Trouble Around the World

On the first Friday in September, nineteen thirty-nine, when the medium channels the message and opens her flap-happy Svobodian lips with blankets of electromagnetic thought patterns, the word is that the secret lives of the saints will be pre-empted in order that Lord Z can carry a special report on trouble around the world. The intelligence tonight is not native, but military.

“Bharani, Sisters, greetings. In my country we have a saying, ‘Keep details about lovers private, but spread the word about enemies.’ This broadcast is to be kept anything but classified.”

“You mean we can tell tales out of bed?” A murmur goes around the circle in the square.

“I urge you to,” the hairy voice rumbles. “You don’t have to be psychic to see war coming in the Old World, and inevitably the Freeway will be drawn into it. Normally, in the worldly war of good versus evil, the Clear Way is to be like the sun which shines on saint and sinner in the day and leaves them both in the dark at night. Clarions see the whole picture and understand the world turns on the theory of simple relativity: in order for one person, place or thing to be in the light, another has to be in the dark for contrast. But when weapons come into play and armies gather, unless we wish both sides to lose, we ought not stay neutral. We have no choice but to choose. The only way to change certain men’s minds is to kill them and destroy their force. The time has come for us to take a stand against someone. I’m talking about the Furor, Rudolph the red-nosed Reichmann, an absolute hell of a fellow, an evil beyond redemption. He’s doing things even relative devils like us can’t abide: sending thousands who don’t live up to his ideal of nationalistic uniformity to camps of death and torture in a campaign for racial purity. And not only has he stirred up a huge gang of Reichrepublikan juvenile delinquents, blond bloodthirsty animals called Nastis, to do the round-up and the railroading, but he has recruited several of my neighbors as evil eyes to envision him taking over the whole world.”

“Your neighbors?” The fruits and nuts exclaim with wonder.

“Reichmann is no fool. He wants to make sure he holds the really higher ground, the occult levels where causes are translated into effects. With control of the fruited plane, he expects to reap huge military victories here below. But to accomplish this he needs some super-special forces, agents who can go out of this world. Even as I speak, a party of his men are in the Pu Mountains making promises of temporal glory to any mastermind who will help him win friends and influence causative factors in high places. And there are, I’m sad to say, men and women with great mental abilities who don’t have to have their arms twisted or their noses broken to say ‘yes’ to an evil power. Several expert meditators have sold their souls to the devil and become boogies. Instead of shining their love lights, they are now knitting their brows, training their evil eyes, and focusing on seeing Rudolph have his sick dreams come true. Besides using negative visualization, they are twisting the powers they get from chanting. The sounds they utter are directed not for the benefit of everything that breathes, but as a heap of dirty language on everyone who’s not a true blue-eyed brown-shirt.”

So, there’s ectoplasmic slime on the terror, psychic grease on the axis of Reichmann’s war machine. The fruits and nuts know what a positively out-of-this-world experience love can be. They all shiver to think that there are men and women of high spiritual caliber who are intent on discharging their inimical emotions as murder weapons. Among children it’s proverbial that sticks and stones will break your bones but names can never hurt you, and witches generally concur: they draw their power from the circle of light and darkness in their hearts, rather than the Word. However they can allow that smutty talk, a smear campaign, and negative propaganda, if it turns into mass hysteria, can be almost as offensive as guns and bombs. Properly loaded with hate, sentences can kill.

“Lord, be our spell-proof vest in times of trouble!” Sarah shoots off her mouth on behalf of her sisters.

“A good offense is the best defense in this case, Bharani, Sisters. The Furor’s soldier boys can be defeated by bullets, but we need rarer elements than lead to overcome the waste, death, and destruction on earth these tough nuts and rotten apples are out to create from the higher planes. To combat them we’re going to have to fly missions to loftier battle sites, ones that the regular air force can’t get to. In reality the enemy can be anywhere, but especially, in the most insidious place: within us. For instance, one needn’t go to the Reichrepublic to find racial injustice. Right here on the Freeway there are soldiers who are not willing to fight for freedom in the same platoon with men of other races.”

So now the Sisters see: the coming war will be more than just a struggle of men’s military might. It’ll also be a test of the women’s practical application of their Sisterhood.

Under these circumstances, they wonder, should we still take it lying down?

“More than ever,” says the Great Monkey. “The biggest wrench we can throw into the Furor’s works is to be as spineless as jelly. For what is a stand opposite hatred if not horizontal? First and foremost, keep loving your husbands and your boyfriends as yourselves. Once the fighting starts to heat up, we’ll need a surplus of love. But it’s going to take more than the rise you get from love’s rockets’ red glare to hold the fort against Rudolph. Simply making out is not going to be forceful enough.”

