Jason: Book Three of the trilogy A Sequence of Events

By Howard Pierce

The trilogy begins at a near future (Pavlov's Colon - 2048) where the raw comingling of religion, capitalism, and human nature has dragged a bungling world down into muffled, choking crisis. Fortunately, a handful of clear-brained individuals from various corners of the globe are brought together, either by luck or by a well-meaning algorithm, to become pivotal actors on the fragmented world stage. Driven by a shared sense of the profound inanity of the universe, they cobble together a way forward that is undeniably less bad than what almost was, and which allows human consciousness to live on to fight another day.


The second book (Macronome - 2128) describes the twilight years confronting the enigmatic band's survivors, as the rhythm of failure is once again accelerating across the globe and humanity itself requires significant upgrades if it is to survive. The reboot scheme that emerges speaks to human creativity in the face of peril and our extravagant will to live. The strategy is less obvious than a spaceship escape to Mars, but far more achievable by a rapidly degrading species stranded on a crumbling world.


The final book (Jason - 3215) offers a quiet reflection on one life and the spinning universe of universes that contains it. In conversations between Jason, a donkey mystic who comprehends all of human history, and The Methods, the sarcastic and needy manifestation of all the working rules of the cosmos, an imaginative understanding is reached, a shared appreciation between organism and organizer for the aching beauty of the doomed but universal struggle against entropy and the final stillness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667856872

Book preview

3215

I have been traveling for some days now, or rather nights due to the preferences of my wayfaring companions, heading steadily west and south and staying as high up in the scrub covered mountains as practical. Clouds are rare as always and most nights the moon provides adequate light, so we pick our way along deer trails through stunted conifers and across steep scree slides of decomposing shale and basalt. We spend most of the blazing days in the lower realms, usually near some small water source I can derive from the maps and histories in my mind, triangulating regularly across the plex for nearby springs and ponds while similar queries find me grasses, berries, and cones that are digestible. My companions have to work for their supper.

We are, I guess, an odd group in the eyes of the scurrying world that watches us pass by. But no odder I think than anything else. Nikke is my closest friend and forever the scout who lopes ahead looking for danger and game, in that order. He is a brindle colored coyote with streaks of near-black markings that stream back from around his eyes, like water pushed horizontally by a fierce gale. Tall and lean he moves with effortlessly alert grace, sensing every clue carried on every puff of wind. We have been together since he was young, nearly three years now; we are brothers.

Sticks, that is the nickname Nikke gave him on day one, is new to our little pack. He is a badger, but from a lineage heavily stepped on by adaptive biology many generations ago. Obvious as it was fortuitous, Sticks’ people leapt genetically over the human-made environmental insults and tribulations of the past millennium, with an eye towards a life more nomadic than is typical for badgers. Right now, while he lies with just his snout pointed out of the cooling hole he dug for himself as soon as we stopped for the day, he looks much like the white-striped cousins that Nikke sometimes has to compete with for his daily rabbit. But as we hike through the cooling hours of evening, usually with Nikke in the lead and Sticks between him and me as the rear guard, he looks more like an overweight long-nosed bobcat. Short salt and pepper fur rolling with a truculent gait that leaves one guessing how much is muscle and how much fat.

And me, I am Jason, a name I don’t much like because of its overwrought presence in human legend and myth. At first glance I look like any wild donkey from the hill country, but upon closer inspection or conversation I am clearly a trybrid: venerated by humans despite their simmering stew of fear and resentment, and looked upon with various flavors of amusement and respect by most other species.

I’m winding my way back to where I started out four years ago, after my extended walkabout or pilgrimage, my journey to find a center of gravity or at least a useful handful of perspectives, one being that the personal irritation with my name is irrelevant. Humans have long forgotten its heritage, which the animals never knew, and now that I am grown, the tedious references to the golden fleece by other juvenile trybrids have abated.

