experience yet. After several beers, I fell into the temptation of teasing him.

  “Do you know how that term denier first came to be applied to sceptics?” he challenged.

  Odd question. Though I suppose I didn’t really. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  He smiled and handed me a tattered photocopy, apparently from a page of the Boston Globe newspaper. I read the underlined passage.

  I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future. The piece was dated a couple of years earlier; the writer was one Ellen Goodman.

  “Soon we’ll be shipped out to fight a regime that is deriding and dehumanising a section of its own people. If the science of ‘the consensus’ is so overwhelmingly robust, why do they and their support base feel a need to deride and dehumanise those who would like to see the sums or who simply have questions?”

  Sid finished his beer, donned his cap, and left.

  Even through a buffer of alcohol, I felt uncomfortable.

  Now: in hospital.

  Dora returned, to administer another shot of morphine.

  “Is that more comfortable?”

  She shone a strong light into my pupils. Purple and red blotches remained with me as vivid recall pushed the real world away.

  Recall: abroad.

  I thought the milling colours must be confusing my eyes; strange visions winked in and out of existence, each lasting only a split second. I had to stay sharp out here! Perhaps I’d drunk too much at the officers’ bar the previous evening.

  The rich palette was a vain attempt to disguise poverty. Hats and hijabs, T-shirts and flowing skirts, burqas and robes and baggy slacks, whether plain or patterned, together presented a dynamic artwork in scarlet and sky-blue, gold and turquoise, electric pink and royal purple, simple white and religious black and everything in-between. The visual assault was matched by cacophony; everyone in this market seemed to be haggling if not outright yelling, and this above dozens of radios pumping out wailing vocals and raucous strings, not to mention a heavy pulse of percussive sounds emanating from somewhere deeper within the sprawl of rickety stalls.

  Most of the squad were strung out in pairs and not everyone was fully armed and armoured; our stance was geared to look casual, though in truth was anything but. I was off to one side, keeping the ragged chain in strict control via constant headset contact as we passed through the skirts of the market. Wafts of incense partially masked more disagreeable smells beneath. Helen Clarke from artillery, a key member of our outreach team, was hunkered down fifteen metres away from me, grinning like a clown and handing out chocolate to children.

  Then a huge snakelike head rose up above the crowd, grey and scaly with golden orbs of eyes. I gave a start and glanced nervously around. Was this some local entertainment; maybe a giant paper puppet? No, I could partially see through the thing. A monstrous balloon? It looked far too real. No-one else reacted. Had someone slipped a pill into my drink earlier?

  A flush of panic stressed my already overheated veins. I called for a status check; all troops. Perhaps some clever diversion was being staged, a presage to attack. A girl in a blue-grey burqa approached Helen with purpose; by her size older than the other kids but no doubt just as keen for chocolate. Everyone A OK except Tamin, garbled static came back on his channel ID. I couldn’t see him. No one mentioned the alarming creature, which I now saw was more like a wormish dragon than a snake. Dark tendrils from its body fanned out into the jostling throng.

  The girl pushed through a dense knot of punters pawing at butchers’ offerings: ragged lumps of meat lying on bloodied wooden tables in the burning heat. Something about her determination triggered my concern; I reached up to my helmet mount and slid the video monocular into place, then focussed her up. A thin strip of immaculate beauty floating on a fabric sea. Flawless dusky skin and amber eyes; how rare, yet disconcertingly similar to the giant worm, and... was that fear? I backed out a little. Petite frame but, through fleeting windows in the crowd and the veil of loose blue burqa, excess bulk and sharp angles at her stomach.

  “Clarke! Blue-grey girl, your 2 o’clock. Loaded!”

  As though in slow motion, Helen rose and started to draw her pistol. Maybe she was phased. Maybe it was my racing perception.

  “Team. Imminent explosion meat stalls. Leave market – run!”

  The worm’s fierce gaze swept the area. I instinctively dropped down, even as I simultaneously cursed myself for not ignoring theatricals or drug-induced visions. But right then I suddenly knew the calibre of the round that missed my head, the exact line of its passage, the inevitability of an unintended victim, where he would be hit. I glanced around. A thin guy with a straggle of beard, surprise etched on his face as crimson blossomed over the egg-shell blue of his robe. How could I know those things? The enemy probably knew I was the link man.

  No time for the sniper. I flipped my monocular out of the way and got a bead on the girl. Not clutching a dead man’s button. Good. People sensed trouble. Heads turned, bodies shifted. A decent gap… but innocence flowed out of those amber eyes and right into me, turning my trigger finger to jelly. I swore. I’d lost it; this was grossly unprofessional! Helen would be blown to bits, and Franks too, her partner who’d ignored the order to run. Probably me as well, not to mention a bunch of civilians, many of them children. Helen’s pistol waved in front of her, she couldn’t get a shot. Older children scattered; the younger ones thought she was playing. A peculiar silver glow occupied Helen’s midriff. The fact that she was pregnant pushed bizarrely into my mind; I knew this as absolute truth. A split second of recall: a drunken night of shared comfort after we lost a colleague and friend. I had to prevent this slaughter. Franks, a few strides away, started into motion.

