The War Chamber (7 page)

The Council members shift in their chairs, losing patience with David's unfocused presentation. He tries to improvise with some of the statistics he learned about 40,000 children a day dying in the world because money is spent on wars instead of food and medicine. About what his mother said about peace profiting everyone and war profiting no one. About how he wants to use the Singer for good, not just for power. He has a responsibility and he takes it seriously. He just has to figure out how to use it.

The huge brass gong is struck by the timekeeper, and its reverberation is felt ominously throughout the auditorium. David's three minutes are up. His knees wobble embarrassingly, and every vital organ in his body quivers from the vibration of the gong.

“Sechmet, do you wish a rebuttal?” the president of the Council asks.

“Yes, I do, indeed, Madam Chairman. The boy's arguments are superficial and inept, and have nothing to do with the matter at hand. He has no business possessing this treasure.”

“That is for us to decide, Sechmet,” the president chastises him.

“He can't even explain to us how he would begin to use such power contained in the Singer crystal,” Sechmet continues emphatically. “We don't even know why he has it, or even if he acquired it legally.”

“It was given to me,” David injects, now defending himself, “by my aunt who found it and gave it to me for my collection. I used it to find my sister when she disappeared from her wheel chair, and when I experimented with it on the beach -”

David stops abruptly, noting a stern and impassioned look on Bianca's face. He realizes that he almost spilled the beans about the Moon Singer.

“What gibberish is this?” Sechmet interrupts, his hands held wide in protest.

“I - I don't really know why,” David then says. “I just know it was given to me for a reason. I don't know where it really came from or why my aunt found it and gave it to me. I just -” David rubs his hand over his shirt pocket, but what he feels is flat and round, not the sculptured crystal that was to guide him through the debate.

“I'll tell you where she found it,” Sechmet yells. “It was stolen from us!”

Madam Chairman pounds her gavel to control the uproar now moving swiftly through the crowd. “Order. I will have order!” she commands.

By now, David is at Bianca's side, whispering frantically. “What happened? Where is the Singer?”

“I don't know. It was in the box. No one had access to it in my private dressing room. I didn't open it until just before the debate.”

“This is just great. It's a mess. I can't believe it.”

“I'm sorry, David. I don't know what to say.”

“I do. I blew it again,” David mourns. “I shouldn't need your help to tell them why I shouldn't turn over my crystal. Why can't I do this on my own, Bianca?”

“Some things are beyond our current level of understanding, David. All we can do is pray that the Council will negate Sechmet's argument.”

But after only a few moments to poll each member and count the votes, the Council declares Sechmet the winner and orders that David turn over the Singer to them by the next full moon.

“Well, the laugh's on you. The Singer is -”

Bianca yanks David back from the microphone before he can finish. “They can't know the crystal has disappeared,” she whispers. “Panic would ensue.”

“So, now what?”

“I have no other choice now. Brace yourself, David. What is coming is an unbearable sight. But they deserve to see it. They need to see it once again.”

In a swift decrescendo of chattering voices, a chilling silence is felt in the auditorium. All eyes watch in fascination and expectancy as Bianca takes the speaker's podium. She takes in a breath, long and deep, closes her eyes, stands motionless for a moment, and exhales audibly a low and mournful sound. Delicate and slim, she is nonetheless an imposing sight standing there in a ray of sunlight that pours like a waterfall through the glass panels in the ceiling. The golden streak washes over her, embraces her and creates a halo that dances around her silk turban. Bianca's face glows luminously as she looks upward to drink in the light. Her flowered silk sheath shimmers and radiates hypnotically. Everyone's breath is held, waiting for her to speak, no doubt both anticipating and fearing what she will say.

“It has been years,” Bianca finally says, “thankfully, many years since we, as fellow beings and group souls, have had to contemplate any of the issues that Sechmet has brought forth today. I still believe in my heart that the majority of you cherish the peace and simplicity of the life we share on Coronadus. But the Council's shocking vote today reminded me that memories are short. I had hoped you would all stand with me and deny Sechmet his opportunity to destroy the Coronadus we have sacrificed so much to create. Visions of the tragedy we suffered have faded with time, and mercifully so, or we could not bear it. And though it gives me great pain to have to use my authority this way, I have no choice but to call forth that vision once again.”