Early this morning we made it to the saddle between two peaks where I hoped we would find a view down to a pond called Deep Teal. When Sticks and I reached the windswept summit on the east end of the swayback ridge that stretched about a mile to the next nameless peak, we could see Nikke standing fifty meters out looking down to his left, fur ruffled by a warm wind sweeping up and over the land bridge. He looked back at us and nodded, letting us know that the water was indeed below, and then he headed back our way while sniffing the thermal. He thought it wise to take the longer way down, sticking to the cover of wooded hillside rather than the exposed but more direct descent over gravel scree and small boulders.

I can never tell how much of Nikke’s tactics are solely based on instinct and how much are a factoring for my limitations as a traveler. Here, once again, the slow road made a much more comfortable route for shambling hooves. Nikke picked the way down more slowly than he needed to while Sticks skulked forwards and down with a low-slung padding that emphasized the tufts of black fur over each front shoulder. I tried to follow behind like a fellow predator, but stiff footfalls and small triggered rockslides alerted the world below to a pack animal.

When we finally arrived at the pond’s edge, the water was as clean and cool as the last known report had indicated. Deep Teal existed on a thousand old maps that were overlaid in my mind, some with pictures of the scene in different seasons, but the most recent confirmation of good water I could find was 147 years back. A trybrid named Sloan, also on a pilgrimage, had thought to make note of it in the macronome.

It would be a good place to rest and collect my thoughts. Our recent pace had been steady and tiring for my donkey body despite my relative youth, and for weeks I have neglected any pretense of preparation for the upcoming Recital. My plan has been that a few days here by the green water would allow for a cautious re-connection with the macronome and a review of any new Game States that might have been accepted at the last minute. But I have found there were none.

It would have been unlike Master Aschenbok to allow any new candidates this close to the Recital, but one could never be sure. It was a known strategy and useful spin to be the last to submit your Game State, but Aschenbok was not one to be played. He didn’t like anything that smacked of overzealousness or self-promotion. I could see that there had been three submissions in the last month, none accepted. Mine had been in for almost three months. It was my first serious candidate and it would make this year’s Enigma Recital unlike any other. No longer a young kibitzer playing at appreciation and interpretation. This year I would be hanging out for all to see, my own composition being scorned or praised by others, both masters and fools.

Only a few weeks away and nothing to do but make my way slowly back to Paradox with Nikke and Sticks, back to where my old room waited closed up and stuffy, and where almost all the remaining trybrids of the world would soon focus their attentions.

If I hadn’t undertaken this long journey I don’t think I would have submitted a game state, and anything I could have composed would have been too cramped, certainly too derivative. Now it is done and in the hands of the vizzars, and I don’t really think about it. Occasionally I remember the opening musical theme which emerged from a vision I had of shifting winds making patterns across the tops of waving grains. Ancient grains that haven’t thrived for a millennium, swirling winds like gravity waves blowing through never-ending galaxies, jerked and pulled by black holes and dense pockets of quanta hiding unseen within.

Nikke and Sticks have gone off to hunt for rabbits. I can make them out across the pond as they consider the lay of the land and inspect old tracks and smells in the dusty sand. They have become quite a team, like two members of a well-worn comedy act who can ad lib with casual precision because they always know how the other will react. In truth, I think they only have a handful of strategies, maybe three or four. Today I can see them setting up for the ‘badger looking for grubs’ ruse, one of their favorites.

Nikke has climbed up on a boulder twenty meters back from the pond’s edge, perched above the steeply sloping hillside. He has flattened himself down against the curved top of the warm stone, blending into its coloration, and he has gone perfectly still. You can’t even see his ribcage move as he breaths.

Sticks on the other hand is making all sorts of commotion as he appears to be preparing to dig into the hillside in hopes of finding grubs for breakfast. He rakes away handfuls of crusty surface dirt with first one clawed paw and then the other, inspecting what lies beneath and then moving a little ways to the side to try again. Although I can’t see his face I know he wears an expression of disgust, as if no self-respecting grub would bother to live in such wretched soil. I can’t hear him but I know he is muttering curses in a loud hoarse voice, all the while swaying his long snout and thick head-neck from side to side.

