Solaris Rising (24 page)

The man in khaki had tried to organise the protesters but, not being one of them, was nearly killed himself. Twenty-three people died that first day, two of them white. One of them, an opponent of Apartheid, was found stoned to death, left with a sign around his neck:
Beware Afrikaaners
.

The man in khaki had retreated with the others towards Soweto. He had been there for some time, quietly, organizing a resistance movement to operate outside of the city.

The bodies of dead and mutilated children lay in the street.

“It is a war,” the man in khaki told his comrades. “The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”

Fifteen hundred armed police officers stormed Soweto the next day. The man in khaki and his comrades were waiting, though they knew the fight was doomed. Helicopters circled above the township. Armoured tanks drove through the streets.

The man in khaki was armed and dangerous. He killed three police officers close-up, with a handgun. He disabled one tank with a home-made grenade.

He was wounded in the arm as he carried a seven-year-old child, himself wounded, through a backyard demolished by heavy artillery. He rolled, still holding the boy, and fired back.

But there were too many of them coming after him, white men in riot gear, firing at him and the child both. He jumped over a broken wall and almost dropped the boy, but didn’t. He made it to the safe house but the house was no longer safe.

“Look after him,” he told the nurse. She nodded her head quickly, took the boy from him and ducked inside. “Go with God,” she told him, and then she was gone.

“I do not believe in God,” he told her; his tone was almost apologetic.

He was hit again by then, in the shoulder.

The man in khaki smiled. His smile was that of a lean, hungry wolf. He let the gun drop from his hand and walked towards the officers. They watched him come.

The third shot hit him in the stomach. His smile was no longer a smile but a grimace of pain, though he did not cry out. He crawled towards them. They began to laugh.

“Finish the kaffir-lover off,” their leader said. The man in khaki heard guns cocking. They were taking their time. He tried to smile through the pain.

They shot him in the head, a confirmed kill. His hand rolled to the side, lifeless. His thumb came off the dead-man’s-switch, opening the circuit he had been holding back, and a tiny current of electricity rushed along a new path, reaching the explosives wired to the dead man’s chest.

The resultant explosion killed five of the seven officers. Of the other two, one lost both legs and the other only lost his arm.

The noise of the explosion went unnoticed amidst the screams and the gunfire.

Part Three: Fear and Loathing

“I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ… I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal, and try to leave the other man dead so that I don’t get nailed to a cross or any other place.”

– Che Guevara

We were somewhere around West Beirut on the edge of the city when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats.

They were Israeli fighter planes.

They were pounding the shit out of Beirut.

Then it was quiet again. Che had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.”

Che was in Beirut to fight for the revolution. I was in Beirut for Rolling Stone. They had tracked me down at the Polo Lounge. I’d been sitting there for many hours with my attorney, drinking Singapore Slings with mescal on the side and beer chasers. And when the call came, I was ready.

The Dwarf approached our table cautiously, as I recall, and when he handed me the pink telephone I said nothing, merely listened. And then I hung up, turning to face my attorney. “That was headquarters,” I said. “They want me to go to Beirut at once, and make contact with an Argentinean revolutionary named Che. All I have to do is check into my suite and he’ll seek me out.”

“I thought Guevara was dead,” my attorney said. “Also, they don’t have hotel suites in Beirut any more.”

I should have listened to my attorney. Instead, here I was in Beirut with six sides all shooting at each other while I was shooting up…

–
Extract from ‘Fear and Loathing in Beirut’

by Hunter S. Thompson, published 1982 in
Rolling Stone Magazine

They came from all over to be witness to the gradual destruction of Beirut. Hunter S. Thompson was recently here, P.J. O’Rourke is currently writing a tourist guide to the capital and jokes of ‘unspellables killing the unpronouncables’. The journalists meet at the Commodore Hotel. Shelling commences every night. There are several factions fighting in Lebanon, Shi’ites, Christians, Druze, the PLO, Israel, Syria... the list goes on. The journalists – cynical, hard-bitten, hard-drinking and hard-done-by, watch it all unfold.

But the man everyone wants to see is a ghost; a shadow; a Dracula risen from the grave, a Frankenstein monster animated by who-knows what strange passions. His name is on the lips of militia fighters and busboys, of Syrian spies and Shi’ite commanders.

That name is Che.

For the past decade he has made his appearance wherever evil and injustice rear their ugly heads. Which is to say, he’s been sighted everywhere.

Where has he come from? Where is he going? Tales abound of the cigar-smoking, bearded hero of the revolution, from Soweto to Phnom Penh.

And now he is here. As a series of mysterious assassinations rock the once-grand capital of Lebanon, leaders of all sides being taken down with military precision by an unknown killer, many speculate Che is, single-handedly, attempting to end the bitter civil war.

But where is he? Does he truly exist? Thompson claims to have met him, to have spoken with him, but his story shifts and changes with each telling. O’Rourke claims to have caught traces of him on a recent jaunt South, near the Israeli border.

Syria claims to have him in prison. So does Israel. At least one militia claims to have executed a man fitting Che’s description.

Could all those stories be true at once? Or are none true at all?