With arms outstretched, Bianca chants over and over again to invoke the “dreaded final deterrent” that she hoped David would never have to see:

“As you experience a thing, a thing experiences you…

As you experience a thought, a thought experiences you…

As you experience a vision, the vision experiences you…

As you experience violence, the violence experiences you…

As you experience a child's agony, a child's agony experiences you…”

With each invocation a paralyzing laser beam plunges straight down from the ceiling to the floor, one prismatic javelin after another hurled from heaven to earth. In seconds, mind-numbing walls of refracted light overwhelm the senses of everyone in the room. A horrifying holographic image appears. Some people turn away and cover their heads in fear and shame; others are transfixed, unable to shield their eyes from this morbidly mesmerizing sight.

David gasps, tears stream down his face, he chokes on his sobs of sorrow and terror. Who could commit such unspeakable acts that would cause such human suffering? Why? How could they not know the consequences? And if they know, why do they continue to repeat them over and over again?

Bianca has invoked the War Chamber. In it are the children, the victims of the countless wars throughout history. The crusades, the civil wars, the World Wars, the revolutions and genocidal annihilations that demonstrate man's inexplicable and indefensible inhumanity. Devastating wounds, disease, agonizing disabilities.
Young innocent faces with dead eyes,
as David's father had described them, staring at you, begging for relief, praying for death, wondering what they had done to deserve such pain.

“Because they died as victims, they are destined to suffer forever,” Bianca expounds, “incarnation after incarnation, until the world stops it penchant for war and destruction. You know the faces. These are the faces of the children of Coronadus who paid the ultimate price for your sins the last time we took up arms. Remember their faces. Experience those faces!”

Suddenly an anguished cry rises up, from the gut, from deep within the soul, and wails like a wounded, dying animal. “No! No! No! No more!” Sechmet wails, his fists clenched and pounding at his face and chest. “My Marena! My sweet Marena,” he sobs, shielding his eyes from the vision of an angelic young girl bleeding to death in his arms. “Forgive me. Forgive me! No more. No more. I yield, Bianca, I yield…I yield…”

As powerfully as it came, the hologram of the War Chamber dissipates, leaving not a trace of its image.

Confused murmurs rise up in the audience.
What's happened?
they ask each other.
Did you see something bizarre? Was it an illusion? Were we hypnotized or something? I don't remember anything. Whatever it was is gone now.

With cursory finality, The Council adjourns the hearing reaffirming their ruling that David turn over the Singer at sunrise. Indifferent, the people begin to leave, chattering casually to one another as they file out of the auditorium.

David is aghast. Are they blind? Are they crazy? Were they not moved at all by that incomprehensible vision from hell? But he knows he is no more devastated than Bianca. The look on her face speaks volumes. That look of torment, of failure, of defeat. The same as the look on his father's face when the people of Port Avalon voted for the government contract, and when he told David how it was his fault that David's mother was killed and Sally was crippled in the car accident.

“Bianca?” David approaches her carefully, hesitantly. “Bianca? What happened? Sechmet saw it. I did. How could they not see?”

“You needed to see it so that you might never have to see it again. Sechmet needed to remember so that he would never forget again. As for the others, they are blinded by their own desperate, selfish desires. I guess I, too, have been blind to their true feelings.”

“What do we do now?” David asks.

“We have to find the Singer before the full moon. That gives us seven days.”

“You mean give it over to the Council?” David is incredulous.

“Certainly not. We must conjure up the Moon Singer so you can escape.”

What little furniture there is in Bianca's bedroom is looked under, behind and into three times as she and David search for the Singer. But their search is fruitless.

“It never left my hands until it was placed in the box!” With mounting frustration, Bianca traces her steps of the night before when she programmed the Singer in her dressing room. “I closed the lid securely, I know it. Then I came to my bedroom and went immediately to sleep.”

“You're not a sleepwalker, are you?” David jokes half-heartedly, just as disconcerted as Bianca. Bianca is not receptive.

“No. And I didn't dream that it flew out of the box on its own, either,” she says through tight lips.

“Then,” David speaks the obvious, “someone took it.”