What else are we good for? The thought spreads through the group stemming from the doubts some of the women have about themselves as effective people.

“Whatever else, you are all for one and one for all. The one strength evil lacks is the power of alliance. The ability to make trustworthy friends is unknown to it. The good, however, are always willing to put aside selfish differences for political ends. When the line is drawn, blessed are those of different religions or ideologies who will readily band together against a common enemy, and genuinely wish one another well on the outcome, not be waiting around to knock their allies off the first time their backs are turned.”

Now, deep in the throat of Lord Death’s grave and gritty blue tone, a little voice pipes up. It has a light, cool, handsome, devil-may-care manner, that of a proper Brutish gentleman with a high-fluting accent. The little voice, the circle of women learns, belongs to Father Freeman Fetter Fife, the Disembodied Head of Intelligence Operations for a branch of the High Church of Inkland which officially doesn’t exist, the Salvation Air Force.

Fearing some sort of Brutish Inquisition, some of the women begin to squirm and cringe as if they were burning at the stake already. But the little voice assures them he is friend, not foe. “Even though for centuries the Church has chased you fairies underground, made it off-limits to worship trees, burned your books, and even burned some of you, faced with the Furor, we hope you’ll be willing to let bygones be bygones, pull together, and let us help one another in our common cause whether we share the same moral and religious attitudes or not.”

Not saying another word, he leaves a silence so the woman can hear ye olde isle of gramarye alive and ticking inside him. He lets out a stream of hot air that sounds like ‘hisss’ and there is a spray of assent from those in the know, fond of fondling snakes. The Bharani Sisters sing a song of sibilance, joining agent Double F Fife spraying Reichmann with every breath they take.

A short wave later Lord Z patches in his former archenemy, now his ally, Mother Goose for psychic victory gardening lessons. Again, in the mother tongue, a little voice gives them the lowdown on organic methods of warfare using fowl language.

Look for nature in the bushes,

between your legs and in your tushes.

Love your boyfriends, husbands, brothers,

love one another and one another’s lovers.

In war-making foul can be even fairer!

I call you to wing, Sisters of Bharani-Sarah.

Under Mother Goose’s lead they go agaggle in their minds on manure manoeuvres. In chevron flight, the Nussbaum irregulars are the silly goose squadron. They lower the boom, and let Rudolph have their payload, bombs away. Tooting fruity, they rain their mental intestiny, Donder and Blitzen, on Reichmann.

May worms on Rudolph’s red nose feast

and a pox consume his snorter.

May his blood bubble like brewer’s yeast

and a rabbi marry his daughter.

They may sound silly but the jingles jangle a nerve in Sarah. The rhyming spells make it seem like old times, and remind her of the days when she would recite doggerel couplets and receive unadulterated Purple Hazings from her Horny God. The medium and the message are not always the same. While Keinar would still advise against it, Mother Goose prompts Sarah … Mother Goose prompts Sarah to call the dogs of war and get in touch with Lord Z directly.

Bharani and Bharavi alone up in the Blue,

fused together in a Big Celestial Screw.

You can be a model to the suffering sorry world

of ecstacy in agony, of riding on the curl …

Sarah is tempted to set an example, to spend one more blazing moment with her Lord, and have that moment last forever not as flesh, but as the symbol of creative voidness, the model of everrenewability, selflessness, and compassion for those tormented by humanity’s inhumanity. She understands that it could be a suicide mission. That thought thrills her. But the thought that it might cause the debilitation of her Lord causes her to refrain. She exercizes her power by not exercizing her power.

At the close of the meeting the voice of Lord Z returns, enjoining them to increase their numbers. “Bring friends and lovers to meetings, and any enemies who will come.”

Afterward Sarah calls her husband and tells him that the meetings are now open to everyone, and that he should come to learn about the Lord, and hear the Great Rumble and the little voices speak. “Harry, my earthly darling, you are my fellow soldier. Lord Z wants you.”

He looks at the beautiful peach’s white dove breasts and moon white buttocks and shakes his head. “Me? Become a witchman? Bah! You are nuts!”

“But since you are mixed up with me, you are also nuts! You know you’re a practitioner of the Craft. When we have relations you represent the Lord. From now on when we love, we will offer our spirits in defiance of the Nasti Reichmann and the black magicians he has enlisted.”

He’s never heard such humbug as these stories of soul-travel, Shalamar, and Swami Shores, and he’s not one for hearing voices or engaging in psychic warfare. Even so, when she orders him into the trench, the love brigade’s foxhole on the front line, he doesn’t flinch an inch.