  The girl was innocent, coerced. I knew it. So the trigger must be elsewhere! I rose slightly and gazed through my gun-sight to follow the line of the sniper’s shot. Women in bright yellow vests below limp Scandinavian flags, dishing out soup to the poor, which was nearly everyone. A shaven-headed guy on a raised platform behind the makeshift kitchen. One of the fatter dark strands from the worm ended where he stood. Nearby, a silencer protruded from high up in a load of food sacks on the back of a big flat-bed truck; not UN, the colours of a local business. The guy gazed at a cell-phone, his finger poised. I lined up and shot. No jelly this time. The target launched backwards into piles of grimy cardboard boxes and a s
tack of luridly labelled cans. I followed up with a good few rounds into the sacks. Dates and broken biscuits streamed out, imports no doubt liberated from food-aid supplies.

  I turned around. Franks must have rugby-tackled Clarke to the ground; his arms were still wrapped around her legs. He froggied further along and sprawled his body over her. Incredibly brave, and suicidal. The blue-gray burqa girl reached them.

  Nothing happened.

  I rushed over to strip the explosives off the poor girl. Amber eyes spilled surprise at seeing the world still, yet despair was already leaking in. Maybe a close one would suffer for this failure.

  Franks and Clarke disentangled themselves. The worm had disappeared.

  “You’re pregnant,” I said stupidly.

  “It’s Tamin’s,” Helen confessed. “I thought… I thought we were dead.” Shock cut in and she started shaking.

  My stomach churned with relief and concern and confusion. Yet again impossibly, I knew that Tamin was a traitor.

  Now: in hospital.

  The worry pushed me into the present again, except that a different worry entirely was racing around my head. I’d be in a terrible state if she didn’t come. Awful, unimaginable. I wouldn’t be strong enough on my own. I needed her. Fear slipped around my veins. There wasn’t much time left; please please let her come.

  To fend off panic, I continued thinking about the past.

  Recall.

  The dilemma about Tamin and Helen was the first of many, and the first time too that I realised I could see truths. I didn’t visit the M.O. He’d think I was crazy and I didn’t want to get booted out of the service. My personal theory was that the strange old woman had gifted me something, a kind of ancient wisdom maybe, or it came from the lost civilization there. Or I was mad, but if so a very powerful kind of madness. Not that this aspect helped me at first. I was immediately put on a charge for shooting an unarmed civilian.

  When it was proved that I’d saved the day, they had to release me. It was hard though convincing them how I’d known who to shoot. With a single silent bullet bloodily marking a twisting and falling body, I’d never have determined an accurate source location without special knowledge. And only premonition prompted by the weird worm prevented me from being the victim!

  Everything lined up about Tamin. Our company was called ‘lucky’. Not surprising; to save himself Tamin made sure we didn’t get jumped. Our comrades in other companies took the hits. The entanglement with One Eye had been accidental; intelligence was screwed up on our side and they must have gotten their wires crossed too. In the market Tamin had slipped away, knowing more or less what would happen.

  I could barely conceal an enormous anger. Brotherhood betrayed is a terrible thing to a young warrior. My gift soon granted me the means to obtain hard evidence and confront him.

  Avoiding authority left open the path of noble demise, which he took. At least that outcome was a little bit easier on Helen. As local attachment he’d have been executed by his own people anyhow, with his family shamed and without the dubious privilege of a long wait.

  Though unexpectedly attired in a thorny cap of guilt, in secret I’d saved men and inside me hot ego celebrated. I vowed to conceal this awesome ability in the vault of my mind. No psychologists would dismantle my thoughts and paw over all that was precious to me! Little did I know the lethal spell that had latched on to my life.

  My immediate problem was comprehension. Complex truths would typically appear as visual metaphors, often lurid, presumably something my primitive brain should grasp, except that I couldn’t always do so, or not fully. Different types of metaphor depicted different aspects of the revealed truth, yet there were some generic rules. ‘Good’ things tended to shine or at least have pure, bright colours; ‘bad’ things tended to be dark or muddy. Usefully, objects I touched would often spill out their histories or greater detail.

  Disconcertingly, the multi-hued fungi of hidden truths blossomed wherever I looked. All of society seemed riddled by myriad roots, soaked in spores, almost defined by perplexing parasols. Those intricate veins of bureaucracy, lace-moulds of religion, enormous fans of celebrity and mushrooms of sporting achievement, those incredibly complex corporate cells; were they ugly or attractive, nurturing or consuming, part of us or playing, out of normal sight, their own evolutionary game?

  It was scarier still when the more dynamic aspects of the social engines were portrayed, often as great worms like the religious manifestation in the market. Eventually, I realised that these beasts really did have a kind of true existence of their own, fuelled on the borrowed brain-power of many, and indeed I could see that most individuals donated their support to several such higher forms, subconsciously or otherwise.

  Confusingly, few entities appeared purely good or bad. Pretty white fungi like magnified snowflakes hid dark cankers beneath. Great black-scaled beasts reflected beautiful blue sheens. And it was obvious that the beasts bred. The one that disturbed me the most, the tricksy worm I thought of as good perverted or nobility corrupted, was the strange child of inspiration bred with fear. I hoped never to be near the business end of that powerful and unpredictable worm, the end with a hypnotic gaze and horribly poisonous fangs. Its dripping drool was the slaver of psychologizers declaring its enemies crazy.

