The Fires of Orc

By Tony Phillips

In the wasted world, what does an old man remember? Before the fires he was part of something, something that would last. So he thought. Looking back fifty years to the destruction of 2032, he knows the end was inevitable. Power, greed, ambition and murder were the order of the day – and then the fires. A survivor remembers how the dawn of quantum computing signaled the end of democracy, how lust, vengeance and scandal lit the fuse, and how a hardened few started over, rebuilding tomorrow from the ruins of yesterday.

With equal parts prophecy and prose, The Fires of Orc is a complex tale of intrigue told from a frighteningly foreseeable future. Fans of George Orwell, Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin will recognize and appreciate the scope of this post-apocalyptic thriller. The debut novel from acclaimed editorial writer Tony Phillips, The Fires of Orc is sure to be 2017's most talked about cross-genre book, blending classic themes with postmodern style and a nod to the prose of a bygone century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tony Phillips
• Release date: Nov 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386594666

Book preview

The Fires of Orc

By Tony Phillips

THE FIRES OF ORC

Copyright © 2016 by Kouros Phillips Development, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

Kouros Phillips Development, Inc.

425 South Meadowbrook Drive, 132

San Diego, CA 92114

or

[e-mail]

I am indebted to many people for their contributions, direct and indirect, to the contents of this book. Space and short memory preclude listing all the minds that have enriched my life, but to each of them I am indebted. Their ideas infuse the entirety of my work.

For my wife,

who is the best part of me.

Contents

After the Fires

Those Days

America, a Requiem

San Diego

Man in Progress

Siren

The Echelon

The Word

On Being Clean

A Hot Winter

Serendipity

A Woman’s Work

The Arithmetic of Conquest

Peregrination

To Mine Own Self

Expedition in Blue

Amid Ice and Fire

The Fortress Soul

By Whatever Means

Coup de Grâce

Juggernaut

Too Soon

Loose Ends

Crescendo

One Night in November

Coronation

Blowback

Apocalypse

Pilgrimage

Reprobation

Fiery the angels rose, and as they rose

deep thunder roll’d

Around their shores,

indignant burning with the fires of Orc..."

––––––––

William Blake, America: A Prophecy

After the Fires

...I think the world will come to an end

amid the general applause from all the wits

who believe that it is a joke.

Søren Kierkegaard

F

ifty years ago fire tore through the cities of the world – first one, then another, until the night sky glowed ghastly and the day came half-dead across a scorched globe. All that Civilization had wrought in the span of eons was consumed in a day and the quarter of us who survived, hidden away from the cities in the wide world where the fire did not come, resumed our lives desperately, man against man, with fiendish urgency, scratching at the parched earth to purchase another day.

Today there are children and parents and grandparents who never knew the world before the fires. Among the people of the world today I am a curiosity, a relic, a mythical being whose mind contains the last real impressions of a world undreamed by the new rank of men.

It’s another morning and I’m awake.

COFFEE’S ON, CHIRPS The Landlord on yet another day. The yellow light of morning fills the musty space of the Friendship Inn. Suspended dust from long-neglected chores blurs outlines of mismatched furnishings and assorted clutter. I take my customary place at the kitchen counter. Coffee’s on, he reminds me.

How I loathe The Landlord with his whiskered jowls and sallow skin, the gap-toothed monger, purveyor of hovels to junkies, thieves, mendicants and aged wrecks like me. Of the countless items in the Friendship Inn that are neither friendly nor worth the price of a stay, The Landlord is the most insistently irksome.

Coffee’s on, he tweets again, to Helena, the drag queen drug dealer. I believe his actual name is Enrique, but what’s in a name? A nickel bag from any peddler would kill as sickly.

Coffee’s on, says The Landlord one-by-one to the wino, the purse snatcher, the ditch digger, the dock worker, bland humanity all in a row, descending like husks of men a twisting, creaking staircase.

How he offends me, this affable twit of a man, his very affability a vanity. The shuffling, snorting, flatulent little beast is quite likely the most repulsive man I have ever known. A loathsome, esurient little troll is The Landlord. May he choke on his bitter coffee.

