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CHAPTER 15

HU AND CLEO DIVERGE

MIGRATION TIME

Hu meanwhile, by no means unaware of the perils for the moon and its significance for the earth, mused that if it was a light at night that this planet provided, yet it would soon doubtless become a blood play by day that it enabled. He knew of the intense rivalries of the missions and though it was good to develop the moon for the earth, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the MAIN point about the moon was its space station capacity.

In Hu's own private opinion, it was best deleted, since he had a good control of earth now, and an unknown and highly technical rogue State, the moon, with power to intimidate the earth, was both unnecessary and needlessly expensive to maintain.

He had certain dark thoughts about the place, and in true conformity to his style, which if not inimitable was at least not easy to surpass in subtlety, he had his own means prepared.

Since his harassment of his own family, he had become more deeply committed to a ruthlessness which was rather in the mode of the Islamic destroyers that preceded his own rule, whose greatest gift seemed to be this, to remove gifts and create devastation. If he did not care for their mere devastation mode, he at least felt he could use it in part, in measure, in this or that phase of history, with some distinction. Indeed, he felt a very religious glow at times, which though more emotional that anything of Claude's, was similar in some things. For example, he became more aware of a certain intuitive power within him, a sense of purpose and destiny.

Exposing this delicately once to Margaret in a closer moment, he gained the retort: Yes, it is like that of Judas!  Of this comparison, Margaret had once reminded him in her so spiritually indomitable way. Yet he felt it for the good of humanity.

Her words on another occasion however left this in his temporarily misted mind: What good ? What is good ? Are you it ? How and why, and in what way are your thoughts a criterion for man!

In what way indeed ? Yet nothing else worked, and his own sense of power and capacity so fascinated him that the mere question of value and worth, truth and peace felt like a cart hitched to him as horse, yes proud and might draught-horse, tossing the head and pulling with enormous éclat. If it could be directed by the driver behind it, and helped to 'see' by the lash, what it ought to do, then he would be that driver also: a dual role, a jewel royal ... his mind idly played with the verbal toy. Toy ? Ploy! He fastened himself once more to the task, not despising these little day dreams of power and glory.

There was within him now, a certain sense of illumination which, though not all he would have liked in terms of nobility and authenticity, yet seemed cosy and comfortable.

Power ministered to it, and it ministered to power; its very sense of assurance seemed to fascinate and bewilder his opponents and a certain sense almost of majesty seemed to grow like an aura about him.  He found himself able to do manipulative things now which a mere year before would have seemed not only impossible, but politically suicidal. Under the auspices of his own particular aura, he seemed to be reaching a plane of destiny! Such was his thought.

Satisfaction as so often, warmed his heart and allowed the more sober analyses of his mind to depart in a sullen state of dismay. Let it, he felt, for it is only to minister to my ruthless realism. What else is it for ? Destiny is arriving. He saw it as a royal coach, gilded and elongated like an el Greco carriage, coming to the gates of some huge palace, while he, the inhabitant, intoxicated with delight, welcomed it as his own!

That in turn merely ministered to his sense of contributing dynamic for destiny, overcoming all obstacles, even those within; and as to conscience, he could con it at any time by his fluency with words and his cunning phrasings. It seemed he could do the same with that of many others, a fact which gave him the nearest approach to boyish thrill that he had experienced for a long time. His eyes narrowed as they seemed to draw him to hospitable visions down the corridors of history to come.

Then he awakened for a moment, from his visionary voyaging, or more precisely, his illuminated travelogue of the darkness of destiny. That phrase, it pleased him: let it be dark, he concurred, for who could say then what it might hold! A smile flitted across a face febrile with self-fashioning fever, as if the mere heat of desire could awaken the heart of a swampland in which every undesirable denizen basked in its own sun.

Of course, there was Cleo...

Cleo for her part indulged in NO illusions. Like the Jews in Poland in the double deception of USSR and Germany in the earlier days of World War II, she became all too aware that where political power was, lies tended to live long in this earth. She made cool and careful plans to avoid her husband's domineering paranoia and his paternalistic directives. Anything less like a biblical husband she found it impossible to conceive in relation to Hu, who seemed almost the diametrically opposed counterpart, an illustration in the negative. If he had a tutelary role, was it by contrast to teach the right: anything I am not, that you should be! As to his sexual life, it was obvious that if perversion were king, he would be its chief minister. She had grounds of divorce, and chose to disappear.