Sure enough, here comes a large rabbit, stopping ten meters away to sit on its haunches and watch Stick’s performance. Its nose twitches while it evaluates the strange looking badger. Too fat to be very fast, a grub eater and clearly crazy, as many badgers are these days. Not much of a threat but better give it a wide berth to the uphill side.

As the rabbit hops slopewards Sticks sits up and hisses some form of badger insult. The rabbit laughs to itself, but it’s a signal for Nikke.

On the rock above Nikke has been listening carefully and he knows the hiss means the rabbit is almost directly between the badger and the boulder. With the grace of a hawk’s first sweep of wings off a high tree branch, the coyote rises, assesses, and leaps all in a perfectly linked series of motions. Each informs the next. It’s too perfect for nature, and Nikke lands directly on the chuckling rabbit, grabbing it by the nape of its neck and whipping it sideways and back in a blur of motion, all the while crouching into a roll over his right shoulder.

As the dust settles over the neck-broken rabbit, Nikke shakes powdery earth out of his fur and sits waiting for Sticks to lumber up the hillside. They are proud of their performance, hoping I was watching, and meeting up over the dead bunny they both spot me across the pond. I give them one loud bray of appreciation and bob my head. Nikke picks up the rabbit and trots off a ways to dismember it. They will be planning to do this once or twice more this morning and he doesn’t want any telltale blood signs on their stage.

Nikke will give the thighs to Sticks, they are his favorite part, and Sticks will ask me for the hundredth time if I want some. They still can’t believe I’m a vegetarian. Once they even left a fat prairie dog out on a hot rock to cook for hours, guarding it from other creatures and hoping that the dried meat would entice me. It didn’t.

Looking up the hillslope on this side of the pond I see at least fifty cholla cactuses, cane cholla my favorite, with green-yellow fruit buds hanging heavy off the prickly arms. I am in heaven. Let them eat rabbit.

Deep Teal

We have been five days now at Deep Teal and I know I am stalling. My journey, which has been arduous at times, is nearly over. I find that I don’t want it to end. Not that I really want to keep walking across the land, but I fear that I am going to find the rejoining of life at Paradox stressful. Having gotten used to the company of Nikke and now Sticks, who don’t talk very much, I worry that interacting again with humans, votaries, and especially other trybrids will be less pleasant.

Yesterday it occurred to me for the first time that the only two trybrid vizzars I sought to meet on my travels are both self-hidden from the formality and public rigor of the Game and its hierarchy. Both vizzar Cathbad and vizzar Gladwelle are trybrids of great fame. Both contributed epic Game States that are still held up as works of art for younger trybrids to study. And while they are as different from one another as night from day, neither chooses to participate in the sublime Game any longer.

When I left on my journey I told Master Aschenbok that I intended to try and visit Cathbad along the way. He had little to say about him which surprised me at the time. He didn’t offer to help persuade Cathbad to receive me, which I took as an indication that they must have had some dark history in the past. But reflecting back on the conversation where I had asked Aschenbok about Cathbad and his physical location, I now suspect it was merely that he thought Cathbad a bad influence on a young ‘vizzar-to-be’. At the time I hadn’t thought to try and visit Slothrop Gladwelle so I didn’t mention him. I’m sure Master Aschenbok would have taken an even dimmer view of that visit.

The three of them were all of very similar age, contemporaries who must have known each other by more than simple reputation. I’m not sure of exactly what year Gladwelle’s Game State was accepted for Recital, and I have avoided looking it up for some reason, but Aschenbok and Cathbad were only one year apart, winning successive Recital cycles, with Cathbad handing over the reins to Aschenbok in 3199. I was nine at the time, and just old enough to play at studying the Game State plex selected for the Recital Game by the vizzars. I thought Alexi Aschenbok the smartest donkey in the world, glad that it was he who would replace the dour Cathbad as the Master of Paradox.

I didn’t know that I would be headed for Paradox myself the next year, nor that the vizzars would decide to eliminate the tradition of cycling to a new Master every year. Aschenbok had been a good choice to bring a longer continuity to the oversite of the vizzar community, and it had been a wise idea to separate the Paradox Mastership position from the transient yearly author of the Game State selected for the Recital. But I didn’t understand any of that when I arrived at Paradox at age ten. I understood nothing at all, other than I loved music and I loved the idea of the Game, Enigma.