He sells me bread and board for what scraps I earn teaching simpletons to read. If I weren’t here, I’d be at the New Life Church, on a mat, tended to by well-meaning oafs. That’s coming soon enough. There’s little purpose left for what I, a living artifact, can impart. Day by day there’s less and less worth reading about and fewer sincere optimists to write about it.

But perhaps not at the church. Sometimes, at night, I can almost see it. It comes and right soon. I won’t long survive this place. Surely this is how it ends. In the nadir of my leasehold on misused life lent me by time and twisted fortune, I will dwell amid the palsied and perverted, the manifold miscreants of my kind, until death takes me, wide-eyed and destitute, screaming silently in a twelve-room flophouse. But at least the coffee’s on.

In the littered kitchen a scrawny cat hunches it back, hacking in a corner, a phlegmy imp, one-eyed and wasting.

Outdoors the scene is somewhat worse. A coat of night-born soot coats stoops and gutters and the shuffle of thick-soled boots kicking grey papers, blown in skirls of dry wind, the constant bombardment of a blasted earth. It has been this way since the fires. So few of us are left who knew the world before. Months pass without my seeing in another’s eyes the disgust that dulls mine, the disgust of long life and haunting memory. Virtually no one in the grey of our time knew the green world or the blue. These half-people can’t recall the burst of spring or the reddening of Old October. They can’t know the tragedy of now since they never knew the world before.

Fifty years, half-a-century, two-thirds of my life ago. When it happened we were already nearly fifty years past Orwell’s presaged age of tyranny, but there was no Big Brother. Neither were there shadowy minions, no Ministry of Truth, no Thought Police. We didn’t need them. Who should police our thoughts when there were none of us in those better days still willing to think? We were entertained. Our world gleamed bright and gay.

And then the fires...

Coffee, Old Timer? Twenty years and he can’t call me by my name. He was just a youth when I came here. I was his father’s tenant when I still had life in me.

Why not? I relent. Coffee is, after all, one of the comforts we can still take for granted in this shattered world. It comes in regularly via the sea trade that connects us to the north and the south. Every few weeks, coffee comes off the small boats and fruit goes on, oranges, limes and avocados, our local bounty.

With a chipped mug of black brew I settle stiffly into a crooked chair in the parlor to watch another morning come and go, another string of guttersnipes pass grimily by and another day’s shadows shorten and lengthen across the grit of an unswept floor. Perhaps I shall read.

Over the long march of years, my books have been my only attachment to the solid world of solid ideas. My little trove of volumes is unique in this burnt-out world, worth more to me than anyone alive. They are my link to a lost era when words expressed thoughts and thoughts moved hearts and hearts believed in the potency of their own pounding. My brittle paper treasures in their crumbling leather bindings are all that I hold dear. I have among my cherished holdings a hundred years of majesty, the finest of the American Century. There are Dreiser, Faulkner, Wolfe, Capote, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. There are also the later greats, Gaiman and McCarthy, Robbins and Pynchon. But just now I think maybe it’s an Upton Sinclair morning.

But wait – no! On this day of days let us weigh anchor and set across the bounding main to find Joyce in his verdant homeland. Before I fade from the world like so many tears in rain, I will understand that bewildering Hibernian.

But before I knock the dust off that weighty tome and try once again to unpack the great riddle of a Dublin sojourn, a bit about my time. It’s right that you should know it. Whether your time is months or years or millennia from mine, you might have influence. You might be one who can alter the course of things. You might bring to bear what forces as yet unknown can keep right the rudder of nations and people in their folly, that they should not steer the ship of history into the shoal. Learn from this grey morning’s tale what fate awaits those who take for granted the wind and time on which they sail.

What do you hear about Arizona? he asks.

The Landlord frets about fables. I doubt he believes the stories; no sane person could believe them. Still, he worries.

There is no Army of the Sun. There is no new life in the desert. No blue sky, no Southwest Republic. But if there were, what would become of a leech like him? If just over the mountains there were a Shangri La with jobs and homes and golf courses for all, who would long remain on this dingy, ashen coast to rent his lousy beds and stuff his cash box?

