The Kanshou (Earthkeep) (12 page)

Jez sank to her own cot.  "Granted."  Zude sat and faced her lover.  "You may have the better way, Jezebel, the better purpose.  But I'm still an Amah cadet.  I believe in the Kanshoubu and in what it has done to heal and to keep the Earth.  War is history, the air's clean, drugs are controlled, the ozone's healthier, hunger is obsolete, and 'development' is the dirtiest word on the street.  Little Blue is slowly revitalizing.  We're beginning to govern ourselves, from within ourselves and among ourselves.  All of us.  The global village is discovering itself."Zude paused.  "The Kanshoubu is at the heart of all that.  The Kanshoubu is the most decent thing to happen to this planet since the days of the worship of the Ancient Goddess."

"I can't argue that, Zudie," Jez replied.  "It's just that good as the Kanshoubu is, it's not good enough for me right now."  She started to say more, but at that moment a shaft of sunlight fell upon Zude's big hands.  Jez froze, then dropped to the floor in front of those hands, seizing them with her own.  She covered them with kisses and blessed them with tears.  She sobbed. Then, in the stretch of her last cry, she straightened and stood.  Zude rose with her.

The sun had left the dossroom altogether.

Jez moved to her locker and opened it.  She pulled out a heavy, hooded, canvas jacket.  Then a worn rucksack, fully packed.  Jez slid into Zude's arms again, her lips close to Zude's ear.  She closed her eyes and pressed out the words slowly, one-by-one: "I do not want to go without you.  I do not want to live my life without you.  You are my heart."   

"Then don't go." 

Jezebel Dolalicia and Amah Cadet Lieutenant Adverb kissed.  Silent witnesses on other beds delicately dropped their gaze.

Then Jez broke from the embrace, picked up her rucksack and jacket.  She headed for the down pole. 

Zude's voice stopped her.  "Jezebel."  Zude stepped toward her with something in her hand. 

Jez felt a tiny object fall into her palm.  One of Zude's earrings.  A silver unicorn.  Her eyes sought Zude's and her lips tightened. 

"If you ever need me, send this and I'll come."

Clutching the earring, Jez turned and spiralled down the exit pole.

* * * * * * * *

When on that warm winter afternoon Jezebel Dolalicia, clad in soft cotton woodswarmth
,
turned her feet away from the Amah Academy Of Hong Kong, she invoked the Disciplines Survivory of her Craft to carry her through immediate times.  By day she walked with unhurried steps toward the colding north.  By night she bedded in way sheltersand set her dreams to work on releasing Zella Terremoto Adverb from her constant thoughts.  She marked each day with wonder and gratitude, sought the wisdom of her Future Self, and as she walked she chanted the litanies for Loss And Forgiveness.

In China's coastal cities she fired kaolin pots, sang her way into sanctuaries and stupas, repaired electronic breakdowns, and on occasion gave spirited lectures on physics to university classes.  In the hills and recovering forests she performed small mental feats of cloud-gatheringand metal-heating, and often offered herself as pain-soaker for those who needed such cures.  When her food credits drooped or her canvas and tree-gum boots wore thin, she begged permission to glean and grind her own grain, to cut and sew for the filling of her own needs.  She avoided the transmogrifier and other convenient hard-tech options, for they called up too much memory of Hong Kong. 

During the first months after her departure from the academy, Jezebel articulated no purpose for her life.  Rather, she opened to the will of her Source Self, turning her feet toward any beckoning whim or hunch and following wherever it led.  She sensed that some destiny awaited her and that her developing capacities and insights would eventually engage in a satisfying use, but she refused any temptation to speculate about an ultimate goal.  She breathed deeply and took notice of the largess of every moment.

In the late spring of her first year away from Hong Kong, Jezebel embarked on a pilgrimage of curiosity, rich and solitary.  She signed onto a crew captained by Patrice Of The Seven Seas and set out on a square-rigger bound for proving its mettle on the widest of waters.  In Samoa she found a new peace.  Over the Pacific Basin she lost all fear.  In the Peruvian Andes she understood for the first time why it was the power of women that was transforming the globe.  In Santiago she hallowed the lessons of her travel by becoming Jezebel Stronglaces.