“But how? Someone would have had to enter the house undetected and sneak past me, and I'm a very light sleeper.” Her conviction fades as she realizes, “But, I was extremely exhausted when I finally went to bed. Perhaps I did sleep through it.”

“I didn't hear anything.” David explores his activities of the previous night. “I tossed and turned half the night from worry. I got up really early because it was so hot. I went outside in the garden. Sokar was there, too, checking to see if you were awake yet. I don't think he heard anything. I'm sure he would have said so if he did.”

“Sokar was here, outside my room?” A flicker of wariness glints in Bianca's eyes, but she dismisses the thought of any impropriety on her nephew's part.

“It's a mystery,” she decides. “Perhaps a cup of tea will help us solve it.”

Usually, Bianca makes a jug of sun tea daily from herbal tea leaves and water set out in the hot sun to brew naturally. Then, it is cooled overnight in the cooling bin. But this is a ritual forgotten in the madness of the last 24 hours. Today instead, she prepares herbal tea in a copper kettle. She places the kettle on a coil which protrudes from the top of a stove that no longer works electrically. Directly overhead is a skylight that lets the full force of the sunshine down onto the kettle. In moments the kettle is whistling with hot, brewed tea.

“How does that work, Bianca? You have no electricity, no natural gas. How do you cook anything?”

“The solar panel on the roof reflects the sun down over the stove - or what once was a stove - and ignites the coil with intense heat. Simple, really.”

“What about the oven? How do you bake such great bread and stuff? There's no solar panel there?”

“Brick,” she says, matter-of-factly. “You know how hot it is in Coronadus. The brick ovens are a throwback to earlier times. The method works quite well.” She pours each of them a cup of tea.

David sips. The fresh mint makes a surprisingly cooling drink, even with boiling water. Sitting here alone with Bianca, David feels a kinship with her that he was unaware of until this moment. There is something enigmatic about her, warm and inviting yet aloof. Unlike Ishtar who was an open book, Bianca leaves much unsaid, yet her countenance speaks volumes.

His mother was a lot like her. He never quite knew what was on her mind or in her heart, or why she did some of the things she did. He never knew when her mood would shift, as though there were some demons that she was fighting within.
What are Bianca's demons?
David wonders. “
Are they the same as Mom's?
”

For the first time since coming to Coronadus, David takes the opportunity to investigate how things operate in a city that has no power to energize the utilities and machinery that lie dormant and useless. As he asks about each subject, Bianca freely explains.

“Fresh water is pumped from a well for cooking and bathing. The shade trees provide the only respite from the heat, and only at certain times of the day. No perishable food is ever stored because there is no refrigeration; grocery shopping is done every day for the entire day's meals. Everyone has a garden to grow fresh vegetables and herbs, some of which can be stored in underground canisters by the water wells. Nightlights are oil lamps. There are few paper products because they take so long to produce manually. Just about all of our materials come from natural resources found in the earth or from the plant and animal life indigenous to our surroundings.

“Coronadus was once a teeming metropolis of advanced engineering and technology,” she concludes. “Then, as you know, everything changed.”

David ponders all this information for a moment, and the thought of Sokar suddenly enters his head. “How did Sokar's mother die?”

Bianca is taken aback at the sudden turn of the conversation. “Why do you ask?”

“Just wondered. Sokar and I have something in common. Was it an accident?”

Bianca hedges. Her gaze shifts to a time long ago and far away. “It was - an unintended consequence of a difficult situation.”

“What does that mean?”

Bianca pours herself more tea, a bracing cupful. “You've heard me talk about the war, and the destruction of Coronadus.” David nods silently. “Before that, my sister Falana - Sokar's mother - and I were very close. Our family was highly respected on Coronadus, and very much trusted. That was the legacy my father gave to us, one of integrity and honesty. I was fortunate to have married Ishtar, a brilliant and compassionate man.

“Falana was not so fortunate. Her husband, Dubri, was a miscreant.” Bianca speaks the word with contempt. “But he was the ultimate charmer and could wrap Falana around his finger. When the enemies came, Dubri turned coat against all of us. He was weak and greedy. And he was able to convince Falana to stay loyal to him, to be his ally in the surreptitious plot to overtake Coronadus.”