Same old same old, I tell him. They say there’s clean water and blue skies. I’ve heard the Army of the Sun controls everything from Old Yuma to the Rio Grande.

Look at him shift and fidget. Idiot. An odious blend of avarice and anxiety stuffed in a pudgy package.

So what do you think, then? Think they intend to expand? I mean, do you think they want to come out this way?

Can’t say for sure, I tell him, belaboring the pointless deception. I’ve heard talk of raids in the camps to the east. They say some loggers in the mountains disappeared and left a complete lumber facility with all the equipment in place, untouched.

What could that mean? he persists.

I couldn’t say, but if they got conscripted, well I don’t suppose there’s much timber to cut in Phoenix so why would the army take the equipment?

But if it’s desert, how can they support an army and a whole republic?

A sensible question. Look at him, pushing that tattered rag around the filthy counter, faintly streaking the grease and ash.

Could be the river. Maybe they’re irrigating. It’s a long way but the Colorado used to support cities all over the desert, some of them with millions of  people.

Now you’re pulling my leg, he protests. Millions of people living in the desert?

It’s true. The river used to support forty million people, half of them in the desert.

Oh come on. How could that be?

How could he understand? This world, after the fires, these people, they just can’t imagine.

The river is life, I tell him. Give it enough water and the desert is farmland. Build dams and the river’s a power plant. Forty million people lived off the river, most of them hundreds of miles from its banks.

He scratches. But why wouldn’t the river dry up?

Well it nearly did, eventually. In fact, people used up the river at least twice. Before my time, long before, the Ancient Ones built an empire in the desert. They drained water from the river into the surrounding dry ground and the land was so fertile that forests grew up around their canals. But they cut down the trees and the soil washed away with the water and in time the canals cut the earth into badlands. The empire crumbled and the Ancient Ones drifted away, leaving their chambers behind.

And the people in your time didn’t learn from the Ancient Ones?

Another sensible question.

The more things change, I tell him, the more they stay the same.

I remember learning about the Ancient Ones as a boy. I once visited their ruins. I saw their cities in the cliffs, their kivas, the Cathedrals of the West, where Red multitudes came together thousands of years before Whites in their westward frenzy.

There are towers in the desert, ancient towers that still stand. I learned about them as a boy and I remember hearing that for a hundred years explorers argued over their purpose. Perhaps they were built as look-out posts. Perhaps they had some ceremonial purpose. Perhaps they were just vain monuments to the power of those who built them.

But in my time a young archaeologist had a hunch. He and a cohort of fellow researchers fanned out across the desert one night. They ascended a dozen of the ancient towers and lit fires atop them. Then they spread themselves across the desert floor in all directions and found that wherever one happened to be in the desert one was always within sight of a fire. As one traveled away from a fire, leaving it behind, another appeared in front such that even for the wanderer in the desert, in the time of the Ancient Ones one could never be truly lost. Wherever one found oneself there was always a fire to light one’s way home.

I found comfort in that, as the Ancient Ones must have – the idea that you are not alone, that even in the desert on the darkest night you can find a place where someone waits, where someone will welcome you in from your travels, where water and the sounds of life await the parched and lonely vagabond. A light in the darkness is a simple thing and for the lonely and afraid that simple thing can be enough. You are not alone, says the light, and that makes all the difference.

Here though, now, in this woeful place with its sordid and motley herd, one is truly alone even in the crush of men. We were no better in my time but our beastliness was better hidden, at least on our surface. The beasts within us were no different from those within these gargoyle men with whom I pass my waning days. But our outward selves still feigned refinement, civilization, culture, marks that stand us apart in our minds from the animals we are in our souls.

I’m not going to worry, says The Landlord. Even if there is a Desert Republic and an Army of the Sun, what would they want with us? We have nothing worth taking. We’re simple people. Why would powerful people want to conquer simple people?

Why indeed?