Sometimes, and particularly when the stars sprinkled themselves into memories of dancing brown eyes or when she awoke with her hands stroking a cold emptiness, Jez admitted to herself that she sorely missed the wonders of spooned sleep and the comfort of a warm body wrapped around her.  Most of all, she longed for the dreamwalking, that precious gift of womanlove wherein she could wander measureless worlds within another's sleep and wherein that other could roam with her the networked pathways of her own undiscovered countries.  

She began to see more clearly the tasks of her every day: to sharpen her unorthodox skills, to develop new powers, to appreciate the boundless dimensions of women, and to understand the enigma of men.  Toward what end she still did not know, except that the journey itself must be her home.

She spent several seasons with sub-Pacific communities bent upon coaxing into existence a low-level animal life form from the tolerantly whispering ocean floor.  In Ouagadougou she became adept at reading truth-glows around a speaker, in Kanazawa she learned to develop her ki as she slept, in the shrill grasses of the Kinangop Plateau she practiced the refinements of wind shaping.  Near a tributary to the great Irrawaddy she at last mastered her shape-shifting, and practiced it by becoming one after another of the lush plants of central Burma.  She learned to think of plants as "bound movers," and of humans and the departed animals as "free movers."

As season followed season and year followed year, Jezebel's feet touched every continent and roamed the deepest interiors of Little Blue's every satrapy.  In communities of women, or of women and men, she slipped into the appropriate tribal custom and used her special skill in sleep transference to learn the language. 

Shortly thereafter she trained for two years in a hospital satellite developing nul-gravity psychic surgeries.  It was there, when she saw the marbled Earth hanging in space, that she fully appreciated the spiritual transformation of satellite riders who saw their home world from that distance.  It was Astronaut Kasey Shelton who had first called it "Little Blue."  Jez at last understood why the name had caught the imagination of its inhabitants.

Jezebel knew by now that even among extraordinary women the gifts she possessed were extraordinary.  And because she was courageous and honest in her regard for Things Which Are True, and because she struck a level of intimacy with all she touched, she drew into her company large numbers of people, overwhelmingly women.  They sensed a destiny in her gait, or they basked in the cadence of her voice.  Some of them swore in their secret selves to be forever by her side.

The paradox that was to harry her throughtout her life then began to crystallize: how to use, for the benefit of all, the powers she found galloping to fruition within herself, and at the same time how to avoid the historical paradigm of leadership with its rationalizations and subtle assimilations, its eventual and inevitable misuses of power. 

"Do not worship another person," she would advise those who would deify her.  "Your authority is in your self, not in me." Or, she would encourage, "Let us learn together, making an atmosphere that calls up gifts from all of us, for all of us."

Wherever she went Jez conscientiously gathered about her a group of women who trusted her, whom she trusted, and whom other women trusted.  Together they addressed the matter of Jezebel's power, trying to understand how that power could be shared and used with greatest effectiveness.  Together they sought every person's appropriate use of personal power, and the re-connection of the human family with All Of Life.  They worked for the elimination of violence, frequently debating its cause and the question of whether or not violence was gender-related.   

About 2085 C.E., women world-wide began organizing for the once-and-for-all eradication of violence, and they clamored for leadership.  They hoped for a woman who had charm, intelligence, energy, imagination, the appropriate convictions, an unfailing regard for those she worked with, and a charisma that would call forth loyalty and dedication.  Almost against her will, Jezebel Stronglaces became that unanointed leader, the linchpin in a widening wheel of global activism.

In 2086 and preparatory to a formal proposal to Little Blue's Central Web, the Consorority Of Neurosurgeons revealed to demesne news services in every part of Little Blue a plan to use bailiwick habitantes in the search for a violence center in the brain.  Thus the controversy over moral issues that had brewed for decades in laboratories and academies was now exploding in the cities and hamlets of every satrapy.  Jezebel Stronglaces, her heart alive at last with hope for her species and for her planet, lent her considerable influence to the forces demanding Habitante Testing and to the ultimate legalization of the use of Anti-Violence Protocols on convicted social offenders.

* * * * * * * *

When Cadet Lieutenant Adverb saw Jezebel Dolalicia walk out of the Amah Academy and toward the northern mountains, she did not question the finality of that action, or her own response to it.  With determination and calm she immediately delegated her daily and weekly duties, wrote a formal memorandum to her commanding officer, and put herself on temporary -- if unsanctioned -- leave. 