Resentment and pain form a heavy veil across Bianca's face, but she steels her voice to go on. “My sister was put in the position of having to help launch an attack on a group of city council members who were meeting in the church one evening to come up with a counter plan to save the city.

“To make a long story short, there was a confrontation, a violent one. Falana was killed by the guards as she and a group of snipers approached the church. All but one member of the council was brutally murdered.”

Bianca rests her head in her hands, weary from the tormenting memories. She shakes her head and whispers, “She was just a child, really. What did she know about such things?”

With these words, a memory sparks in David's mind with eerie familiarity. “
She was just a kid. What did she know about any of this!
” his mother used to rant about her own sister, shot to death at age 19 by armed guards firing on a group of student anti-war protesters. She was caught in the fray, not even a part of the protest, just one of the frightened kids running from the chaos. It was this tragedy that led Billie to become a pacifist.

David wondered if seeing her sister killed is what made Bianca such an avid protector of the peace in Coronadus.

“Yes. That and many other things.” Bianca expels a heavy breath of fatigue, then inhales deeply to energize herself. “Sokar is, indeed, a sad child from the loss of his mother. But it was different for you, wasn't it? Your mother didn't die the same way.”

“No. It was an accident.”

Bianca segues back into her philosophical persona. “I've learned nothing is an accident. In fact, we choose many of our own life and death experiences to learn some particular lesson of the soul.”

David grimaces, not quite wanting to apply that philosophy to his mother, and remembering that he himself accused her of not wanting to live, as though it had been her choice.
Is that the same thing?

But in response to Bianca he scoffs, “That's weird. Why would somebody choose something bad to happen to them?”

“For the same reason you chose your deafness,” Bianca says, not unkindly.

“No, I didn't. I got sick when I was seven and lost my hearing.”

“You made that choice long before you were born, so you have no conscious awareness of it.”

David frowns. “But why would I?”

“So that you could hear in silence what you could not hear surrounded by sound - the cry in the wind, the music in the ocean tide, the song in your heart - all of them messages from other worlds deep in your consciousness.”

David smiles and rolls his eyes. “Now you sound like Ishtar.”

“He had a profound effect on me, that's a fact.” Bianca's eyes beam at the thought of her husband then are clouded over with the sadness of separation from him.

A delayed reaction to one of Bianca's statements stirs up a curiosity in David. “You said everyone on the city council was murdered except one. How could one person survive such an attack? Who was it?”

Surprisingly, Bianca's answer is needling and almost sharp. “As always, you are a bundle of questions, David Nickerson. Enough of this. Now we must get back to the problem at hand. Finding the Singer.”

Her brusque evasiveness is so obvious that David knows he has struck a very sensitive nerve, which makes him even more curious. Another Coronadus mystery that he determines he must solve before he leaves. If he is ever able to leave.

David follows Bianca into the living room to enlist the aid of Maati and Sokar in looking for the crystal. It has to be somewhere in the house. But where?

Maati comes home, prancing into the living room, invigorated after a late day swim in the cool ocean. Maati is less intense than her brother, and more inclined to go with the moment, especially a moment of pleasure. Relieved to see her, Bianca embraces her niece briefly, then explains that she needs her help to find the Singer.

“Tell me, Maati, can you recall seeing or hearing anything strange last night?”

“No, Bianca. I slept like a rock. Sokar had to wake me up this morning to get ready for the Council meeting. How could the Singer just disappear, Bianca?”

“That's what we're trying to figure out. Until we do, we will search every inch of this place and every blade of grass outside. By the way, where is your brother?”

Maati shrugs with indifference. “I don't know. I haven't seen him since just after the debate. I asked him if he wanted to go to the beach with me and he said he had something else to do.”

“What could he have to do –” Bianca's head turns sharply toward something that causes her to hesitate. “What's that?”

Maati and David look at each other, befuddled. “What's what?” Maati asks.

“That sound. Did you hear it?”

“No.” Maati eyes David questioningly.

“I didn't hear anything either,” David says.

Bianca's hand goes up as if their silence will conjure up the noise once again. “There. There it goes again.” Bianca moves with haste toward her office. Maati and David follow on her heels. The unidentifiable sound grows louder. Bianca throws open the office door and stands frozen in the doorway, aghast. “Oh, my God!”