“Che?” the hotel’s busboy told me earlier tonight. “He stays here, at the Commodore. Room four-oh-one.”

Everybody, it is said, comes to the Commodore. When I went up to investigate I found the room bare, the bed made, the sink cleaned. Could he have been there? Is he here at all?

– Extract from
Strange Passions: A Memoir of the Civil War in Lebanon
, by Carl Bernstein, published 1985 by Random House, Inc.

The on-going civil war in Lebanon has officially ended today with the dissolution of the various militias (with the sole exception of Hezbollah) and the election of a new parliament. Lebanon now faces the long road to rebuilding a torn country and a city once described as “The Venice of the Orient” [...]

When asked about the whereabouts of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, new president Elias Hrawi said, “I don’t know to whom you are referring.”

Mystery continues to surround –

– Extract from
End of Civil War in Lebanon
,

by Jeremy Levin, Associated Press, 1991.

Part Four: Destinations

“
Why do we say Che is alive? Because of his grandeur, his transcendence. For us, Che is here, very much alive, in everything we say.”

– Osvaldo ‘Chato’ Peredo

There were seven of them who met at the Mojave Desert airfield. Seven dusty men with olive skin and haunted eyes. They had arrived separately. Outside, on the tarmac runway, a futuristic vehicle sat waiting,
SpaceShipOne
written in bold black typeface on its sides. One of the men lit up a cigar, coughed, and said, “I remember reading about these things in those American magazines we used to get sometimes.”

“Science fiction,” one of the others said. “I always thought such literature was ideologically suspect.”

“The world has changed,” a third said. They moved inside, into the hangar. The place was theirs alone. “So few of us remain…”

The seven examined each other in silence. The pain in their eyes was visible.

“The world changes,” said the first one, after a moment of reflection, “yet people don’t.”

“Soon they will go to the stars,” said one. “The Chinese already are talking of Mars, and the moon again…”

“Malaysia wants to explore commercial opportunities in the asteroid belt.”

“In Equatorial Africa they are speaking of building something called a space elevator.”

“Enough!” the first one said. “Where there is commerce there is exploitation. Miners once dug for coal. So now they would dig for precious metals on rocks in space, while others will grow rich from their labour. The world changes. We won’t.”

They all nodded. Veterans of endless conflicts, of the Balkans and Afghanistan, Gaza and Tibet, Timor and Argentina and the Western Sahara, they were weary but unbent, tired but not defeated.

“They put our face on undergarments now,” said one of them. “They put them on T-shirts and bandanas.”

“Rampant capitalism will seek to subjugate its opponents by commercialising their own image,” another said. They all nodded.

It was quiet in the hangar. A giant model of a ship, half-completed, filled up the space. They avoided looking at it.

“Out there,” said the first of them, his hand sweeping across the desert, the runway, the spaceship outside – “out there is not the future. But it is
a
future. One of many.”

“So many of us are gone…” one said.

“Yet we remain.”

They nodded. “Do you think we made any difference at all?” one asked.

“We cannot be the judges of that,” the first said. “Only history can judge us.”

He looked at them. The tip of his cigar glowed red. “And history is a thing to be shaped and remade.”

None of them spoke after that. Outside, the sun beat down on the tarmac, and the desert, like the future, stretched far away and disappeared beyond the horizon.

STEEL LAKE

JACK SKILLINGSTEAD

Jack Skillingstead lives in Seattle with his wife, Nancy Kress, whom he’s noticed seems to write a lot more than he does. ‘Steel Lake’ marks his thirtieth professional short story sale since 2002; the first twenty-six of which are gathered in his Golden Gryphon collection,
Are You There and Other Stories
. In ‘Steel Lake’, Jack wanted to write about a father and son with parallel issues and that slippery region that lies between dreams, imagination and so-called reality. The piece proved a particularly troublesome one to get right. Jack’s 2009 debut novel
, Harbinger
, prompted
The New York Review of Science Fiction
to dub him ‘The matador of our field.’ The author is quite proud of this, reckoning it has a nice ring – as long as you don’t ask him to explain what it means.

“Why are you doing this?” Brian Kerr asked his son.

“I’m an addict.”

“Yeah, I
know
that. But why now?”

They sat at a table in an institutionally grim room. The flat glare of fluorescent light made Brian’s eyes ache. His shirt clung to his body in dark patches of sweat. A big school-style clock counted the seconds in tiny jerks of a black needle.

“I took something that scared me,” David said.

“According to the checklist we just went through, you’ve taken every damn drug known to man.”

“This one wasn’t on the list.”

“Great. What was it?”

“It isn’t even on the
street
yet. This guy, he stole it out of a UW lab, he said. Like he was a volunteer for this test?”

“Okay. But what
was
it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Jesus Christ.”

David shrugged, looking away. His over-sized white T-shirt hung loose on his shoulders – the way it would on a coat hanger. Green spray paint speckled the shirt. Graffiti blow-back.

“You just took it. Without even knowing what it was?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“
Why?
”

“It was there so I took it, is all. You don’t really get it, Dad.”

“No, I don’t. What scared you about this drug? I mean, what’s scarier than –” He picked up the checklist, the unbelievable, terrifying checklist. “– heroin, for instance?”