After all, his behaviour made it apparent that she represented a contrary mode of living so decisively different from his own that she was in effect absent, even when present.

It had been a work of art with Cleo, to find ways of securing for herself one of Hu's former financial accounts and to render it active, by subtle means and in discrete amounts, so that when she disappeared, having hidden it in a maze so complex that it almost seemed to make of his own duplicitous accounting practices, something entirely simple, she felt she could escape for some time. Free she could thus be from the prying controls of the Financial Transaction Centre, and gain unnoticed funds for her work.

He had stripped her own accounts on the spurious ground of investigation for one and for all, and she would take no more than he had already taken from her, so making it seem moral.

Because she was a very long-sighted lady, she had long before found for herself in another name, a discrete and quiet house near the sea in a peaceful little district, with just enough people not to make one more inhabitant conspicuous; and now,  she simply ... disappeared. For some time, Hu scarcely noticed, since he had been systematically avoiding her.

Then he thought she had probably in some huff gone to relatives; and it was some three months before he realised he had a problem; for if it ever became known that he was unaware where his wife was, how could he account for a world which he was inclined to dominate like some possessive husband!

Could he lead the home of Hu ? no ? then how would he lead the home of man! How ludicrous it would appear! The matter would therefore require, Hu felt, considerable delicacy...

Cleo had contrived to 'be' some obscure friend of Ralph, and she addressed her words to Harry in space,  through him, by an agreed procedure. If Hu was subtle, Cleo was in advance of him at the more personal level;  and if not that tar on the tart, an advanced thinker, she found this more modest ability far more serviceable and less obscure. Long sight was her mental vision, and she enjoyed it.

Meanwhile, feeling infuriated by his family, Hu felt more and more inclined to make lunar life difficult for Harry, who had already crossed him. There was someone he COULD locate. So he kept his counsel and pondered his plans, which developed like some handsome melanoma on the back, clear if you could only see it; but seen by few and desired by none. In Hu's case, the plans if cancerous, at least did not seem likely to kill him, a point in which he was to be found mistaken.

The stringencies of the financial controls, so clearly predicted in Revelation 13,  were now biting hard into human liberty, and Hu felt that some more power from the moon might not help, and might need special taming; and yet, it seemed to him, it would be far wiser for the time, quietly to increase the controls and disregard the outrage of some autonomy on the moon, since in the end, his was a winning game and simply required nerve and verve to push it to the point when objections would become too feeble to count. His thoughts about the moon, in fact, were increasingly saturnine, and slowly becoming gravely sinister: indeed,  he found that somehow, he relished them, as some men do golf.

Religious leaders were now increasingly devout to his humanistic cause, many of them having been little more than a mask of formal religion on a very supple and solely human face, and with the Romanist and Anglican causes now well under control, and the Lutheran wedded to Rome in large measure, while Rome was becoming both pliant towards himself, and even suppliant, he found them all really useful. Unity is strength, he mockingly intoned, derisive of their spiritual palpitations, especially when it is devout, single-mindedly, to me, to me ... Me! It is all about me, he said aloud.

If the air seemed to mock this little outburst, not being sedated by his success, he disdained to notice it. Conscience he had long exulted to make captive; it was himself that was to be exalted, and exultation was in that fact. Who knows ? he queried his scarred heart, what good I might accomplish in sedating the social and propelling the political about a unity it sorely needs; for power not only corrupts, but can cancel life on earth. I at least know where I lead, to a unity which is safe and an order which is secure.

For what ? came the haunting voice from the air, as if an echo of a dead conscience, slightly stirring in its grave of corruption. For man! he thought, for mankind. It is kind to mankind to be the kind of man who can make man continue and not abort his role and destroy his own destiny in despicable wars and mad calamities. For that, there is need of some purging of the ranks, purifying of the people; it is better that some live, yes most, than that all collide until only a smashed society is left to compete with disease and radioactivity. My way will be short, though the preliminaries have been long.

But where ? came the sound of the air, which not being subject to restriction, seemed to echo yet some vague subliminality from his own spirit. Where ? he accepted the challenge. Where it needs to go, of course.

Circular reasoning, came the echo. You will lead it where it needs to go, which is where you will lead it. WHERE does it need to go ?

Where I lead, he responded: oh yes, circular, circular, but at least that is one way to keep going.