Tomorrow I will open and review the Game State I submitted to Aschenbok months ago. I hope I still like it.

The Citadel

The first thing I remember about coming to Paradox is the view of the valley from the top of the western escarpment. I had seen the same vista a thousand times in my mind as I traveled the thousand miles from my home in Kalispell, but after three months of hard walking it looked both less and more to my young eyes. More because it radiated peace and safety, two things I longed for after the difficulties of learning to be on the road. Less because I had expected some kind of magic to emanate from the place itself.

The infamous mist hung in the air just beneath the elevation where I stood, making the scene below pastel and gauzy, and the great stone wall that stretched across a quarter mile of the upper canyon was clearly visible, a purposeful geometric slash across the jumbled terrain.

A blue-green stream, which originated from an arched sluiceway near the center of the great wall, tumbled a short way down to the valley floor where it flattened and flowed more calmly onwards to the east. The bottom lands to either side held well-ordered crops of differing colors, with cart paths dividing the world into precise rectangles. I knew from my schooling that ram-pumps deep within the Citadel itself fed moisture to the fields, and that the seed-keeper votaries of Paradox were renowned for the stability and quality of their harvests.

Walking down the steep trail, out of the wilds and into the disciplined valley, I began to feel the magic my ten year old imagination longed for. Two-thirds of the way down I stopped again for a closer look, having emerged below the mist cloud and into a world where the finer details resolved more clearly.

I could see several carts pulled by donkeys with hooded humans either walking beside or sitting in a driver’s seat. Seeing regular donkeys put to slave work still made me feel slightly queasy. I could see guard towers at various vantage points on the valley sides, and I knew they were manned by votaries whose job it was to be the eyes of the citadel. After three months of journeying across many boundaries between the wilderness and human encampments, I knew they had seen me coming for miles, and from the communications I had had from a resident trybrid named Quentin I was sure they knew who I was. Quentin was to be my minder during the early days of my studies at the Citadel.

As I hit the valley floor a human was suddenly approaching, appearing out of nowhere with a single purpose to his stride, which was to intercept me at a crossing of two paths. He wore the grey cloth hood I knew marked him as a votary and he spoke to me with a comfortable deference I had never before heard from a human. No edge of fear, he merely said. You must be Jason Blume. We have been expecting you. How was your journey?

When I answered that it had been fine but long, I could tell he heard me with the same resonance another trybrid would have heard. There was none of the blenching substrate most humans reveal when a trybrid talks into their heads. The man seemed comfortable being my first welcome, and referring to the westward branch of the cart path I had just intersected he said, We will feed and rest you well, now that you have arrived. Just take this path up to the biggest opening in the wall, and ask for Quentin. He will take you on into the Citadel.

I thanked him and headed along the path which followed above the river side, sensing the wear of the last three months and imagining what a dusty mess I must look. Drawing nearer to the wall, I began to appreciate its true scale as the single exposed side of cavernous spaces reaching deep into the box canyon’s mountain mass. I was approaching the front door of the Paradox Citadel, the most famous physical location within the trybrid universe, where the Enigma Recital played out every year and where the Recital Master lived. This was to be my new home.

My path led me to a stone arch around twelve meters wide and six or seven meters high at its capstone. Crossing under the archway and onto the periphery of a large internal courtyard, my hooves hit paving stones and the clopping sound resonated through apparent emptiness. But before I had time to wonder which direction to proceed I heard another set of hooves and saw a trybrid emerging from a passageway on my left. It crossed the courtyard and made directly towards me, skinny like I was at the time, but older by a few years and meticulously groomed from nose to tail. I sensed even in those awkward first moments that Quentin was somehow my calculated opposite. Where he stood perfectly erect before me on the worn cobbles, with long strokes of currying waves visible across the glistening bristles of his coat, I slouched with the fatigue of months on the mountainous highways and paths, steam rising from scruffy fur laced with pounds of road dirt and bramble.