  Thankfully, revelation did not come all at once. I began to realise I’d explode if it did. I might anyway. Even by the time of my first leave after Tamin’s death, I was getting regular migraines; the merciless cramming of knowledge into my brain and the constant strain of not revealing what I knew, were both taking a toll. And my guard began to slip; that’s how I first earned Evelyn’s distrust.

  Recall: home.

  I gazed at the eco-shrine that occupied a corner of the front room in Evelyn’s house. Pictures, awards, keepsakes and such. A pale square revealed where one picture had recently been removed. I couldn’t recall for sure but thought it had been a photo of the scientist James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia hypothesis. Nearby on a nail, a gold medal hung from a green ribbon. Peering closely, I read: ‘UN award for services to sustainability – Energy (female first class)’. Curious, I reached out and picked up the cold disk, giving my voracious perception something to bite on. All the heads and hands that had contributed to the concept of that award passed through my mind.

  The ‘UN Senior Advisor on Sustainability’, the ‘Senior Advisor on Sustainable Development’, the ‘Technical Advisor, Population & Sustainable Development’, the ‘Advisor on Sustainable Water Development and Management’, the ‘Second Committee Advisor on Sustainable Development’, the ‘Consultant: Gender, Climate Change and Sustainable Development’, the ‘Environmental Management Coordinator and Climate Neutrality Advisor’, some country-specific ‘UN coordinators for Sustainable Development’, then fanning out to a formidable array of sub-committees and a veritable army of assistants before making it to the Non-Governmental Organisations and a network of volunteer bodies.

  A hint of scepticism probably rested on my forehead as I set that weighty medal back down. Gilt for guilt, gold and sold.

  Evelyn must have approached while I was absorbed.

  “I’ll bet you have no idea what it’s really for, what behaviour it’s meant to encourage,” she jabbed beneath her cloak of moral affectation. Spurred into defence, I instinctively parried with all those names and more, then thrust with all their declared goals too. Evelyn’s jaw dropped. I charitably omitted the subconscious goals.

  She stomped off.

  I hadn’t meant to upset her, but she was so damn aggressively righteous!

  Maybe I could make amends. Evelyn was always going on about Gaia, how we were giving the Earth-mother a fever with our CO2 emissions. Sometimes she spoke in hushed tones, as though discussing a real matriarch who was sick, a revered great-grandmother perhaps. Whether good news or bad my abilities ought to give me some genuine insight into that great lady’s health, which Evelyn would likely appreciate.

  Later that sam
e day Joanna drove us over to her mum’s place nearby. I was still alarmed by weird manifestations on home turf, the sight of the great social beasts roaming familiar streets. Up to then I’d associated them with the sweaty climes where I did my soldiering; within the ravaged domain of a semi-permanent war-zone they seemed not that much crazier than all the other brutal and crazy sights.

  We passed by the wind-farm that Evelyn and her allies had fought so hard to establish. I was alarmed by what seemed to be streams of smoke pouring from hubs and blade tips, twirling around to form a great cloud downwind. Thinking the turbines must be on fire I opened my mouth to call out, then snapped it shut again. Clearly Joanna saw nothing; it must be another metaphor. I gazed at the misty ribbons in varying shades of grey, many quite dark, which usually implied some kind of hidden problem. But what could possibly be dubious about windmills?

  Base-load, my perception supplied for one stream, cold calms for another. Feed-in tariff, conventional cover, smart-grid challenges and pylon proliferation, nameplate capacity, (what? Why not have the real capacity?) real capacity, (oh. Good grief was it really THAT low?) high maintenance, hydro-pumping, Norway, (what??), strong winds mitigation, dumping, back-up response times and relative emissions, grid-glitches, slack-time payments, shaft-levelling, third power law, rare-earth metals, forecast resolutions… and so on, even a thin black cotton-like thread for raptor and bat kills, plus one pure white streamer: free wind.

  I knew from our friends that the government planned many such farms. Scaled up to match, that downwind thunderhead seemed to me quite some storm that would break upon our energy infra-structure.

  Perhaps complications and consequent costs simply had to be borne, to save the planet as Evelyn constantly put it. Oh, relative emissions, I recalled. Joanna turned north and the blade array slid out of sight. How much carbon footprint gain would we get for our pain anyhow?

  As Joanna put her foot down and we sped away, an after-spasm of my perception pricked regarding potential unintended consequences: in the current regime heavy price rises would mean more fuel poverty and excess cold deaths. I hadn’t thought of that. I didn’t need special skills to tell me Evelyn would condemn such an outcome. A lot worse than a few mangled bats.

  “Why are they called wind-farms?” I mused aloud. “Nothing is grown there.”

  “Dunno. The wave-power thingies at sea are usually called generator arrays.”

  Were these ‘farms’ more about architectural symbolism than practicality? Like Victorian railway stations only more so? Either way, my damn perception had screwed any