She disappeared first into the hands of Viana Painstalker, who pushed and pummelled her body until it was open enough to allow the release of her anguish and anger.  Weeks later, when Painstalker and her attendant sound healers finished with that body, Zude cleansed herself for weeks with fire, water, and thousand-foot bungie drops over a Gongga Shan gorge.  She breathed ammonia culled from Jupiter's clouds, chewed the acidic mulch of Mendocino oaks, and cursed womankind in clarion shouts from a raft adrift in the Taiwan Strait.  Finally she submerged herself in warm amniotic fluid at the New Life Center and dreamt there that she had swapped her lungs for gills, that she could sit at the bottom of the tank forever if she so chose.

She emerged only when concerned friends lured her out with an invitation to drum for three days on Victoria Peak in the city-wide rejoicing to the Approach Of Spring.  With the invitation was an unspoken understanding that the name of Jezebel Dolalicia would not be mentioned. 

Upon her return to the Amahrery, Zella Terremoto Adverb acquitted herself as no other cadet had done in any academy -- Hong Kong, Los Angeles, or Tripoli.  She achieved multiple honors before she was graduated into the Kanshoubu in 2071.  She served a year in Calcutta with the Amahrery and two more in Cairo with the Femmedarmery. 

In 2074 Zude was summoned to Los Angeles, main seat of the Nueva Tierra Norte Satrapy (and of Aztlán Siempre), to serve as Steward Of Bailiwicks for the satrapy, an office designed to exploit the best of her dedication to the transformation of bailiwick policy and conditions.  Wherever her ambition had taken her and with whatever accomplishments, Zude's first priority had been always to implement her model of "contained violence" in the administration of bailiwicks.  So in Nueva Tierra Norte, she advocated for and, where possible, mandated changes that allowed each bailiwick to be endowed with its own life, to function as an independent organism; she sought relationships of peaceful co-existencebetween each bailiwick and the environment of free citizens surrounding it.

Her reforms earned her the rank of Matrix Major and the high regard of both Kanshou and citizens in the Nueva Tierra Sur, Central, and Norte Satrapies.  During that time, the Vigilantes under her command -- Foot-Shrieves, flex-car shrieves, sea- and Sky-Shrieves, particularly the Flying Daggers -- took every opportunity to demonstrate their pride in their leader, and their unswerving loyalty to her person.

In 2080, after negotiating the success of a series of humanizing (and risky) innovations in Vigilancia policy and practice, Zude dared to place her name in candidacy for the position of Vice-Magister of the Nueva Tierra Norte Satrapy, an office soon to be vacated by the widely-loved Guygavin Mahaney.  In an unprecedented move and on first consensus consideration, the Heartappointed Adverb to the position, the youngest Shrieve  ever to sit so high in the Kanshoubu.  Thus, with her companion Vice-Magisters in the Nueva Tierra Central and Nueva Tierra Sur Satrapies, Zude at the age of 38 stood only one step away from her tri-satrapy's highest executive office, that of Magister. 

As she continued her career as a stateswoman, Zude increasingly understood on a profound level the rare gift of trust that Little Blue's citizens bestowed upon its public servants, particularly upon its Kanshou.  At every level of her rise to power, she honored that trust by a constant searching out of the needs of her subordinates and of Little Blue's citizens alike.  Every morning before she rolled out of bed, she recited her mantra from the
Labrys Manual
: "Where are they going?  I must hasten after them, for I am their leader!" 

In the first year of her Vice-Magistry, one of Zude's close friendships expanded into a large extended family.  To her deep satisfaction, her life began to take on the rich textures and dimensions of children, grandparents, sisters, and cousins. 

In that same year, Flossie Yotoma Lutu, Magister Of The Africa-Europe-Mideast Tri-Satrapy, invited Zude to attend as her guest Crete's annual Aviary Celebration, a computer modelled performance of thousands of birds from around the world, especially programmed that year for interaction with human spectators.  Once as a teenager, Zude had briefly met and admired Magister Lutu.  But Magisters usually kept their own society and their own political associations, and Zude felt she hardly qualified either as friend or colleague of enough long-standingto be tapped by Yotoma.  Yet there it was, that formal invitation, cleverly engraved within the comcube.  Zude accepted and flew to Crete, Yotoma's unofficial seat of government.  She was enchanted by the Aviary Celebration, but more important, she began to establish on that evening a political and personal liaison which was to inform her life from that moment onward.