Good day Jason, I’m Quentin, welcome to Paradox and the Citadel. You made your way from Kalispell in very short order, just under three months I believe. The powers that be will be well impressed. But you must be tired and hungry so which shall it be first, food or rest? We needn’t get started on true orientation until tomorrow, so the balance of today can be spent towards getting you sorted and noshed.

He fixed me with an inquiring stare and waited for my reply. It was a look I would come to know well over the coming years.

Remembering my mother’s repetitious lessons in good manners towards all, I replied that I would be very pleased to have something to eat, to which Quentin flicked his tail in a ‘follow me’ manner and headed off towards the two o’clock corner of the courtyard. As we walked out from under the covered perimeter that ran behind the arched entrance and across the open-air central square, I began taking in the first details of a cloistered world hidden from the outside by careful layers of custom and officialdom. As I gawked at the sights, beginning with the strange crystalline rocks that were arrayed in three lines across the canyon side running up and away from us, above what was clearly the bulk of the entombed Citadel itself, Quentin’s fastidious voice began a running commentary in my head.

Those are the refractor gems. They collect, amplify, and store daylight. They light every corner of the Citadel through a network of prism tubes. Quentin made it seem as though he could elaborate on this infrastructure, but didn’t want to bore me with the details.

I’ve heard of them of course, but I don’t really understand how it all works? Even at ten I could feel Quentin’s trybrid mind debating how frank to be with me, and to his credit he quickly came down on the side of candor.

Nor does anyone that I have ever met in the three years I have lived in the Citadel. I know that we have the humans keep the gems clean and polished on the hillside, and the votaries do the same with the lenses that sprinkle across the ceilings of all the Citadel spaces, but I think the workings are unchanged since the Ancients first built the place.

So the Citadel hasn’t changed much at all since the time of the Ancients? I knew that from my early schooling with my parents, but I had never really thought deeply about the implications.

We were just re-entering the shadowed light again under the courtyard’s perimeter roof, now on the far side of the courtyard. Quentin stopped his march to turn and face me in order that I might note the seriousness in his young face while his reply rung with youthful pretension in my head. "As vizzar Claudine explained it in her well noted Recital Game, I think it was in 3020, ‘The song remains the same.’ I’m sure you will study her game during your first or second year but the bottom line is that there are only twelve notes in the chromatic scale, and eighty-eight keys on a piano, yet billions of musical works were created using them. Still, when you deconstruct all that art, you end up back at the fundamentals like twelve and eighty-eight."

He waited just long enough for the significance of this to sink into my young head, which I am quite sure it didn’t, before turning back away from me and continuing on through a doorway and out of the daylight. Following behind we entered a large rectangular room, maybe ten by twenty meters, bathed in an even and slightly greenish light which emanated from a grid of ceiling lenses. The walls were sheathed with horizontal wood planking that looked old but timelessly sturdy, worn and rubbed at a level that matched my donkey haunches.

Across the stone floor, which was a continuation of the tightly fitted cobbles from the courtyard, were three rows of two-meter diameter pedestals that stood at donkey-knee height. With my eyes adjusting to the strange light, I realized that these were actually sawn slices of huge tree trunks, small tables cut from trees bigger than any I had ever seen in my travels. The hundreds of rings visible beneath a clear finish spoke to the great age of the trees when they were cut, and as I considered them more closely I could tell from the many dings and wear that they had been cut long, long ago.

Quentin echoed in my head again and I found him standing close behind me. You are right to think there are no trees like that anymore. I’ve been told these are from before the great collapse, over one thousand years ago. No one knows how they got here, but it must have taken teams of humans to roll them through those doors once the Citadel was built. I always wonder if they somehow guessed they would eventually be just the right height for our food buckets.

Just then an oldish human woman wearing the same gray uniform I had seen in the fields entered through a side door carrying two dull-silver colored buckets which she placed heavily on the trunk pedestal nearest to me. She smiled broadly and nodded a friendly greeting while stirring the contents of one of the buckets with a large wooden spoon.

Welcome my young friend. Please have some nice grain mash and fresh water. What is your name? I’m told you come from a long ways off.

I