Scarcely a merrry-go-round, more a sad-go-round! came the admonition that touched his senses with an edge he despised. This was as near as he came to despising himself, for being so weak as even to entertain such noises, giving them some guise of intelligibility.

It is better to continue and SEE, he authoritatively told himself, than to discontinue and not be able to see!

Is prison in irons better than release in liberty ? came the echo.

I shall lasso destiny and tame it, quoth Hu, and in the contest, the surge of satisfaction in mankind will be like a perfume.

The perfume of the horse-breaking yard ? said the echo. Obscene obfuscatory Hu, your thoughts are of death, mimicking life by mere movement.

Where you go and what you get for your pains, this you forget. Using forces is no way to understand the people you seek to subdue; a force-manipulator, you merely manufacture dead-hearts' destiny, a sort of psychological mortuary, unhappily living rather than inhabiting the death that is its proper place, like dysfunctional bodies kept alive by psychic heart-lung machines, meaningless mumbles of a lost life, neither valued nor understood.

You make destiny in your mind, an undesigned designation, continued the echo, and mocking all design, make your own emptiness the substitute for truth. You try to supplant logic with will, reality with desire, intractable truth with inveterate determination. As for you, you neither know truth nor desire it, in order to evaluate what you do. In effect, a divorcee from life, from its source and its basis, its objectivity and its demonstration, you are making yourself the truth, a mere think-processor unit. Abandoned like a motor-boat in the ocean, you are borne by its surges.

You want it medically ?  the echo resolutely continued, leaving Hu almost hypnotised by its mellow fury, and disdainful satire. You are untrue to the reality that your mind is an abscess of evacuation of all truth, like devitalised flesh. Founded on itself, it will surely founder in the realities it ignores. It lingers as a pathological residue, like dynamised gangrene, devoutly diseased, and lusting for its last lapse.

Hu himself was amazed, and the main result of this echo of  soliloquy was an increased hatred of Ralph and Harry, Cleo and those few evangelical voices which remained. He would show them by power that push is worth more than palaver! He reflected now on the scope of his power.

A powerful junta of pseudo-churches was lending him servile acceptance, and they were finding a voice which Claude in his lunar emporium, was pleased to echo. It was as in Revelation 13. With the second beast now working dynamically with its false prophet syndrome, sedulously seduced by a mixture of fear and false glory, now attached to a failed personality glorying in international power, Hu had a voice that would not echo, but thunder. It was one at once religious and minimally moral, to aid his work, like a megaphone at a sports meeting.

In fact, the religious franchise at Hu's concession, as he liked to conceive it, if you could call spiritual prostitution by such a name, was still moving in its corruption with a minimum of human feeling, and a passion for pronouncement to which even the pope could provide no equal. Indeed, he had been wholly superseded, his control and power a useful tool to be simply snatched from his the hand of his withered power,  by the spiritual insurgents of the period.

This new version, moving on from the Roman Pontifex Maximus to the Romanist Pope, to its next phase papacy to political licensee, was as fawning as any corrupted cleric to the monetary power; but such was the majesty with which Hu was now surrounding himself, that there even came to be a new note of passion in the State worship, which in Hu reached its zenith. Like subservient churches, he had subservient nations, and soon he reflected, the whole world would worship the greatness of man, and then realise that there was only one channel for such worship; and he would look to see himself in the mirror of divinity, just as Paul foretold in II Thessalonians 2:4ff.. He relished the thought as some take brandy, and found it quite as intoxicating.

With no real life but lies its master, the double exposure of the two beastly carnal powers, State and false religion, was bringing the world, or most of it, into a subjection for which both Stalin and Hitler might have sold their souls a second time, always supposing it possible, to achieve such a sale.

As to Hu, life surged, and he felt satisfied, if strangely aloft in a way which at times both fascinated and troubled him. He surveyed the situation anew, one fine morning when Spring seemed to suggest life in abundance, in a way vaguely unsettling yet still able to minister to his intoxicated spirit. Yes, the moon! Hu's dark thoughts grew deeper in the indigo region, approaching black. Some men liked black, he reflected, black cars, black suits, black sports shirts.

He liked darkness; night for him held allure, and like Judas, he went out into the night full of thoughts that would blush like Autumn leaves, if ever the light hit them. With Hu, however, there appeared in his inebriation,  little likelihood of that.

For the drunk, reality rarely seems to matter,  whatever the intoxicating medium. It is only when sobriety returns that the feelings change.