He wouldn’t understand, but before I get to Joyce, if you like, I’ll tell you about my time, that is, the time before the fires. Today, fifty years after, the crusted earth is just beginning to shake off its charred shell. In spots, the black earth blooms green. But the coming life still struggles. In this time, after the fires, no wanderer would follow a flame. We would all rather flee the flickering light. Our common notions are too freshly wounded and the fires too recently past. The burnt earth is not ready for fires in the night.

And so we wander, many of us outside the company of our own kind, some within an easy walk of settlements like New Pacifica where I make my home. But those outsiders will not come among the enfolding reach of our bustling new enclaves. They would rather wander the empty wilds, suffering the ills they know, than forsake their isolation and succumb to ills they know not of. There is a long way to go. I won’t live to see us get there. The possibility of a new world remains just a possibility, while stories of the old world are little more than fables.

But I lived in the old world. I can tell you the truth.

I am now a man in his eighties, truly alone. I lived the best of my life in my twenties. All that happened to me I remember as if from a story. I might never have been that young man at all but I believe I was. The loneliness that attends my unending days is not something I bargained for. I feel I’ve done nothing of any account, nothing to stand the test of time. So what is there to do? I can keep living each dismal day until day does not come, but is that all there is?

Now, if I could tell a story, once truly and well, if I could fit my mind to its narration and bend my will to its revealing, perhaps then I’d have done what should be done. It’s not that anything I’ve seen, said or done is in itself so remarkable, so worthy or so important that it must be shared. It could all go untold, but to tell it is in me, I suppose, like the song is in the blackbird.

Those Days

What a weary time those years were –

to have the desire and the need to live

but not the ability.

Charles Bukowski

I

overheard some sailors talking in town yesterday."

I’m sure he did. The Landlord pays more attention to rumors and speculation than to the day’s work.

They say they saw an airplane off the coast, an hour south of here.

An hour south of here is Old Mexico. I’ve heard the rumors. Some say there’s a functioning government in Baja. If there is, it hasn’t come to us in the shadow of Old San Diego. New Pacifica arose within sight of towering, jagged hulks still marking a city center that hummed in my day with the business of life and pursuit of the moment. I still venture out from time to time to look at the ruined skyline and remember those long-ago days. No sane person, particularly not one as infirmed as I have become, would ever venture into the city today. Old San Diego is a killing zone where men half-dead on the outside and all dead on the inside pick at yesterday’s carcasses and prey on the occasional missionary whose faith surpasses his own good sense.

But there it still stands, Old San Diego, its bones at least. The past is the past, but it never goes away.

Well, say I, if there’s an airplane off the coast, there must be a pilot who can fly it. Maybe it’s a new army. Maybe the Aztlán Confederation has its eyes on us.

The Landlord shuffles papers, composing his thoughts. I’m trying to be serious, Old Timer. I don’t need to be insulted.

Perhaps I went too far.

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you, I assure him, though that was precisely my intent. Who’d have thought he would notice?

Anyway, he asks, do you really think there’s an airplane?

I tell him I don’t know, hoping it will suffice. It clearly will not. So we talk.

Honestly, I assure him, I don’t think there’s an Aztlán Confederation.

But what about those riders who came through here last year with their flags saying a new land waits in the south? There were at least a dozen of them. Remember?

I do remember. I just don’t care.

What about them? People say lots of things. Even if dozens of people say something stupid, it’s still a stupid thing.

They were new world bandits, the riders.  Their kind abounds in the Outlands. They hunker down in shells of the old world like Old San Diego where they manufacture their crude drugs, hone their crude weapons and weave their crude tales to lure the gullible, like The Landlord, into misbegotten pilgrimages that end in murder and pilfer.

If those men promised anything, I tell him, it was a lie. They’re thieves and scavengers.

But they had flags! he protests.

What they had was some old cloth. I’ve got a Bible. That doesn’t make me the Pope and this place sure isn’t the Vatican.

There once were two nations that met in the strip of sea and land beyond Old San Diego. There are now no countries, no flags, and no reason to fight for the former or salute the latter. If only he knew.

