The Wall Story

The Wall 7

Albert sat alone in the 'Hartmann for the greater good' civic building. His mood was forlorn. Abigail had told him she wanted nothing more to do with him and that she was no longer prepared to sell marble to him or his family. He'd handled the whole situation with her wrong. It was his fault that she'd reacted as she had.

Telling her he wasn't prepared to leave his wife and family for her was one blow. Telling her that the Hartmann's wouldn't let her go was the other blow. He'd expected the latter to galvanise her actions towards the Independence Movement, not away from it. Women... he couldn't understand them.

He'd parked his wasp on a pliant ivy leaf and had wondered if it were possible to use this to communicate with the outside world. He'd not been able to think of a way, the Hartmann's had planned for such attempts on the part of their workers.

Although the wasp-like bot was in the outside world, Bolivia in fact, it was also tens of miles away from the nearest human village and Albert didn't know which direction that village lay. Even if he discovered the location of the village, he knew the Hartmanns automatically monitored the G.P.S. co-ordinates of their species seeking robots and those that strayed from a 'safe area' were de-activated.

Albert took the 3-D goggles off and slumped in his chair. This was no good, he couldn't focus. Finding undiscovered species and their precious genomes was like finding a red needle in a haystack of brown needles at the best of times, trying to do so when all he could think about was the wall was impossible.

Doing this job gave extra credits to his family, but it made him no more than a flunkie to the Hartmanns' illegal activities. On the one hand he headed the Independence Movement, and on the other he secretly worked for the Hartmanns'. He realised, with a sour feeling, the kind of person he'd go down as in history.

He sat back in his chair and stared at the pale wall of the wasp cubicle. How was he going to get the wall finished in time now, especially considering the latest news? The Hartmanns had phoned him earlier and told him his family had one week to disperse. The Aldmans had arrived to the top of the queue as Patrick Holt warned they would. Dispersal was the word that struck terror in any family.

Dispersal was the breaking up of the family unit. The Hartmanns theorised that the tradition of each successive generation of descendants joining the community of their forefather brought danger. It created power blocks and rebellion, a false sense of security through numbers. The Hartmanns theorised that if families were dispersed across the settlements then ghettoes of 'wrong thinking' would be prevented.

After Aldman had taken the phone call he'd come here, to the Hartmann's 'for the greater good' building. As strange a move as one could make in the circumstances, he realised. Why had he decided to go to work? He couldn't say. The dispersal affected people deeply. Some families committed mass suicide as soon as they heard the news. Albert coming to work for the enemy constituted the same kind of dysfunctional thinking. It was a co-dependent reaction.

He had a month to finish the wall, not enough money to buy the extra stone needed for it, and Abigail Lane wasn't even prepared to sell the required stone to him anyway. Plus, there were no other quarries in the settlement.

How matters could so easily fall awry, he thought miserably. How the wheel of fortune could so easily turn bad. The dark wooden bowl and the ivory tapper lay on the table before him. He carried them everywhere now, much to Helen's irritation. She said he was obsessed by the things.

He traced the carved designs on the bowl with his index finger. Perhaps this is a thing of evil as Patrick Holt sensed, he thought. Those who fashioned it, those who have a technology more advanced than us, perhaps they've solved the problem of good and evil.

Perhaps good and evil are tangible, like gravity and electro-magnetism. Perhaps this alien race has created devices which emit evil fields and have seeded them on Earth to monitor their effects?

Could that be why our Independence activities have gone wrong now because I have become dependant on an evil artefact?

He sat straighter and stared at the bowl. I'm becoming delusional, he thought. The dispersal is affecting me as it has affected others.

The bowl's designs seemed less threatening now. He considered the divination message he'd obtained. Fritz Cowper had been the header, the notification of source. They'd realised that after they'd continued the process and found the 'body' of the message spelt next.

They'd received a message from Fritz Cowper who was dead.

Fritz's idea of going for a snake had been a good one. They would no longer need all the rock they'd have needed for the spider's body. Also, they could lift the rock from two of the three legs they'd created and use that to modify the third leg into the body of a snake.

By notifying Albert of the dispersal in one month's time, a new obstacle was added, time. The spider could have been completed within a month, moving all the stone around to create a snake would be impossible in that time scale.

Idly, Albert lifted the bowl and gently beat a drum with the tapper upon it. A new pattern formed in the sand. Albert brought the book from the library out of his coat pocket and looked at the metaphoric interpretation of the new pattern.

Cutting Action: When forces surround one on all sides and options recede, Cutting Action comes to the fore. The upright protagonist will strike the problem at its weakest flank, with the whole of his capabilities. One should not concern oneself with matters of ethics.

Albert lowered the book back to his pocket. This is not a 'nice' divination system, he thought. No other system of deciding the future would be so ruthless. Astrology and I-ching worked on the principle of common sense and positive thought, not desperate action. Yet ... cutting action is precisely what is required to save the project and bring independence.

He began to formulate strategies in his mind.