The Abolition of Species by Dietmar Dath

Author:Dietmar Dath
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780998777016
Publisher: DoppelHouse Press
Published: 2018-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

7. ATTACK

Esprit, the hounds’ High Holy Day, had come round again and by now was a festival that no one could enjoy. It seemed to celebrate something scorched, obsolete, unwanted. The Gente’s rage and fear turned ugly—at the edge of the cities they captured humans who had not reached the designated refugee zones and many were tied up and burnt in the streets to mark the occasion. For days afterwards the stench threatened to mask even the king’s pherinfonic broadcasts, which always proclaimed the same slogans, ‘We will stop them in their tracks, we will drive them back.’

Who was ‘we’?

Today Dmitri was visiting the king, to bring him a very particular message. The Lion had withdrawn to his sandalwood chamber, its walls now entirely covered with the pivoted mirrors. Satellite images burst forth all about him like exotic weeds.

He looked older than ever, but still far from defeated.

Dmitri found that he still felt the deepest respect when he looked upon his king, and something like love—possibly chemically induced, but it felt genuine. The wolf forced himself to remember his dead friend, the scuttling hog, and wondered whether the Lion had watched Hébert’s murder from this room, on these screens. Diagrams superimposed onto meteorological images showed how the Ceramican campaign had accelerated genetic drift. It all looked pretty grim.

In a melodic and sonorous voice, like the chorus in a classical play, the king began to explain the state of the world as he saw it.

‘To use the old names, they have taken all of Africa, most of China, and the two Americas were theirs from the beginning. We shall dig in, and I find it amusing that we shall make our stand where thousands of years ago the planet’s first technological civilization made its start, the human civilization that we so scornfully chose to call the Monotony. The war . . .’

‘There is no war.’ Dmitri had no desire to listen any longer to this bombast. He had been given a safe conduct, although he was down in Georgescu’s databanks as a deserter. The shipyards, the island; everyone who lived and worked there had solemnly been proclaimed outlaw. Not him though; I’m a diplomat for life, he thought.

‘No war?’ The Lion smiled indulgently. He still had the knack of seeming to know more than anyone else.

‘No more than in the sense that when an old crust grows mould, the mould is at war with the bread.’

The king breathed out loudly and said, ‘I understand. She’s talked you round. Mould. A metaphor—you could say so, I suppose, but I find that a better image is when cancer attacks vital organs. I won’t insist that the carcinoma is at war with the organism. But I don’t believe that the body should just flee in the face of the cancer. Or that it’s even possible. She thinks so. Her prerogative.’

She: the name that could no longer be spoken in the two cities now remaining, Lasara.

‘I see that you’re still investing all your resources,’—the wolf

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.