But how could he know? No one can since the fires.

WE WERE YOUNGER THEN and more naïve. In that time the space between Americans still allowed the cultivation of old fantasies. We sustained the principles of a simpler age. We believed that work was correlated with reward, that merit underscored achievement and that opportunity could narrow the gap between the many and the few.

In those days no one yet foresaw the fires just over the near horizon. Through the lens of long memory I see now how predictable it should have been to all of us. Everything had to happen as it did, when it did, where it did and with logical consequences, but no one at the time heard death’s advancing step. We might have heard, but we weren’t listening.

America was then a big country full of big people and it was still so young. Just fifty years ago America dreamed as did its first invaders centuries earlier. We had no rank or royalty to mark our station. We thought ourselves free to be who we could become, not just what we were born into. We did not know who were gentlemen and who weren’t and it scarcely mattered. The most vulgar of us could buy a position at the top with fifteen minutes’ wealth.

Today we are all much older.

Those Americans had big hearts to fit their big land, but their hearts were those of overgrown children, bursting with adolescent urges, ungoverned by self-reflection. That America, my America, was a place where a childlike laughter echoed and beckoned the solitary traveler to join the crowd. It was always a good land, America, and its people good people. Good, but oblivious, and they knew not yet who they really were.

My Americans lacked the introspection of adults. They still saw themselves as they wished they had been. As a people, my Americans spent most of their brief history trying to become some imagined ideal, without pausing to look at what they became instead along the way. What they became, as any seer from a mystic perch might have presaged, were soft people born of soft times – decadent, soft people.

My America grew soft through fate and circumstance, and there were, in my day, ogres – great pigmen, fat upon the land, whose run knew no bounds and whom no hedge enclosed. They fanned out across the globe in gluttonous droves, feasting from bottomless troughs. They gorged themselves on what the innocent earth gave freely and on the living souls of men, taken for a pittance. They hoarded unto themselves all they could snatch from air and sea and earth and they accreted unto their stores the treasuries of the day. Theirs was the order of the time. The ogres in their thousands herded men in their millions and the multitudes loped after them giddily, content to breathe their vapors, dance to their grunts and marvel at the waste left heaped and steaming in the swath of their passing.

Americans, my Americans, were too soft in those days to ask what right a few ogres had to take so much from so many. Instead they asked how each of the rest of us might get just a bit more than the next one in line. There were wars and rumors of wars, and gods and ghosts in whose name to fight them. There were great gilded causeways linking the wealth of nations across the waters. There were those who worked and the ogres who rooted out the fat, sweet produce of that work. There were haves and have-nots and a man was not his own master. He existed for his overseers to extract the toll of surplus with the ogre’s whip.

And nobody really saw it for what it was. Americans as a group were all too content with two weeks of vacation, a Chevy in the garage and a rifle in the closet. It was absurd. It was America.

I have lived long enough that I don’t expect to be understood in the present when I speak of the past. Unchecked acquisitiveness was America’s chief virtue, its icon a busty redhead, its tabernacle a tacky glass pyramid with a halogen cap. It was, in a word, insane. Yet, as a man once observed, insanity in individuals is something rare, while in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the norm.

America, a Requiem

"If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder,

you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science,

no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong."

Jasper Fforde

I

distrust on principle documentarians who relate events of putative importance while stressing their own certainty of the facts as revealed. I was there, they’ll allege, as if that fact in and of itself guarantees the authenticity of their account. If I were a tale-teller with only a boring tale to tell, I’d lie. Authoritative records in my day indicated that four hundred thousand people attended the first Woodstock, but in time tens of millions of hippies turned yuppies turned retired conservatives claimed they were there. Sometimes one just shouldn’t let facts get in the way of a good story. After all, where story-telling is concerned, embellishment is second only to fabrication. So I won’t tell you that my recall is The Truth, unalloyed with nostalgia and the fog of time.  Not even Gospel truth is absolute and complete.

If I err, may enlightened generations forgive me.

THE LAST TIME I SAW The Soldier, he was a